Audiology Marketing Now Web TV Show

Episode #15: Learning From the Mouse – What the Walt Disney Company Can Teach Us About Marketing a Hearing Practice

Matt — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 20:14:14 +0000

Episode #15: Learning From the Mouse – What the Walt Disney Company Can Teach Us About Marketing a Hearing Practice

This a long episode, but hey – it’s a special one. In honor of AAA being in Anaheim this year, I decided to share some thoughts about how we can apply Disney’s marketing strategies to our practices.

1. Differentiate to Avoid Competing on Price – Disney is expensive, but people pay what they ask anyway. They’ve created their own market. How much is a Nestle Drumstick worth? 60 cents. But a Nestle Mickey Mouse ice cream sandwich is worth $4. How do they do that?

2. Provide an Experience, Not a Product – Do your guests feel welcome? When you walk into Disney it just feels like an escape. From the nostalgic Main Street to the majestic Cinderella Castle, and even down to the trash removal, everything is done with the experience of the visitor in mind. For a private practice it doesn’t have to take special skills or extra money, just a little bit of effort and desire to enhance the customer experience.

3. Pay Attention to the Details – Backstage at Disney World they spend years growing topiary plants for their parks the hard way – rather than always resorting to the easier, cheaper way. It makes a difference. The birds in the Tiki Room actually appear to be breathing too. This is all due to Walt Disney’s attention to detail. It may seem insignificant but the differences like the paper you print your documents on, and the pens you use in private practice, can have a big impact on how a patient perceives your office.

4. Create a Company Culture Where Everyone Knows Their Role – Employees at Disney parks aren’t called employees, they’re called cast members. They are trained to present a persona to patrons that is upbeat and personable. In some cultures it is impolite to point with one finger, so cast members are required to use two fingers or their entire hand. Backstage they are more relaxed, but they take extreme pride in their role as a cast member in the park. What is the culture like in your practice?

5. Test and Track Everything – Disney uses a lot of tracking of customer feedback to enhance sales. For instance, they have cast members at the gates asking you to rate details of your experience in the park. Testing and tracking over time produces better results when marketing. Not testing and tracking, results in wasted time, money, and effort.

6. Always Innovate – Ask yourself if there is a better way to be doing things? Fast Passes were a huge innovation at Disney because people standing in long lines for rides would become unhappy and frustrated. They also couldn’t spend money while in line, which was bad for business. The creation of the Fast Passes allowed people to reserve their place in line while they continued to shop and eat, etc. Walt Disney was known for always improving things and never accepting that anything was impossible. Innovations not only make things possible, but improve the daily functions of any business.

Gyl Kasewurm and I will be presenting a half-day learning lab on Wednesday afternoon. You can checkout the info here:

(It looks like the direct link is broken, but you can find the details by searching at the page below.)

Learning Lab: Multimedia Marketing Techniques that are Sure to Grow Your Practice (Offers ABA Tier 1 Hours) – 210B

See ya in Anaheim!

Episode #14: What Makes a Marketing Tool Effective, an Expert Interview About Practice Newsletters, and an Image Editor So Simple to Use You Won’t Have to Ask Your Kids For Help

Matt — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 17:50:35 +0000

Episode #14: What Makes a Marketing Tool Effective, an Expert Interview About Practice Newsletters, and an Image Editor So Simple to Use You Won’t Have to Ask Your Kids For Help

“Show notes” are posted below each episode. This is where you will find relevant information and links related specifically to the episode.

When it comes to marketing advice, there are a lot of people out there who are very happy to tell you what you should be doing. I get emails every day from people claiming they have the next greatest thing ever – a “new” strategy, technique, or tool that promises to make all your dreams come true. The first question we need to ask ourselves is: “Does this marketing tool work?”. But that’s not the only question we need to ask ourselves. Another very important question to ask is: “What do I need to do to make sure this marketing tool works for me?”.

