Branding isn’t as tangible and visible for anyone to see results immediately. Branding is a subtle marketing activity that pushes a company’s marketing effort a few steps ahead. Yet, it hasn’t received the recognition it deserves because so many of us are not tracking those subtle things that can make all the difference.
If you are not implementing any branding strategy, most likely, you will feel the effect after a year or longer. You may attribute the issues of your poor marketing results to something else, but lack of branding could be the answer.
What branding is
When we are talking about branding, at the end of the day, we are talking about reputation. Many may think it is about looking pretty and choosing the right colour for your logo. Branding includes much more than your operations, messaging, and values; it is all you do.
A few things make branding important, and it could dampen your other marketing effects if you don’t follow through.
You do what you say you are or say you will do.
How many of you say you use a patient-centred approach, but the only way someone can book an appointment is by calling your office when they can’t hear on the phone very easily?
Or maybe you use other generic promises that other clinics use, but your services and practices are also the same. A client can’t tell the difference, and now you must compete at a lower price.
If you say you will do something and you don’t follow through, clients experience a disconnect. In the back of their minds, they think of dishonesty.
In an industry with a reputation for dishonesty, you have to go above and beyond to get it right. It’s not enough to say sorry. You’ll have to come back and go above and beyond.
You are operating in a market that lacks transparency. For example, there is a disconnect between the prices and the value in return. When people spend $20000 on a car, they understand the value. Rarely do you hear people complain about cars costing so much? However, in hearing care, it is the opposite.
People still can’t associate the value with the price, and even more so when they find out it costs, on average, only $200 to manufacture a hearing aid, but somehow they are seeing a $6000 price tag. The fact that they don’t have a clear answer makes them even more suspicious of the industry.
The client’s guards are already up, and any sign of dishonesty will make their guards go up even further.
Develop your differentiating factor.
In today’s market, most hearing clinics are the same from the eyes of the client. The only difference is the person who is servicing it.
Some think your academic knowledge and profession as an audiologist, not a hearing dispenser, will be your differentiator. The inexperienced person who doesn’t tune and adjust the hearing aids to meet the client’s needs will lose business.
Yes, that is true, but that shouldn’t be your differentiator; it should be table stakes. Everyone in the profession should be expected to provide proper tuning of hearing aids, especially in a regulated industry.
The last time someone fitted me with an eye prescription, and I still couldn’t see well, I never returned. In my mind, the basic service level should be to be able to provide the correct prescription.
Anything that is regulated is regulated for a reason. It is designed to protect people’s health. If you can’t follow through on that, you’re not good at your job.
However, there will be other people in your profession and neighbourhood who can properly tune hearing aids, and what will be different from them? This is where many hearing clinics fail. You need to have a unique strength.
You might not have your unique strength immediately, but you must develop those strengths.
When you have a brand, you can spend less on marketing.
People with strong brands do not spend time educating customers on why they are different. When you spend most of your marketing dollars on educating people about your services, the industry or the product category like hearing aids, you don’t have the trust that allows people to take anything else you say.
When you see big brands like Ikea or health brands like Pfizer, we rarely see or consume educational content from these brands. The only marketing they must do is inform us of anything new or different in the business. We rely on their reputation and purchase the products they offer and the solutions they promise to provide us.
It takes time to build a brand.
Your branding activities should have started yesterday. If you are starting, it could take you a year or a couple of years before you notice a difference.
You need to explore the various channels to build your brand (and it’s not on Google or using Google Ads). Start to develop a solid brand, and your marketing practices will change and become cheaper over time.