to open up the broadcast so everyone can hear. And Kerry will be sending you chat messages on the time that you have left. I'm also going to keep it on my phone here. Because I'm not going to be, it's like what happened last week, is when I look down there, I'm not going to notice that in like a good 15 minutes. I'm probably going to be in a situation where I don't even know when you put that up there. So I'm going to do the best job I can. When I start, I'm going to have it on my phone, a timer to where it goes. But either way, I mean, you all can type that. I'm just going to say that that chat's really hard for somebody to pay attention to while you're trying to talk. Okay, okay. But we will still, just in case. But just keep in mind if there's any kind of problem that we're encountering, we may send you a message through that. Sure. Well, no, that's fine, that's fine. If I don't react to it, just bear with me. Okay, let me just... Okay. I just typed you a chat message, Mike. Did you see it? No. No? Okay, some questions. Did he get the line? No, I don't think he did. Okay, that's weird. Okay. All right, so, okay, Mike, we're going to go ahead and get started. Okay, and you'll have about, from the time that I start talking, you'll have almost 45 minutes to do your thing, and then we'll go into questions. Sounds good. Okay, all right, please stand by. Okay, ready, Kerry? Do you want me to move the screen over? I'm sorry. I mean, do you see, when I'm looking at my PowerPoint, the upper right-hand corner? Yeah. Do you want me to minimize or put this over here? No, no, no, no. Nobody can see that. No one can see that but you. That's all I wanted to know. Okay, thank you. Okay, please stand by, and, Mike, I'm going to mute you while we're talking and vice versa, okay? Okay. Okay, all right, just a moment. Okay, so, Kerry, make sure we unmute him when I get to the point where he's going to take it. We have to make sure we unmute it. Okay. Okay, I need to start broadcasting. The broadcast is now starting. All attendees are in listen-only mode. Welcome, everyone, to the webinar on Evolving Today's Marketing Plan for Tomorrow's Practice. We're so glad you could be here today to learn more about how to evolve your marketing strategy to incorporate web-based initiatives into your hearing health care practice. Your moderators for today are me, Fran Vincent, IHS Marketing Manager, and me, Kerry Peterson, IHS Education Administrator. Our expert presenter today is Mike Dalton, Director of Marketing Operations for Audible. Mike has worked in various sales, marketing, and leadership roles within Starkey Hearing Technologies in the last 20-plus years. His experience in leading people, along with his knowledge of retail marketing and sales, makes him a great fit to further develop the retail needs of the hearing aid industry. We are very excited to have Mike as our presenter today, but before we get started, just a few housekeeping items. Please note that we are recording today's presentation so that we may offer it on demand through the IHS website in the future. This webinar is available for one continuing education credit through the International Hearing Society. You can find out more about receiving continuing education credit at our website at IHSinfo.org. Click on the webinar banner on the home page or choose webinars from the education menu on the left side of the page. There you will find the CE quiz and information on how to submit it to IHS for credit. Also on the webinar page at the IHS site, you'll find a note-taking guide to help you gather the information you'll need for the CE quiz. If you haven't already downloaded it, feel free to do so now at IHSinfo.org. As a special bonus, everyone who completes the 60-minute webinar and submits a CE quiz with the CE quiz fee will be sent a special download with marketing plans, templates, and tools. Tomorrow, you will receive an email with a link to a survey on this webinar. This will help us create valuable content for you moving forward. Let's go through the agenda. Today, we'll be covering the following topics along with the Q&A within a 60-minute presentation. Our topics are the benefits of marketing planning, planning considerations, building a marketing plan today, and building tomorrow's marketing plan. At the end, we'll move on to a Q&A session. You can send us your questions for Mike at any time by entering your question in the question box on your webinar dashboard, usually located to the right of your webinar screen. We'll take as many as we can in the time we have available. Now, I'm going to turn it over to Mike, who will guide you through today's presentation. Mike? Well, thank you very much for having me today. Fran, Carrie, thank you very much. And everybody else online, thank you for taking the time. When I was asked to do this, we were talking a little bit about marketing and what's going on in today's world, and I thought, you know, I work with a lot of customers today and a lot of questions of how, why, what, what's going to happen here with social media, and how do I start changing my marketing, my avenues. So I pose this question to everybody, is why? I think to myself, why do I do what I do when I get up in the morning? A lot of you think, why did I get into business? You know, I thought that maybe owning a business would be something I'd be really happy to do, and I'd probably see something like this in my backyard. The old money tree. We all have this vision of a money tree and making money. Owning a business sometimes is a little more difficult than we thought when we went into it. There's this thing that we like to talk about, e-myth. The reality of getting into business, I'm sorry, the reality of getting into business is really scary. It's not everything we cut out to be. We realize that we have much more hats we have to wear. So when you think of this, the e-myth book states that most businesses fail because they are not founded by entrepreneurs, but by technicians suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure. Now what's interesting about that is a lot of us got into business the same way. We might have been working in a practice a long time ago, or just a few years ago, and we thought, you know, I want to own a business. When I got into it, I realized, holy moly, there's a lot more to it. Managing people and many other things. I like to talk to people about working on the business or working in the business, and which do you do? Working in the business, take this chef, for instance. A lot of great chefs sit in the back and they cook and they cook and they cook, and they get complimented about how great of a job they do. So they start getting this vision of, why should I work for people? Maybe I should own a restaurant. And then when they own a restaurant, they find themselves in the back cooking all the time. What they don't realize is going on is what's happening out in the restaurant area. How are people being welcomed when they come into the restaurant? How's the service outside of the kitchen? So they know they're cooking good food, but how's people being treated? So that's working in the business. As is dispensing, same thing that we're in right now, is that same situation. We might be fitting hearing aids all day long. And when we're fitting hearing aids all day long, what's going on out in our front office? When I get home after fitting hearing aids, I've got to start thinking about, what am I going to do about marketing? What am I going to market tomorrow? I've