I once heard Brian Tracy compare marketing tools to treadmills. If you’re trying to lose weight, a treadmill “works”. There’s no debate about it. But the results you ultimately get from a treadmill depend on a number of factors. Two important ones are how often you use it, and for how long. A treadmill is going to work a lot better for you if you use it consistently. Using it just 15 minutes per day is a lot more effective than a full hour at a time, just when you feel like it.

One of those marketing tools we know works, yet we use about as often as most people use a treadmill, is a practice newsletter. I sat down with healthcare practice newsletter writer Tina Grove and discussed why practice newsletters work and how we can use them to market our hearing and hearing aid practices. She even created a special offer for viewers of the show.

Click Here for Tina’s Special Newsletter Offer

This episode’s “Tool of the Trade” is an really simple (free) online image editor – Pixlr.com. I love Photoshop and use it all the time. But Photoshop isn’t exactly simple to use and it’s pretty pricey. Pixlr is a great alternative.

Episode #13: The Slow Death of Google Places, Facebook Changes Audiologists Can Be Grateful For, Online Reputation Management for Hearing Practices, and a Resource You Can Use to Automate Your Life

Matt — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 19:03:41 +0000

Episode #13: The Slow Death of Google Places, Facebook Changes Audiologists Can Be Grateful For, Online Reputation Management for Hearing Practices, and a Resource You Can Use to Automate Your Life

“Show notes” are posted below each episode. This is where you will find relevant information and links related specifically to the episode.

So Google Places is no more – kinda. Google has merged Places with Google+ and created “Google Plus Local”. A lot of the same optimization strategies remain the same, and most of what I covered in my Places for Audiology course still works. But the game has changed a bit for us, particularly in the area of patient reviews. I go over a couple of the changes that have already taken place, and there will likely be many more to come.

I covered the new Facebook Timeline changes during the Virtual Audiology Marketing Symposium. For the most part, the timeline change was good for hearing practices. But they’ve recently changed two more things that a really good for most hearing practices. In this episode, I tell you what they are and why they’re so good for us.

I received a question from a viewer who wanted to know how he could find out what people are saying about him and his practice online. While there are services out there that can track this for you, I recommend most hearing aid clinics manage their online reputation on their own. I show you how in this episode.

This episode’s “Tool of the Trade” is one of my favorite online resources right now. It can be found at ifttt.com. Go check it out!

Please comment below, and let me know what you think.

Episode #12: Thanks, But No Thanks! How Oticon’s Healthy Hearing Partnership May Be Hurting Your Practice

Matt — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:02:51 +0000

Episode #12: Thanks, But No Thanks! How Oticon’s Healthy Hearing Partnership May Be Hurting Your Practice

“Show notes” are posted below each episode. This is where you will find relevant information and links related specifically to the episode.

Don’t Forget To Register for the Virtual Audiology Marketing Symposium - April 23rd-27th 2012.

This is weird one for me. I’m actually uncomfortable about it. But I’m more uncomfortable about keeping my mouth shut and not trying to do anything about it. I was shocked when I found out about it, and the few friends I’ve told about it were equally as shocked – some more so. One of my audiologist friends told me I should title the video “Prepare To Be Infuriated”.

It’s important to me that people know that I don’t have anything against Oticon as a whole. I have friends at Oticon, and I don’t hold this against them. But I do have a BIG problem with this particular issue.

As someone who understands internet marketing a little differently than the average audiologist, I feel a responsibility to spread the word and share my perspective.

I have two goals with this episode:
1) Inform practice owners about what’s going on so they can do something about it to improve their positioning online.
2) Motivate others to join with me in requesting that Oticon change their policy about lowest tier listings.

I’m particularly interested to find out how you guys will react to the news.

Please comment below, and let me know what you think.

Episode #11: Understanding Backlinks, A Question About Using Twitter to Market a Hearing Practice, and an Online Tool That Will Change the Way You Work With Stock Photos

Matt — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 08:27:16 +0000

Episode #11: Understanding Backlinks, A Question About Using Twitter to Market a Hearing Practice, and an Online Tool That Will Change the Way You Work With Stock Photos

“Show notes” are posted below each episode. This is where you will find relevant information and links related specifically to the episode.

