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It is hard to miss it, the barrage of mail received by many regarding hearing aids can be overwhelming depending on where you live. You may know them as having such incentives as:  30 people needed to try a new technology, 50 percent off MSRP, come in for a free hearing test and get a free turkey (during thanksgiving of course), etc… All of these pieces are designed to get someone who would put off addressing their hearing loss to FINALLY make that move to do something. The average person waits 7 years between recognizing a hearing loss and treating it and about 20 percent of those who could benefit from hearing instruments actually get them at all.

So, the exposure that our industry gets due to all of this marketing has its positives, but it has its negatives. The hearing health care industry is a rather small one and we have struggled to get more people into hearing aids (for many different reasons that we won’t touch on today), so a bit of marketing to prospective users cannot be all bad. However, in a densely populated area with many practices marketing to the same people, a variety of messages get received by potential hearing aid users sometimes once a week or more and for some, it can be confusing as there are many different messages carried in those marketing pieces.

One marketing piece could stress the price of the hearing device, one could stress the advanced products, and another might highlight the actual practice and professionals in it. All of these things as you can imagine are important considerations however, when marketed by different practices with different styles, causes confusion for some.

Marketing is something for our practice that was almost nonexistent up until a few years ago. Our business was sustained by satisfied patients referring to us, word of mouth, doctor referrals, etc…  However after years of stagnation in business practices, our strong commitment only to our patients and not “the business” was quite evident. We made a commitment to improve our business practices, which would enable us to be here for another 40+ years while being able to help more people which is where our need to actively market ourselves came into play. If the community does not know we are here, and does not know how we are different or what we have to offer, no one benefits.

Moral of the story is (and this seems to be a repeating moral), yes there is a ton of hearing aid marketing going around especially in your mailbox but if it means someone acting on a treatment that could improve their lives, it is not all bad. To avoid confusion make sure you do your due diligence, understand what is involved in improving your hearing and visit a licensed, experienced, and capable office and professional.

We hope you have enjoyed our marketing rant as it helps us to talk about marketing not only to help educate our readers, but to justify it to ourselves!