got to get more people through the door. And there's a lot of things that go on. What ends up happening is you really spend so much time working in your business that you forget about all the things that you have to do on top of the business. And that is managing the people. That's managing your marketing plan. That's managing the budget. That's doing all the things that really take you away from, if you've got a family, it can take you away from your family. So it takes away from the balance in your life. And that sometimes is what really sets a business on a spiraling effect out. So when I was asked to do this, I started thinking about really setting the stage, like I just did, of what most people are in this business of hearing aids, in the hearing aid industry, and when they're business owners, is what we struggle with. And a lot of it is planning. And now we've got a whole other dynamic going on. We've got web-based marketing coming in. And that's a scary thing. How do we go about doing that? Should I do it now? Are my demographics even on the web? I mean, they're 65+. Are they really on the website? I mean, is that a way to get or are they really on the internet? Is that a way to get people in the door? And what I'm going to talk about through here is, yeah, it is. So I look at this, the benefits of marketing planning, right? So if you've got business plan, business goals, most of us do. We should, right? That's why we're in business. I have a goal at the end of the year, let's say I'm a business owner, I have the goal at the end of the year to increase my business 10%. So that's my business goal, but how am I going to get there? So what does really marketing planning do? Well, a lot of that's going to drive your business goals. It gives you greater organization, reduces the stress. As I mentioned earlier, if you're working in the business all the time and you go home at night and you've got to come up with the next marketing piece, or you've got to figure out how to do payroll, or you've got employee issues and you're dealing with all that, there's not a lot of balance in the life, which also affects your business. So again, going back to marketing planning, it creates organization, reduces stress, it also creates some consistency to your business. The branding, you know, you can see in the branding efforts of your business. When we don't plan, we're constantly reacting to getting a marketing piece out, there's no branding to that. There's no real consistency. Appointment traffic, another thing that marketing planning and having a plan does is it gives you appointment traffic, consistent appointments coming through the door because you have a strategic way to do that. I'm going to talk a little bit more about that as I go on. It also gives you an opportunity when you go to negotiate ad rates with a newspaper. If you walk in with a plan to a newspaper, you've got the leverage right there, you've got negotiation power because you've got a plan, you've got a budget set forth. They can't really tell you what they think you should do because you know what you want to do. It's also the foundation for sustaining a long-term growth. When I look at businesses that have been around a long time, and I've been in this industry for about 26 years now, I've seen a lot of businesses come and go. Most of the ones that stay, almost all the ones that stay, do a great job of being consistent with their plan. They know what they want to do, they go by their business plan, and they have a marketing goal, they set a budget, they stick to it. As I go through here, I'm going to point out different things, give you tips, and do things like that, but I want to say this right now. When you make a plan, you have to commit to it. You can't deviate from it. You've got to stick to the plan. That's the most important thing. That's also, when I see people that go away from the plan, they change things up, and they start going off the plan, that's when the business starts to suffer. What I wanted to do, I wanted to go into a couple of proven successes that we've had. Again, I work with a lot of folks here with Bell, and just this example right here, small business success, it's two locations, and what I put, these bullet points here, are really the comments back to us in regards to what the marketing plan did, and I thought that this is really interesting points this individual makes. As you notice the picture on the right with all the hats, that's probably how you feel. How do I do all this? I will tell you that you've got to find somebody to help you. It's really hard to do on your own. This individual right here was trying to do so many things on his own, it was very reactive in what he was doing, and when we let him know that, hey, there's an opportunity, let's make a plan, let's partner together and make a plan on this, that made the difference, and here's what he said. Ensured his monthly marketing went out on time. Now that's a big deal. Some people put marketing out there, and they hope it hits on time, and they don't really have it strategized in regards to when they want it to hit. I'm going to go through that, exactly how to set up a timing to where you hit in appropriate times. Kept marketing expenses within his budget. That was huge. Again, set a budget, 10%, 15%, whatever it was, but he didn't deviate from that. He stayed with that because he knew that he could afford just this much. Focused on best performing mediums to meet growth objectives. What we did there, though, that's tracking. Best mediums, the only way you're going to know that is if you're tracking your responses. There's tools out there, and there's tools that we use that tracks the mediums that we use, whether it be newspaper, direct mail, websites, yellow pages. I know where these consumers are calling from. I think it's really important for any business owner to know where his consumers are coming from, what mediums are performing the best. That's where you're going to allocate your dollars. That sometimes can shift over the years, or over the months, or by week. You've just got to pay attention to what's hot, what's working, and choose that. This individual grew 5% in the recessed economy. This was in 2009. What we did is, knowing that things were getting tough in 2008, this guy knew that he had to make a plan. We did that. In a 5% growth in a recessed economy, he was very excited, and we were too, because, again, it goes back to showing somebody that plans work. One of the things that's most important to this, we stayed consistent, and so did he. He stayed committed to the plan. Very, very important. Another one. This is a larger practice. This is four full-time offices, five satellite offices. He's got nine total offices. His comments on this one, synergized effort to deliver a bigger brand message. What did that mean? That means that what we did is, he used to market to his different locations, and he would put, like, when he marketed to a certain region, or where that location, where the consumer's going to come from, he'd put one location in his ad. What we did is, we made his offices look, and we did a bigger brand message out there, is that he's got nine offices. It looked like a bigger operation. We stayed consistent with that over time. We identified, he puts out, I guess I should say, that identified best market opportunities to each location. What this means is that we targeted what's best suited for that, what offer was best suited for that location. It's not always going to be a