Click Here to Register for the Virtual Audiology Marketing Symposium – Presented by Kevin St. Clergy and myself.

Backlinks are an important part of any search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. A lot of major websites spend a lot of time and money making sure that links to their websites get plastered all over the internet. We’ll talk about how backlinks work and two ways an audiology or hearing aid practice can start accumulating backlinks immediately.

I’ll address a question about using Twitter to market your practice. Personally, I don’t use Twitter much to market my personal practice. I think it can help, but with our demographic, there are a lot of other ways you can invest your time and money online that will likely result in a greater return for an audiology practice.

Here’s a nifty online tool you can use to save some money on your audiology marketing photos – TinEye.com. I’ll show you how in the episode.

I’ll be at AAA in Boston, so if you see me there, please introduce yourself. It’s always fun to meet fans of the show.

TRANSCRIPT:

This episode of Audiology Marketing Now is made possible by The Virtual Audiology Marketing Symposium. Fifteen presentations from some of the world’s best audiology marketers, spread across 5 days, all sharing their best tips, tricks, and strategies designed to help you get new patients and explode your practice growth. It’s a 100% online event, and you can watch the presentations broadcast live for free. The symposium is being co-organized by Kevin St.Clergy and myself, and it’s really shaping up to be an event not to be missed. The symposium will run the week of Apr 23rd thru 27th, and you can register now – for free – at AudiologySymposium.com.- Coming up on today’s episode: Understanding how backlinks work, a question about using Twitter to market your practice, and a useful website that will change the way you shop for stock photos. I’m Matt Perry, and this is the show that helps audiologists like you get what they really want – more happy patients and more profits.INTROSo let’s talk about backlinks. A topic misunderstand by some and undervalued by many. First let’s define what a backlink is. Loosely defined, it’s a hyperlink on one website that, when clicked on, directs visitors to another website. The prototypical backlink is probably a blogger talking about how cool a particular website is. And they include in their blog post, a link to that website. So their readers can click on it and see how cool it is for themselves.
So that’s what a backlink is. But why are we talking about them? Well, backlinks are an important part of a search engine optimization strategy – or an SEO strategy. Your goal with SEO is to have YOUR website show up at the top of the search results when someone types a particular keyword or keyphrase. For example, “hearing aids in your city”. But the search engines don’t share the same goal of having YOUR website show up at the top. They don’t care about YOUR website, they want to show the most relevant and important websites for a particular keyword or keyphrase – so that their searchers keep using their site as their preferred search engine. Now there are hundreds, if not thousands of different factors search engines consider when ranking websites, and they’re pretty tight-lipped about what they actually look for in a website – so people don’t game the system too much. But we know that one quite significant factor is how many backlinks your website has pointing to it. If you have thousands of different websites around the world, all publishing links to your particular website, the search engines assume that your website must be pretty important – otherwise, why would all of these other websites be talking about it so much. Every backlink is essentially a vote in the world wide web’s popularity contest. You want backlinks.
Now the best way to get a bunch of high-quality backlinks is to do something remarkable and worthy of everyone online talking about. But that’s not exactly an easy thing for a local audiology practice to accomplish. But lucky for us, we don’t need to acquire a thousand backlinks to seem relevant to the search engines. On a small, local level, a dozen backlinks may be enough to give you a bump in the search engine results, and a few dozen can sometimes solidify your place at the top. So in the absence of a spectacular, newsworthy event involving your practice, what are the best ways to get backlinks to your practice website? Well there are number of good ways, but today I want to mention two specific ones that you can start doing immediately. The first is commenting on forums. There are a number of audiology and hearing aid related forums out there, and some of them could really benefit from some comments from good audiologists. Almost every forum these days allows you to setup a personal signature. The signature is what’s attached to the bottom of every post you make within the walls of that forum. Well, if you include a link to your website in your forum signature, every time you post a comment you get a search-engine friendly backlink to your site. How easy is that?
