The journey from realizing that you may have a hearing challenge to finally deciding to do something about it is LONG and LONELY.
The data tells us that it can take somebody up to 7 years.
Yet when you look at how nearly everybody in the hearing care industry markets/advertises, they solely target people that have already decided to address their hearing challenge.
They entirely focus on the people in that final mile.
They buy adverts on Google when people go looking for “hearing aids,” or they will run a newspaper advert that talks about new technology with coupons (urghh!). They’re solely targeted at people that have finally decided to take action.
Traditionally, this has been the right decision for three reasons:
- You want your advertising dollars to target people that are able to make a transaction in a short-term period (to deliver a short-term ROI)
- When people did decide to address their hearing challenge, you were one of the small number of options available to them (it was you versus other small local clinics)
- And there were enough people in this category to drive enough opportunities through your door.
The problem is that this game is changing.
To target the small number of people that have finally decided to address their hearing challenge, you now have to fight sophisticated advertising machines from big brands, and you have to fight all the other options available to them; it’s a blood bath.
- It’s going to result in your advertising returns further worsening (just as you’ve been seeing with direct mail, newspaper, etc.) because you’re no longer one of the only available options.
- You’re going to be having phone calls/appointments with patients on the back foot because they’ve been fed information that has them confused and worried about making the wrong decision.
- It’s going to make acquisition of new patients far more difficult (and much more expensive).
This is going to cause big problems.
Because, for many clinics, their default position when they have a quiet schedule is to throw more money at advertising. They run a mailer toward their zip code, or they take out more radio or newspaper ads … but the same messaging is not going to work, as the game has changed.
To use a British term, they’re going to be “pissing into the wind.”
So, what’s the solution?
There’s a much smarter way to approach this (that hardly anybody else is doing!).
It looks like this:
Rather than trying to fight with everybody else in the final mile, what if you could get on the radar of the person much earlier and support them in their journey toward being ready to finally take action?
You communicate with them much earlier in the process, build trust with them, and ensure they become educated on why they need to work with somebody just like you.
It would ensure that you have the person trusting you as the local expert and having already pre-chosen you as the place to visit when they’re finally ready to move forward.
You control the narrative of the conversation.
The best part is, NOBODY is fighting for people in this phase of the decision-making process — it’s wide-open water — yet it’s where the majority of the people are.
By targeting this group, you can build a database of opportunities that will deliver you well-informed and pre-qualified appointments long into the future.
The question is, how?
Well, there are two steps:
- Creating expert articles on your website to educate people that are in the research phase of their hearing journey [as detailed in this article, “How to Create 6 Months’ Worth of Content in 90 Minutes”]
- Turning those visitors into leads by offering an exchange of their email address for a downloadable guide that will help them in advance
Given that all the instructions to write educational articles are detailed here, let’s look at how you can develop a genuinely interesting downloadable guide through your website.
How To Create A Desirable Downloadable Guide
Although having a downloadable guide on your website isn’t necessarily a new approach (it’s something that has been happening in the marketing world for many years), the value sits entirely in the level of execution.
That’s because many hearing care websites have downloadable guides, such as The 4 Signs of Hearing Loss or The Hearing Aid Buyers Guide, and nobody cares.
It’s content that should be a blog … not a downloadable guide. Therefore, nobody gives their email address in exchange for them.
It doesn’t work.
Yet your approach is going to be very different because it’s going to be utilizing data.
You’re going to be fishing with clever, highly specific bait.
How? Well, just look at the gender split of website visitors across all of our member websites in 2021.
We can see that 59.73% of visitors were female.
Yet according to the American Academy of Otolaryngology, men are three times more likely to develop a noise-induced hearing loss.
The question is, are 60% of your patients female?
If they’re not – then it suggests that more females are researching/exploring the options on behalf of their husband/partner/dad, etc.
This is probably no surprise.
Yet how much content, language, and information do you have specifically for these people through your website? If you’re like many clinics, then it’s probably not too much.
That’s why your downloadable guide is going to be developed specifically for this audience to help them to support their husband/father on his journey to receiving hearing help.
As we all know, if you can influence the wife, then the husband will follow orders.
How To Create Your Guide:
There are three steps to developing a downloadable guide and building it into your website to generate leads before appointments.
#1 – Choose Your Title
Given that the focus of this guide is on the females on your website that are researching on behalf of their husbands/fathers, we want an intriguing title that feels like it’s speaking directly to them.
You want a catchy title.
Examples include:
- How to Encourage a Stubborn Man to Get His Hearing Tested
- The 5 Signs That Your Husband/Dad/Partner May Have a Hearing Loss
- The Three Ways to Check Your Husband’s Hearing Without Him Even Noticing
You can take one of the above or come up with your own.
#2 – Creating Your Guide
Just because it’s a downloadable guide, it doesn’t mean that this needs to be a 20,000-word book. People are downloading it for an answer to their question, not because they want some big, impressive lecture.
If we go back to our last Masterclass, we shared how you can create 6 months’ worth of content in 90 minutes by voice recording answers and using Rev.com for transcripts.
Well, you can use the exact same methodology to create your guide.
The questions that you want to answer to create your guide are:
Q: In your experience, are men more likely to have a hearing loss?
Q: Why do you believe that men are statistically less likely to seek help with a medical concern?
Q: What is the impact that an untreated hearing loss can have on the loved ones around them?
Q: What are some of the common signs that somebody may have a hearing challenge (aiming for 5)?
Q: Are there any experiments that a wife could run on her husband (without him noticing) to check his hearing?
For example, covering her mouth and speaking to him or asking him questions in background noise, etc.
Q: Do you have any tips that a wife/daughter could use to encourage her husband/dad to have their hearing tested?
Once you have answered these questions, then you can have them transcribed and returned to you as a Word document for you to answer/format.
#3 – Have It Designed To Look On Brand
The third step is to have your guide designed to look visually appealing.
It needs to feel part of your brand, have your contact details on it, and be something that further justifies why you’re the ultimate professionals.
Whether you use your marketing partners to help you to do this or source a graphic designer on a tool like Upwork.com – this is an important step that makes a world of difference.
#4 – Build It into Your Website
Once you have your guide finalized, you can then build it into a download on your website.
This is a very simple task for your marketing team to do, but it’s complex to do yourself unless you have experience building forms into your website (it would require a separate guide to be written to explain how to do it).
Here are the instructions to send to your marketing team.
==Hello,
We have created the attached PDF guide that we would like to build into our website as a download via a web form. The web form needs to ask for their name and email address, and, upon confirmation, it can share the download link to the PDF.
The contact information then needs to go into an email system [they should have this set up for you] that we can then email updates toward in the future.
An example of what we want this to look like is here (https://cornerstoneaudiology.com/).
Please, can it feature on our homepage as well as next to the blogs?
Thanks.
==
This is a common request for a website team, so this should be a straightforward process.
As I said earlier, this is not a REVOLUTIONARY approach.
But it’s an example of a data-driven decision that then becomes an angle to attract the right people with some highly alluring bait. It has worked very well for our members that have implemented this, and it gets a level of downloads unlike any of the traditional downloadable guides we’ve seen in the past.