high-end hearing aid necessarily for that location. It's not always that that salesperson in that location can take a, let's say, a loss leader type marketing piece, and upsell them to something else. What we were able to do is help him identify the locations, what are our best opportunities to get the consumer the help they need. You've got to understand that you've got to pay attention to your staff, how the front office is handling those phone calls, whether it be a price ad, whether it be a discount offer, the questions coming in, how are they handling those calls, are they booking the appointments, and then are the sales coming out in the back of what you want. This person met his 10% growth objective. He set a goal, he knew what he wanted, and he met that 10%. He actually exceeded that, but he met what he wanted. Again, it was a strategic effort, and it was paying attention to what was happening with his marketing, and that's through tracking. I make these points up front because as I go through this plan, I'm going through a very simple plan. If you've never been on one, I wanted to make it as simple as possible to just get someone started, and then get somebody, or get all of you interested in knowing how would I start implementing any other type medium, such as using the web. I'll get to that, but I wanted to make this point known that if you stick to the plan, there is success at the end of the rainbow. Now, let's get into how we make a plan. I consider I tell everybody there's really three stages. There's a pre-planning stage, which is really what I call a SWOT analysis, and SWOT analysis, if you're not familiar with what that is, is really identifying what are your strengths of your business, what's the weaknesses in your business, what are the opportunities that you have, and what's your threats. Now, if I go to strengths, and this is where I say you got to be honest with yourself, and this is you know, I tell people go in the bathroom, look in the mirror, close the door, be honest with yourself, talk to yourself. Tell yourself what your strengths are of your business. Because the last thing you want to be doing, and I see this happen quite a bit, is when people don't do some pre-planning like this, is they market to their weaknesses. And you got to know what your weaknesses are. So a SWOT analysis is very important. You got to build upon your strengths. The market considerations. So look around your area. There's drive time. If I use the Atlanta market for an example, maybe two miles, two and a half, three miles tops for somebody to drive. There's a lot of competition in the area. They're not going to drive very far. If I'm going to rural areas, my drive time might be 20 minutes. There's seasonality things I got to take into consideration. Competition. Are they coming and they're going? And etc. So when I get into competition, here's where I'm going with competition. You need to know what your folks are doing around your area. How long they've been in business. How do they market? What do they consistently market? Know if the competition, you know, there might be some vulnerability in some of the competition. Is anybody coming in? Is there going to be any new business coming in? All these kind of considerations you got to take into play. And then your consumer makeup. The average age you're looking for. Your lifestyles and the communities that they're coming from and how they live. You position your ads to be attractive to them because you're speaking directly to them. So let me go back to SWOT analysis real quick because I think this is really important in your pre-planning stages. The threats. When I get into threats and I start, you know, and somebody says, well, what's a threat? Well, a threat would be again competition. It could be the changing marketplace today. That could be a threat to my business. If I'm not comfortable with the web and I'm not an internet savvy person and I don't understand Google, I don't understand Facebook, I don't understand Twitter, that can be a threat to your business. And I'm going to get into that a little later, but these are all things to take into consideration. The weaknesses. Again, I go back. You've got to be honest. So if you're going to be honest with yourself and pat yourself on the back about all your strengths, absolutely know that you've got to poke yourself too on the weaknesses. Make sure you understand what the weaknesses are in your business. It's really important. It could be your front desk. It could be the weakness of, you know, maybe the technology you're using or maybe it's the fact that you're all by yourself, so your weakness is my marketing plan could be my weakness. I don't have one. I don't have really a budget. And then the opportunities, I think you absolutely look at your opportunities and figure, hmm, what could I do? What can I improve upon? And opportunities could be training. It could be my staff is going to get extensive training this year, which is going to give me the opportunity to capitalize on my weaknesses instead of always, you know, making my weakness as part of my threat to my business. So then I get into what I call the planning stage. So defining a marketing budget is part of the planning. So I've got my pre-planning where I do my SWOT analysis, I'm honest about my business, and now I'm going to get into defining what my budget is. And I break it into three categories. And I look at it this way. A new practice to me is a zero to five-year practice with no database going into it, right? Now what that's going to require probably is about 20% to 25% of your revenue reinvested. That's really what you want to think about with that new practice. If you're going to go in and thinking that my practice is what I call a developing practice at 10% to 15%, you don't have the database. Unless you're getting a lot of traction off your marketing right away, you can maybe drop to 15%, but I always recommend people for the first at least two years of their practice is 20% to 25% of your revenue reinvested into marketing to build that database. Developing a practice. The developing practice I consider that middle stage five to 15-year practice. I'm going to budget probably about 10% to 15% of revenue towards that, and that's really what most people sit right on that line right there. It's five to 15 years. I'll invest 10% to 15%. Then I get down to what's called an established practice. The established practice I consider 15 years plus. That's a five to 10% reinvestment as far as my budget goes. And the reason why it drops is you've got a database. And what happens is when you've got a database of 15 years plus, you've got hundreds if not a thousand people in that database, and it's much more cost effective to be doing your e-mails or not e-mails, but your mailers directly out to your consumers. You've got a better, it's cost effective this way, and you get a better return. You get referrals. You've got a revolving door. Your people are coming back. You have the repeat buyers. So that gives you that opportunity to stay at a lower marketing budget because you're doing less acquisition, more retention. Now at the very bottom of the screen, what I did is I kind of gave you just what I would do is just baseline. This is my cost. This is what I'm thinking. So if I look at the database mailer, if I'm going to spend about quarterly cost, about 500, that's 300 mailers monthly I'm going to send out to my database. Prospect mailers, depending on how many mailers I'm going to do