But here’s an even easier method. Leave comments in the comments section below blog posts. A ton of websites allow you to leave comments. And prior to posting your comment, most websites ask for your name, email address, and a website. If you provide a website (which is always optional), when your comment is published, your name becomes a hyperlink to your website. Leave a comment, gain a search-engine friendly backlink to your site. And you know . . . I just happen to know of a fantastic website for you to leave comments on. There are quite a few people watching this show these days – Episode 9 was watched by over 600 people. And 95 percent of the comments I receive are from spammers – people who understand the value of a backlink. So here’s your chance. Let us know what you like, what you don’t like, why you watch the show, why you’re never going to watch the show again, what kind of marketing has worked for you, or what you want me to talk more about. Comments are always welcome and they’re a great way to quickly accumulate some backlinks for your practice site. Let me know your thoughts in the comments section, below the video, at the bottom of the page, at AudiologyMarketingNow.com.Ask MattToday’s question comes from Bob in North Carolina. Bob asks: How much “twittering” do you do in your marketing (if any). And if you are, what are some of the typical tweets you send out? That’s an excellent question Bob, and one that comes up a lot when talking about social media. There’s no denying that Twitter is a big deal. While Facebook is the king of social media right now, Twitter is the very independent and powerful queen. But that’s to the general online market. Our kingdom is a little different. When we look at demographics, our market skews older and Twitter users skew younger. Therefore, at this time, I personally do not use Twitter much in my personal practice-building efforts. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to do. It’s probably a good thing to do. But in my opinion, there are so many better places to invest your time, that unless you’re mastering those already, it’s probably best not to spend too much time on Twitter – which is very easy to do.
If you ARE going to use Twitter, it’s VERY important that your content be of at least decent quality – which is NOT always easy to do in our industry, in 140 characters or less. But one way to use Twitter, which requires very little time and effort would be to announce via Twitter when you post a new blog post, or a new online article, or a new video to your YouTube channel. You can tweet out the headline, along with a link to the content. This is a great way to use Twitter. A horrible way to use Twitter is to bombard people with useless comments like “Waiting for a table Chilli’s right now – Love me them Baby Back Ribs” or “What’s up with the Bachelor this year?” That’s how not to use Twitter to market your practice. And probably equally ineffective is bombarding your followers with tweets like “For the best digital hearing aids available, visit Hometown Hearing” or “We love our patients. To become one, call us for a free consultation.” People didn’t follow you to be hit up with advertisements. And they won’t stay followers very long if that’s all you give them. But provide them with useful, relevant information and develop a relationship with them – as a human being – and they’ll keep listening – and eventually, they’ll make their way to your office as a patient. So the bottom line – Twitter can help, but make sure you’re mastering the other stuff first. And if you’re going to use Twitter to market your practice – make sure you do it the right way.

Tools of the Trade

You may have heard me talk about stock photos in the past. Those of you who have gone through my “Places For Audiology” course have heard me talk about them a lot. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, a stock photo is a professional photograph that is available to purchase the rights to for commercial use. They’re also called royalty-free photos, because they can usually be used many, many times without requiring you to pay a royalty for each use. In most cases, you pay a few dollars to download it, and you can use it as many times as you want. They’re great – and unless you have the budget for a professional photographer and models every time you want to use a photo in a brochure, direct mail piece, or blog post – I highly recommend you check them out. Two great stock photo directories to start with are istockphoto.com and sxc.hu.
But here’s another great tool to use with stock photos. It’s called TinEye and it’s found at tineye.com. TinEye is a “reverse image search engine”. So you know what an image search engine is. You go to Google, type “man in a suit”, click “images”, and it displays a bunch of pictures related to “man in a suit”. Well with a reverse image search engine like TinEye – you find a picture of a man in a suit, and then you either upload it or type in its URL, and the search engine returns images very similar or identical the one you already found. TinEye claims that it can be used to (quote)“find out where an image came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or if there is a higher resolution version.”(end of quote) But it can also be used to find cheaper versions of stock images. Here’s how:
Let’s say you find a particular stock image that you want to get your hands on, but you’ve found it on a site that wants more money for it than you’re comfortable paying. Well enter that image into TinEye, and it will show you all the websites that host that image. Some of them will be from people who have purchased the rights to use the stock image for themselves, but others will be from sites that sell stock images – some for quite a bit less than others. Check it out at tineye.com.

