An introduction to ZipHearing.com
We have a guest post today by Jeff Hall about www.ziphearing.com. It’s an interesting concept that a lot of work and thought has been put into. Something of which I will talk about later. Enjoy.
By Jeff Hall
As hearing health care providers, it sometimes seems like we are being attacked from all angles. Insurance companies now occupy a major seat at the distribution table. Manufacturer-owned referral networks are continually commoditizing our services and offering paltry reimbursement rates. Direct-to-consumer hearing aid retailers are telling a story of the “unnecessary middle-men” and “un-fair” pricing strategies.
So how can the independent hearing health care practitioner combat these strong competitive forces? One way is by ensuring that we are doing all we can to market ourselves online. We know that the majority of our clients are online- so it’s up to us to ensure that we are there to educate them on why our products and services are the best choice possible. If we fail to do this, we will continue to see a larger and larger segment of our market be “syphoned” away from us by smart nation-wide companies which utilize effective online marketing. There’s no question that our potential clients are going online searching for answers related to their hearing health care, so we need to be there to meet them with the right answers, or we will lose their business to organizations that claim to save them thousands of dollars by taking us out of the picture.
Most of us know we should be investing in a well-designed company website, search engine optimization, and maybe even pay-per-click advertising. But we should also be going a step further. Consider the popularity of websites like Yelp, HealthGrades, and Angie’s List. Today’s internet-savvy consumer is looking for crowd-sourced, reliable, and unbiased information, so we need to be participating with websites that offer this kind of information. The above mentioned sites are great places to start, but there is another emerging option which is proving to be a powerful way to market your business online.
At the end of 2012, ZipHearing.com was created by a hearing instrument specialist, with the goal of educating consumers, increasing transparency in our industry, and providing some competition to referral networks and online retailers who have largely been shaping the narrative to our potential customers- and have been doing so unchallenged. One of the ways ZipHearing has been doing this is by dominating the search engine results pages. At the time of this post, ZipHearing.com and any of it’s 24,000+ pages show up on the first page of Google for over 750 very competitive keywords that our customers are using to research hearing healthcare.
ZipHearing.com provides those answers to consumers, allows consumers to research hearing aid features, styles, average prices, and more, and all in a way that eventually leads them back to hearing health care providers near them. ZipHearing is planted firmly on the side of the independent hearing health care practitioner, and in every way encourages people to seek out licensed professionals near them.
With 20,000 page views a month, you can be sure that a sizable portion of your local clientele has visited ZipHearing.com in search of answers to their questions, and maybe even a local hearing provider. It’s for this reason that you want to make sure that you are encouraging your satisfied clients to submit a review of your business on ZipHearing. This review process takes less than 60 seconds, registration is not required, and you can easily facilitate this at the end of each appointment with happy clients.
There are only a few free ways that we can advertise our services online- ZipHearing is one of them. Let the web developers and hearing practitioners who own the site focus on the nation-wide marketing campaign, and you can piggy-back on it and use it as a creative marketing solution yourself- absolutely free of charge. If you haven’t visited ZipHearing.com yet, do so today to ensure you have a listing for all of your offices and start getting positive reviews today.