monthly, I'm going to do 7,500 mailers monthly. It's going to roughly cost me around $11,000. Print costs are different. It depends on what type of piece you're doing. Four cards are very popular. It could be a letter. A letter is a little cheaper than a four-card mailer. So the costs vary, but I'm just going to set a quarterly cost of $11,000 for that. Then I'm going to look at my newspaper ads, and I'm going to say I'm going to run three half-page ads, which I would refer to most people doing full-page, but three half-page ads, monthly campaign, and I'm going to run it around $10,000 is what it's going to cost me. And then yellow pages, I do want to stay in the yellow pages, maybe two books most. I'll keep with a bold listing. People ask me a lot about yellow pages. Should I be in it? Should I not? We put tracking numbers in yellow pages, and I do notice that we still get calls off those. So that's why I use tracking because when people ask me the question, should I be in yellow pages, I wouldn't want to say no to them if I wasn't sure. So I do say, yes, stay in it. I would bring it down to a listing, maybe not a quarter page or anything like that. Just stay visible in there. People do still search in the yellow pages. There are still a few folks out there that do that. Okay, so let's get down to the slide here. Sorry, I'm having problems moving my slide. But I will figure this out. There we go. Now I'm going to get into what I call, so I did my preplanning. I kind of set my budget for this. Now what are my tactics? What's really my plan? What am I going to do? Well, I'm going to do some retention. Okay, so I've got a database. I'm going to do some retention. I know that. I need to do acquisition, so I'm going to do some newspaper inserts or ads, and then I'm also going to do some direct mail. So what I've done, retention and acquisition, those are two different types of marketing avenues that we use. Acquisition marketing is basically trying to draw anybody in the door that's not currently in your database, competitive users or whatever it may be. That's called acquisition. You're acquiring them into your business. Retention, again, just retaining your own database. And then I'm going to do an event. Every month I want to do something. I want to be either in the community doing a lunch and learn. I might do an open house or a workshop, depending on what you call them, but I want to do something like that. I'm going to do some networking. I'm going to do some decision referrals, some patient referrals. I'm going to do something around networking at some point. And then I need to do brand building, so I've got to pay attention to my website at some time. I want to develop a new practice brochure. I want to tell more about my business or whatever it may be. So here's my tactics. And it can be anything. I just put these things up here, but when you think about what you want to market your business, how you want to do it, this is kind of your plan right there. Now what we're going to get into is really understanding what happens as far as your timing. So if I'm going to do direct mail, which is really, again, I put here typically best performing medium, one of the things you've got to understand is print's not going away. Print marketing, it's still going to be visible to everybody. I think that it's still going to stay. We've probably got five, ten more years maybe left on print before it's going to be all online. But as we use this, I can say that I think it was about five years ago, and maybe some of you experienced this, that you were probably getting around a percent on your return on your marketing. Today we get about .03 of a percent on marketing. So that's a far diminishing return on marketing on direct mail or on newspaper than we used to. Those mediums have changed. Our consumers are changing. And it's not necessarily their buying habits, but what's drawing them in. We're getting into the demographic of the baby boomers that they're brand orientated. They're very conscious of a brand. So keep that in mind as you go through and you start building your plan. So what I say on direct mail, I can easily target my demographics on who I want to hit, the income, the zip code, because I'm pulling the list counts based on that. I ask people just stay right around 60 to 60-plus. If you drop to 55, don't expect a return on 55-year-olds today. But if you want to start marketing because you've got the revenue to do it and at least plant a seed in their mind today, go for it. But if I am going to market direct mail to a 55-plus demographic, make sure the messaging in your ads are speaking to 55-plus. A lot of that is small hearing aids. I mean, they're still conscious of the dexterity of them and also the visibility of them, so small is better. So think about that if you are going to mail to a younger demographic. If you're keeping it to an older demographic, then you can pretty much market whatever you want. They know what a hearing aid looks like so they're probably pretty comfortable with putting them on their ears because they know the need. Newspaper, what I put on there, what I like about newspaper is I can target my newspaper to enhance my direct mail. So if I drop a direct mail piece, which I'll show you in the calendar, my newspaper, I can pinpoint exactly my message in there to enhance the direct mail. I know exactly when I can drop the newspaper. So if it's Monday, I know it's going to hit Monday morning and I know that my mail is going to hit the mailbox in the afternoon, that's that campaigning type thing. But there is a diminishing in-home delivery circulation. I don't know about your newspaper. I just know that most newspapers that we've worked with with our customers is that there's less circulation and the costs are going up. The reason being is a lot more people are going online to read the news. They're canceling. You don't have to drop that newspaper off anymore. I go online every morning and I read whatever I want. I can go to the New York Times. I can go to my local news. I can do whatever I want. So just keep that in mind. Pay attention to your area. Pay attention to your newspaper and what's going on there. Talk to your newspaper rep. Add cost based upon size, circulation, and frequency. Now, again, going in with your plan, you need to know this. When you go to negotiate with your newspapers to do your plan, you know exactly how much you're going to spend. You know what their circulation is and how frequently you want to do it. So these are just little cues to keep in mind. Now, here we go. Here's the calendar. I'm going to go through something very simple for you guys. I don't want people to get overwhelmed with, you know, how do I make a calendar. So I want to make it as simple as possible. Now, remember I said I want to have an event a month. Well, I'm going to use the example of month of May. So I'm going to do an open house event. Better hearing month, why not? So I'm going to do an open house event. That's the first thing I'm going to plop on because my whole month is centered around this open house. If you notice, the dates, May 15th, 16th, and 17th, that's my event. Now, in order to have that event, if I have that event on that date, my direct mail has got to drop on May 4th. Now, I'm using May 4th. I do everything first class. So when I drop on May 4th, if I drop my mail piece on May 4th, it's going to start hitting the mailbox May 7th, 8th, and 9th. And sometimes the 10th and 11th, it's trickle effect. But so that month or that