And so we come to the end of another episode. Thanks again for watching – hopefully, you’ll be able to take some of what we talked about today an apply it to help you grow your practice. In fact, why don’t you tell us what specific action steps you’re going to take next – in the comments section at the bottom of the page at AudiologyMarketingNow.com.

And when you’re done that, don’t forget to head over to AudiologySymposium.com and register for the upcoming Virtual Audiology Marketing Symposium. Trust me – it’s gonna be good.

I’ll be running around at triple-A in Boston, so if you see me – please don’t hesitate to stop me in my tracks and introduce yourself. It’s always fun to meet fans of the show.

And be sure to tune in next time to learn more modern marketing strategies designed to get you more of what you really want – more happy patients, and more profits.

Episode #10: The Arrival of Google Plus for Businesses, an Audiology Marketing Lesson from Barack Obama, and Another Great Outsourcing Resource

Matt — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:12:54 +0000

Episode #10: The Arrival of Google Plus for Businesses, a Marketing Lesson from Barack Obama, and Another Great Outsourcing Resource

“Show notes” are posted below each episode. This is where you will find relevant information and links related specifically to the episode.

When Google Plus (Google+) first hit the scene, during the summer of 2011, I admit that I immediately became a little excited about it’s potential uses to build an audiology practice. But Google prohibited businesses from setting up profiles – stating that they were still developing the business tools for Google+. Well, the wait is over, and Google has opened up Google Plus Pages for businesses. Right now, Google+ pages are a lot like Facebook pages, but I’m confident that this is just the beginning. The magic happens as these pages become integrated with Google’s other services – which they’re starting to do already with YouTube and Google Search. Set up a Google Plus page for your audiology or hearing aid practice at plus.google.com.

During the 2004 presidential election, Howard Dean received a lot of credit for using the internet to gain support for his political campaign. In 2008, Barack Obama took the use of the internet (with the help of social media) to a whole new level. I’ll show you some interesting statistics about his Twitter campaign, contrast it with Hillary Clinton’s Twitter campaign, and discuss how you can use this information to help you grow your hearing practice.

I’ve talked about Fiverr in other episodes – and I love it. But certain projects require a bit more than $5 worth of work to get done. For more substantial outsourcing (or out-tasking) projects, check out oDesk.com. I’ll give you a couple pointers on how to get started with oDesk that could potentially save you some headache as you delegate out your audiology marketing tasks.

ANNOUNCEMENT: In a few weeks, Kevin St. Clergy and myself will be co-hosting a “Virtual Audiology Marketing Symposium”. We’ve got a bunch of audiology marketing experts presenting online seminars over the course of an entire week. All presentations will be broadcast live, and they will be free to watch live. More details will be released shortly. Make sure you’ve signed up for the show updates (in the top-right corner of this page).

Please comment below, and let me know what you think. I’ve got a ton of great content I’m planning on presenting, but I’d really like to hear what YOU want to see.

Episode #9: Are There Really People With Hearing Loss Online?, Enchanting Your Patients, and a Tool to Create REALLY Creative Photos You Can Use When Marketing Your Practice

Matt — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 01:27:07 +0000

Episode #9: Are There Really People With Hearing Loss Online?, Enchanting Your Patients, and a Tool to Create REALLY Creative Photos You Can Use When Marketing Your Practice

“Show notes” are posted below each episode. This is where you will find relevant information and links related specifically to the episode.