week. And that week, when it's hitting that week, the dates on that mail piece is for that special event coming up on the 15th. So they're going to be booking for that next week. Now, if you notice, on May 14th, I put in an open house newspaper ad. Now, that's to get everybody else that didn't react off my direct mail, oh, by the way, I have an open house this week, please come in. There's an urgency to that. It hits on the 14th. Space is limited. What I would put in there when I mention space is limited, that's what needs to go in the newspaper ad. Because if they saw it in their mailbox and they didn't react to that to book an appointment, but then they see in the newspaper that, hey, the open house is going on, their space is limited, maybe I should react. So that's where I create the urgency part. Okay, so now I've got that event in and I've positioned that. Now I'm going to add some other things. The first of every month I want to do a retention letter. The first of every month, if I've got a database, I'm going to be mailing out X amount of letters depending on what size my database is the first of every month. So that's just an automatic that I know that that's hitting. Then if you notice down on the 18th of May, which is another Friday, the day after the open house event, I need to make sure that my phones are ringing the following week. So I'm probably going to be doing deliveries, the 21st through the 25th from the open house, but at the same time I also want to be doing some tests. So I'm going to drop a prospect mailer out on the 18th that will hit on the 21st, 22nd, 23rd. So I'm going to try drawing patients in again. So I'm trying to keep the consistency to where my phones are ringing and there's foot traffic coming through the door. If I've got multiple offices, I want to make sure my employees are busy and happy. If you look down on the 28th, I've got the wanted newspaper ad. And on the 18th, it could have been the wanted direct mail piece, so I've just enhanced it right down there with the wanted newspaper ad. I use wanted because I think everybody understands what the wanted piece is. I think we all use it. But anyway, you see that down there. So what I've just created is a very simple plan with how our main mediums that we use today, direct mail and newspaper, this is how simple just having something like this or putting something like this together can be. The important thing, like I mentioned at the very beginning of this talk, is the consistency in staying committed to the plan. So if I've got these things going on, I want to stay committed to it. Now, let's go a little further here. I'm jumping ahead. My slides are going a little crazy here. Sorry about that. The data-driven decisions. Okay, that is another important thing. So if I know the newspaper is not drawing that much, I need to be shifting some of my dollars over another direction. Okay? So again, track, track, track. There are companies out there that do this. I personally, we use CallSource. And I use CallSource for this reason. I can get a local area code and a local prefix. And I can also use 800 numbers. So there's two ways I use it, but, you know, I can use it with a vanity number, 800, or local numbers. But it's just been huge for us to learn about marketing and also learn how we can help our customers with education and training, whether it be the front office, back office, or whatever it may be. And at the same time, we're learning a lot about marketing and how to adjust the plan and make it go forward. Because, again, as I said, the next thing, adjusting your marketing calendar, hugely important. It's also been a heck of a powerful negotiation tool for us. Because what we've used it for is when I go to negotiate newspapers, whether before our partners or our customers go and do it themselves, I give them the data behind their newspaper. If I know that I spent $70,000 in newspaper last year, but it gave me a return of about, it's only about 10% of my return, and I go and get 10% of my response off that, and I'm getting about 60% of my response off direct mail, I might allocate dollars. I'm going to tell my newspaper I'm not going to increase my ad buy. I'm actually going to cut back from that. Because I can go in and say, look, I spent $70,000 last year, and I didn't get the return I was hoping. So I'm going to adjust. I'm going to maybe do maybe $50,000. I'm going to take that other $20,000 and allocate it to another medium, only because I know that that would be working. Now here's where I get into taking it to the next step. So I just showed you a basic way of what we do today, a basic way to get started on a marketing plan using the mediums that we've consistently used for the last 20 years. I didn't put TV or radio in on that, but if you do TV or radio, just know where you're going to put that in. And if I could give you an advice on TV, I wouldn't want to run it in the evenings. I would want to do something that's a direct response, so I'd run some daytime ads, something that's a direct response where they call immediately and I have somebody there to answer the phone. So now let's get into building the fortress. Now to incorporate online activities, you want to start with your website. Make sure that your website is that you're able to switch your content out on a regular basis. It's so important. I see so many websites and I say, hey, do you have a website? They say, sure do. I do what's called a Google challenge. I go to Google and I put in hearing aids in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and then I don't see them until page 5. And the reason being is because we're not switching our content out with what's currently being searched on Google. So when I searched hearing aids, how many times does it say hearing aids on your website? How many times does it say invisible product? How many times does it say receiver in the canal? How many times does it say the things that you're putting in print? Because that's what people go to validate. They go to Google, they put in that hearing aid that you were marketing and they want to find out more about it, and they might end up on somebody else's site. So content management is huge when it comes to your website. And put out educational blogs. Blogs is huge. Blogs is what pushes you up on the Google pages that helps give you credibility, and that's a very important thing. And I know this sounds scary to everybody. This is things that maybe I'm not comfortable with doing. I don't understand what a website is. There's companies out there that will help you out. There's manufacturers out there that can help you out and guide you and give you that partnership and make you feel so you're not wearing so many hats. That's really what I want to get across to everybody. I know it's tough to be a business owner all by yourself. There is avenues out there to help you with these kinds of things. You want to start the conversation through social media. I would have a Facebook page. Get your Facebook page, but don't use your personal Facebook page. Build a business page and make sure that all your employees understand that when they like your Facebook page, they should have their own business Facebook also because you don't want to be bringing in their family, their friends. You never know what information shows up underneath that. So keep it credible. Keep it professional. Now we're going to get into how do I integrate this in. Well, if you notice on May 2nd, I'm plopping in. You still see that same May calendar. Now I'm plopping in in green. I'm using social media. My website content optimization, meaning I'm switching out the content on my website. I'm making sure that the content on my website is relevant to my marketing pieces. So I might even have in my website where I talk a little bit about my open house on the 15th, I know that I'm going to be doing something around invisible products. I want to make sure that my content on my website is talking about invisible products. So when somebody searches Google, Google sees that it's got enough keywords in my website so people will go to it. Blog posts, I have new blog posts and open house mentions. So I'm going to blog a little bit about my open house. At the same time, again, going back to it, I'm just using invisible product as it's something to talk about. But I might want to add credibility to visible products, so I might want to search out on the web to find out who's talking about invisible products. Bring in some of that into my web, blog posts, and also get into those conversations and have that on my website. If I go down to May 22nd, I've got another blog post. So I'm doing two blog posts in a month. I'm switching out my content every month, hugely important. Now here's what it's going to look like in 2014. So I just showed you really what 2012 looks like, what 2013 looks like. Now guess what? Look at 2014. Now I've added social media, and that means, you know, look it, I've got event promos through social media. This is where I'm Facebooking. I'm starting to bring people into my business through social media. And that can be Twitter. That can be blogging. That can be Facebook. That can be many different avenues of social media. My point to all this is if we sit and wait to start doing websites and making sure that we are switching our content out. If we wait to do blogs, if we wait to Twitter, if we wait to do Facebook, by the time you go to do this in 2014 when it becomes more relevant to most people, you didn't build your fortress. What happens on the Internet is the more you get yourself on that first page of Google, it is harder for people to penetrate that. And if you know when you search something you end up, you don't go to page two or three on Google, you usually find something on one and then you go to that. That's what it is, building your marketing fortress. I apologize, I only have 45 minutes. I mean, this is a great conversation to have and it's so, it can be so in depth on all levels, but that's what I mean by building your marketing fortress. You have to start today. You have to find somebody to help you out if you're not sure how to do this. And the main thing is, if you are afraid, it's okay because everybody is, but you got to take those baby steps towards this because if you're going to start taking your baby steps in two years, you might be too late. And it's going to be harder to keep your business alive. That is it from, for me, I guess we can open up to questions. Yeah. Thank you, Mike. Well, everyone, we're really excited that well over a hundred of you have joined us today on the webinar. So we do have some time for questions. If you have a question, please do enter it in the question box on your webinar dashboard. And Mike, we asked everyone who registered for this webinar to tell us what their number one marketing challenge is. And while we got a lot of different answers, the overwhelming majority of you said your number one challenge is getting leads through the door and into that first appointment. Mike, what are your thoughts on this? Well, I kind of chuckle at that because I do. I hear that a lot. I mean, when I talk to people about, you know, and they come to me about marketing and the first thing they ask is, you know, I just need people. How do I get people? Well, there's no silver bullet out there and we constantly are building new ads. And I think the message is always going to be the same. The most important thing, I think, for you to get more people in your door is pay attention to how your phones are being answered. We lose more people at the front, you know, so your marketing is working for you. Every dollar you spend is so important and it's getting tougher and tougher to get these people through the door. But a lot of it is our staff. I've listened to, I don't think anybody's listened to more phone calls than me. I listen to calls every day and what I hear is it's how we're handling our consumer and it's not booking the appointment properly and not answering the questions properly. So I think, you know, it doesn't have to be marketing all the time. It doesn't mean that I have to spend more money in marketing to get more people through the door. I really have to pay attention to really my foundation of my business. And like I brought up at the very beginning, what's my strengths, what are my weaknesses? And sometimes our weakness is how we answer our phones. Okay. Great. Thank you, Mike. We have the questions pouring in. So everyone, we're going to try to get to as many as we can in the time that we have available. We have a question from Gina who's in Canada and she wants to know your thoughts on email marketing. That's a great one. And I think if you're collecting your email or if you have been collecting email addresses for a while, that's awesome because email marketing is three cents an email. So if you want to start getting to a cost-effective approach and a great way for retention, I mean, there's also companies out there that can set up trigger-based email campaigns for you. So if you're collecting your emails, that's important. So if you're not, start. Every time somebody fills out a contract with you of agreement of a sale, on there should be their email address. There's other tools out there that you can collect email addresses through also. But I think it's great to tell a consumer that, you know, here's why I want your email. I want to stay in contact with you. I want to make sure that I'm letting you know when the next product's coming out that would be most appropriate for you, you know, as far as an upgrade opportunity. But collect the emails. And I love the idea of going to email marketing. There is a great avenue to that. Like I said, it's three cents an email in most cases. So obviously, that's a cost-effective approach also. Excellent. Okay, Mike, we had a bunch of people write in and want to know what type of educational blog topics are appropriate for the website. And can you throw out some ideas of topics? Yeah, I think keep it around what you're going to be, what's current, right? So if, whatever you're marketing, you know, make it relevant. So if it's invisible products, if it's, if people are on the web talking about receiver in the canals, if they're talking about tinnitus, whatever they're talking about, you know, bring those in, you know, because there's a lot of searches out there where people want to understand what they're bringing in their areas. And if you can involve them or at least if they, when they go Google that, they might end up, you know, going to your blog post on your page and start reading through. But what it does, it gives you credibility. So find whatever you're marketing, whatever you're putting out there in front of the consumers on a daily basis, I would make sure my blog posts speak to those products. Because when they go search for validation of the product and they end up going to Google and seeing you in the first page of Google, click on it and they see your blog post and you're talking about