I recently had a conversation with one of my long-time, and quite elderly, hearing aid patients about how he and his friends are using the internet. He reported to me that their assisted living facility had a huge computer lab, with “old ladies all over the place” communicating with their families via email, Facebook, and Skype (with webcams). He also talked about how much he enjoyed using eBay and YouTube – both of which he uses A LOT. I asked him a question I get asked a lot – just to see what his response would be. Are there enough older people online to warrant spending time marketing hearing services online? And, should we, as audiologists, focus on marketing to the children of people with hearing loss, since they’re more likely to be online than their parents?

Guy Kawasaki’s newest book outlines how successful businesses go about “enchanting” their customers. Apple computer is a great example. Their customers yearn to do business with them. And they don’t have to create any “buy-one-get-one” offers or “10% off” coupons to attract business. While the messages in the book are useful for a lot of different types of businesses, I think they’re especially relevant to the hearing industry and marketing a hearing aid practice. I highly recommended “Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions” by Guy Kawasaki.

Find it on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Enchantment-Changing-Hearts-Minds-Actions/dp/1591843790

I love finding new tools online. Recently, I came across a neat resource that let’s you create REALLY creative images in seconds. Check it out at http://www.imagechef.com.

My Places for Audiology training course is now live and available at http://www.placesforaudiology.com. It teaches you step-by-step what you need to do to create and optimize a Google Places listing, to rank highly in the search results and get more patients online. Places is the easiest and cheapest (free) way to get new audiology and hearing aid patients from the internet.

I’ll be at ADA this weekend – so please say “hi” if you see me.

Also, November 11th, I’m presenting a course for ReSound on AudiologyOnline called “Audiology Marketing 2.0: Using Newer Technology to Attract Older Patients”. It’s a 60-minute webinar – and you can actually get CEUs for this one! You can register for the course at: http://www.audiologyonline.com/ceus/livecoursedetails.asp?class_id=19293

Please comment below, and let me know what you think. I’ve got a ton of great content I’m planning on presenting, but I’d really like to hear what YOU want to see.

Episode #8: What Audiologists Need to Know About Google’s Panda, Plus, and Places

Matt — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 18:42:24 +0000

Episode #8: What Audiologists Need to Know About Google’s Panda, Plus, and Places

“Show notes” are posted below each episode. This is where you will find relevant information and links related specifically to the episode.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the art and science of making sure that the search engines find your information online and display it when appropriate. When someone searches for “hearing aids” in your area, you want your information to show up. One of the keys to good SEO is understanding how the search engines determine what is important and relevant. It helps to know the rules of the game. Earlier this year, Google changed it’s search algorithm significantly with it’s latest update: Panda. Luckily, most audiology and hearing aid practices aren’t going to be negatively affected by Panda. But there are a few things to be aware of. We go over what’s relevant to marketing a hearing practice in this episode.

I’m thinking Google Plus will be a huge deal in the future for independent hearing aid practices. Right now, although Google-managed ads are all over the place, we aren’t able to target them too well, because Google doesn’t know a whole lot about the viewers of the ads. With the Facebook, on the other hand, you can choose to show your pay-per-click ads to very specific groups of people – such as women over 55, in your area, who have an interest in health. I think Google Plus will eventually allow us to use Facebook-style targeting across the entire internet. But right now, it’s not too useful for us – yet. They haven’t released their business features yet. The one thing that we can take advantage of right now though is: linking your Plus profile to your online content, so your picture shows up in the search results. Check out this link for more information: http://www.globinch.com/2011/07/16/authorship-and-google-profile-picture-in-google-search-results/

Google Places is one of the biggest missed opportunities I see in the hearing industry. It used to be impossible for a local business to show up at the top of the search results without any location-identifying information. For example, a search for “hearing aids” would display all the national chains, manufacturers, and medical info site. The user had to search for “hearing aids in San Fransisco, CA” for a local practice to stand a chance. These days, a lot of people are searching for local services online, and Google is finally able to serve them. For a while now, Google began integrating its local maps listings into the regular search results. This, in combination with their ability to determine the location of the searcher, means that your business info can show up on top when someone searches for something as simple as “hearing aids” or “audiologist”. I’ll be releasing a video training course during the next couple weeks. I created this step-by-step training course, specifically for the hearing industry, so that anyone can use to set up a “professionally-optimized” Places listing – the kind that will generate patients.

If you’d like to be notified when the “Places for Audiology” training course is released (so you can possibly take advantage of the launch discount), make sure you’re signed up to receive the “Audiology Marketing Now” WebTV show updates.

SendPepperSuccess.com – Send Pepper is the world’s first automated direct mail and e-mail marketing software designed for small business. I use it myself, and I highly recommend it. I’ve tried a few of the other email automation programs out there as well, and Send Pepper is definitely my favorite.

Please comment below, and let me know what you think. I’ve got a ton of great content I’m planning on presenting, but I’d really like to hear what YOU want to see.

Episode #7: Homesteading on the Internet, Facts About Physician Referrals, and Resources for Finding Used Audiological Equipment

Matt — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 16:24:25 +0000

Episode #7: Homesteading on the Internet, Facts About Physician Referrals, and Resources for Finding Used Audiological Equipment

“Show notes” are posted below each episode. This is where you will find relevant information and links related specifically to the episode.

The time to stake your claim on the internet is NOW. While it’s still possible to have a thriving audiology practice without a strong internet presence, there will come a day when that is no longer possible. The “dinosaur audiologists” (you know who I’m talking about) will finally get a website, and everyone will be online. But those people will be competing with practices who have been online for years and have very strong roots on the internet. The search engines don’t care if your practice has been around for 25 years, if you’ve only been online for a few months.

About physician referrals: Marketing is about getting the right message to the right person at the right time. And people take action when the perceived benefits outweigh the perceived costs. It’s just the way people are wired. And physicians are people too. We go over 4 basic facts about physician marketing that should be considered when designing a physician marketing campaign.

Finding affordable (used) audiological equipment. Every dollar spent on audiological equipment is a dollar not spent on something else. You can find great deals out there, if you know where and how to look. We go over some specific eBay techniques and introduce you to Bud Majest (http://www.majestllc.biz/).

Please comment below, and let me know what you think. I’ve got a ton of great content I’m planning on presenting, but I’d really like to hear what YOU want to see.

Episode #6: Deciding if a Marketing Opportunity is Worth It, a Lesson About Social Proof, and a Video “Speed-Reading” Tool

Matt — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 00:00:09 +0000

Episode #6: Deciding if a Marketing Opportunity is Worth It, a Lesson About Social Proof, and a Video “Speed-Reading” Tool

“Show notes” are posted below each episode. This is where you will find relevant information and links related specifically to the episode.

Social proof when advertising a practice can be extremely valuable. Testimonials are a great way to use social proof. Make sure you’re asking for them and publishing them. But social proof can work for you AND against you. As audiologists, we’re shooting ourselves in our proverbial feet when we advertise how many patients are not doing something about their hearing loss. And, for some reason, a lot of us like to do this. Our intentions are good, but it reinforces the wrong behavior. Instead, let’s talk about how many people are finally doing something about their hearing loss and how happy they are with their hearing aids.

Your next audiology marketing campaign move shouldn’t be dictated by which marketing ad rep visited you last. It’s important to have a plan. But when reps do contact you, ask yourself this: 1) Can I at least break even with this marketing opportunity? 2) Out of all the opportunities available at this time, and all the ways I could spend this money, is this the BEST opportunity at this time?

Do you watch a lot of online video? I know you at least watch audiology practice building videos. If you want the power to speed up or slow down video online, check out Enounce MySpeed. You can download a 30-day free trial at enounce.com.

Please comment below, and let me know what you think. I’ve got a ton of great content I’m planning on presenting, but I’d really like to hear what YOU want to see.