that product and it's great, educational information in there, it gives you credibility. So I think you've got to be conscious of what you want to talk about in regards to your business and what you offer and stay current with that. And again, like I said, I think that gives you that credibility you need. Okay, great. Okay, we had a few questions on the retention letters. You talked about retention marketing. So Carol in Florida and several other people asked about the contents of those letters and do you have different types of retention letters depending on whether a person just came in but didn't purchase? And can you talk a little bit more about that? Sure, absolutely. So you really want to, we're going to look at it in several different ways, right? You want to put them in buckets. So if you've got somebody, if you've got a, somebody who comes in and purchases hearing aids, obviously you're going to have follow-up letters. So you're going to have some strategy behind how you're going to follow up with that consumer that you got. So somebody comes in, buys a product from you, I'm going to send them a letter in a couple of weeks is just, you know, how's everything going, hope everything's good, can't wait to see you at the next appointment. And you might want to set up another mailer for them three months, hey, hope all is well and you just want to keep it consistent there. So what I would say is first time buyer, you want to hit them probably three, four, five times that year of just follow-ups. You have tested not sold letters. Those are also, you know, letters you're going to send out. So if you got somebody you didn't sell, obviously you still want to stay in contact and you want to let them know that you're still there for them if they choose in the future to have help. You have birthday cards, you have warranty information you're sending out, there's upgrade letters you want to send out. So again, it's a strategy, your database. I would recommend everybody, the best way to do retention type mailers is make sure you have a database that you can really sift through. So you could target people two years ago that you hadn't seen in two years, you can target them for upgrade opportunities. You can target them by the product that they bought, whether it be a PowerAid or whether they like small hearing aids and one smaller came out and you want to let them know, hey, by the way, there's a smaller hearing aid for you, why don't you come in and see it. So you really want to position yourself that way. So there's many different types of retention. It's just how many times you want to hit them is up to you, depending on your budget. But you do want to be in their face at least three, four times a year with something in front of them. Okay, great. We have a question from Jennifer in Kansas. And she writes, you say to start online marketing now to build your fortress, but what about the people who started a year or more ago? Will I ever be able to compete online with them? Yes, but you're going to have to be aggressive. So that's why I say today, Google yourself. Find out where you fall. Start paying attention to your website. Because if you wait any longer, if you think it's been a year and you're afraid to do it, it becomes two years and it's going to be much harder. So is it difficult? Yeah, it can be if the person is really good at what they're doing. But if they're showing up on the first page of Google only because nobody else has started, then they're winning the battle and you can still penetrate into the first page of Google or the early second page just because you're starting your consistency. Again, blogging, Facebooking, blogging is huge. Google definitely recognizes the blog posts and the relevance of that and that pushes you up. Also YouTube, which Google owns, that's another good avenue there. But you just got to look at, okay, what do they do? What are they doing to get there? What do I need to do just a little bit more so I can penetrate that area? Mike, Elliot in Michigan wants to know, well, a couple of parts to his question. One, how much time should you spend monitoring social media? How do you measure results or do you? And how much does social media cost or how much should you expect to spend on that? Well, that's the best part about it, right? It's free. Social media is a free avenue. Facebook, you know, setting up a Facebook page, doing that kind of thing, that's all free. You know, website might cost you something. Content management might cost you something. This is another reason why you, you know, when you build a website, make sure that you have the opportunity to switch out content. Some people will charge you quite a bit to be doing that, especially on a regular basis. You know, find a manufacturer maybe that supports that effort, because there are some out there that do that. But cost effective, it's very cost effective because it's free. YouTube's free. Facebooking's free. Twitter's free. All those avenues, definitely cost effective. Okay. Okay. We have a question from Carolyn Canada, and she wants to know about physician referrals. Do you, what can you propose or recommend as a marketing tool to get physician referrals? And that seems to be a question we've gotten a lot in this session. What do you think about that, Mike? That's a tough one. Physician referrals, I mean, obviously you want to get face to face with the physician as much as possible, and that's hard to do. I think more importantly, you got to be, put yourself credible in your community. You know, get your face out there. Let them know who you are first, so they're more receptive to you coming in and meeting them and then saying, you know what, I'm okay with that. I'll refer to you. But you've got to, you've got to have something behind what you do. So I recommend people get out in the community. Do community events. Do lunch and learns. You know, let them see you in the newspaper that you're credible and you're out there supporting the communities, because a lot of the patients they see will then say, yeah, I know so and so. And they may say, yeah, that's a good person to go to. But if you go knock on the physician's door to say, hey, I'd like to send out a referral program, the only way you're going to get through the door in most cases is if they know who you are, because their door gets knocked on quite a bit. I don't know if, I certainly don't have the golden rule to it. But I would say to anybody that, you know, first of all, give yourself some credibility or figure out how you can get more credible in your community. Most of it is putting your face in the community. It's not just your marketing efforts. It's actually getting out and shaking hands, really being a politician. Good advice. We have a question from John in New York. And I know you already talked, Mike, about the importance of having help when executing your marketing. But John writes, he says he's overwhelmed as a business owner and the prospect of creating a marketing calendar and carrying out all those activities is intimidating. And he wants to know, should I hire a marketing person or where should I get help? That's a great question. And, you know, it's scary to most people, because like I mentioned earlier, I think trying to create your own marketing plan or just trying to do marketing period can really take a lot of time. So I would say find a partner. There's manufacturers out there to support this effort. I know on our team here we have, you know, we have 15 marketing representatives. As a company as a whole, we have over 100 marketing representatives to help our customers. But there's manufacturers out there. I think if you go to an agency to find an agency to help you out, make sure they know the industry. You know, and they like to spend. And they're going to, you know, help you with a budget, of course, but they're going to spend, spend, spend, and they're going to try mediums that maybe aren't working, because they're used to other avenues. If you hire somebody at an expense you're putting on to your P&L now, and I would always recommend, you know, if you do hire a marketing person, make sure that they're able to, you're able to justify their cost. They're going to have to be really good marketers to justify that, depending on what you're paying them. They've got to bring in that in the door, which means their marketing's got to be really, really good. And my guess is they might be just as naive to our industry as possibly an agency could be. So find a manufacturer that supports those efforts, because they get it. In our cases, we work with hundreds of customers, so we have a learning opportunity every day on what's working and what's not. Mike, for those people who may have missed the beginning of the presentation, can you go over again what the most important driver of a marketing plan success is? Consistency. Commitment. Stay to it. Very common for somebody to have a plan, get excited about having a plan, and then deviate from that. It's very common for somebody to get a phone call on a Friday from the newspaper rep saying, hey, I've got a, I've got an opportunity for you on Sunday to run a full-page ad. It'll only cost you $1,700. Oh, okay, I'm in, because it was cheap. The problem with that is they're not taking that $1,700 out of the budget or out of the plan, okay? So they just deviated from the plan a little bit, so then they're going to say, well, I don't need to run that other newspaper that's already on my calendar, because I just did it already. That defeats the purpose of a plan, and once you do that once, you're going to think you can do it twice. Pretty soon, you don't have a plan anymore. So whatever you do, and that's why I say pre-plan, and then get into your planning stage, and then put it on a calendar and stay consistent to the calendar and stay committed. You'll see, you'll see success. You might not see it right away, but what you're going to learn is by paying attention to the responses, paying attention to where your consumers are coming from, that's what's going to drive success through a plan. Excellent. Okay, everyone, we're getting down to the wire here with the webinar. We're going to take one or two more questions, and Mike, we do have another question from Joanne. She's in Georgia, and she had a question about the SWOT analysis. She wants to know, how often should you update the SWOT analysis? I would, you know, depending on your marketplace, right, and depending on the change of business, but right now, we're in a situation where I'd recommend doing it once a year. I think at the end of every year, after you do your, you know, you meet with your accountant, you look through your books, and you understand what it is, I think you re-evaluate your whole business. Even if you're, even if you had a great year, I'd re-evaluate. Strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities, and threats, they happen every day. Sometimes we switch out employees quite a bit, which changes the dynamics of our business. So it's one of those things to help you stay at that 20,000 foot level of your business is to re-evaluate all the time. We get caught a lot of the times working every day in our business, and then going home doing things, and we're never really paying attention to the most important things, and that's our staff. And I reiterate this, everything matters. Everything in your business, every customer, every phone call, every marketing piece you put out there, and also, you know, your management style and your skills. Make sure your employees are involved with your business, and that's why I would do a SWOT analysis every year. Excellent. Okay, one last question. Marcus in Indiana, and actually this is a question several people sent in. Wanted to know if you recommend any special, other than call source, any special database tools or databases that people can use to track their marketing activities and their customers? Well, CycleNet's out there, and there's some other office management systems out there that help you with, really, your marketing activities. There's 800 Response, which is another tool just like call source that uses a tracking number. I think using a tracking number gives you all the detail you really need, because you can go in and listen to those phone calls. And what I tell people is even though that I'm listening, I don't want them not to go in and monitor their phone calls. A consumer will tell you why they're calling every time in the first 30 seconds of a phone call. Whether it be take me off the list or not, they're telling you. But those are the important messages. So whatever system you go to, first thing I would advise everybody is call tracking, whether it be 800 Response, call source. But then when I get to the office management, I'd recommend the CycleNet. That's pretty popular. There's HearForm out there, and there's a few others out there. But they're not going to listen to your calls. And from a marketing standpoint, that's the opportunity, is to be able to listen to your calls, listen to your consumers, and also know where those calls are coming from. If it's off direct mail, newspaper, TV, radio, who knows? I mean, it's just those are your avenues, and that's what you need to know. Okay, excellent, Mike. Thank you so much for a great presentation. And thank you, everyone, for joining us today on the IHS webinar on Evolving Today's Marketing Plan for Tomorrow's Practice. We're going to go ahead in advance to the last slide to give you some contact information. Now, if you'd like to get in contact with Mike, you may email him at Mike underscore Dalton at AudibleHearing.com. You can, of course, visit the website at www.Audible.com. And for more information about receiving WANT Continuing Education credit for this webinar, please do visit the IHS website at IHSinfo.org. Click on the webinar banner or find more info on the webinar tab under Education. As a reminder, you can get bonus materials from this presentation today, including marketing plan templates. We're also going to include some other tools in there, a marketing plan, a marketing calendar sample, etc. But what you need to do is complete the CE quiz for this webinar and submit it with your fee to IHS, and that way we can get those tools over to you. IHS members do receive a substantial discount on CE credit, so if you're not already an IHS member, you will find out more information on how to join at IHSinfo.org. And please keep an eye out for the feedback survey you'll receive tomorrow via email. We ask that you take a moment to answer a few brief questions about the quality of today's presentation, because your feedback is critical to us providing quality information to you. So thank you again, everyone, for being with us today, and thank you, Mike, and we'll see you at the next IHS webinar.

marketing planning

hearing healthcare practice

SWOT analysis

marketing budget

retention marketing

acquisition marketing

online marketing

website optimization

customer service

physician referrals