Beltone Discovers the Influencers of Today are the Buyers of Tomorrow

IAC Award Winner Shares Success Story for Discovering their Ideal Audience Online

By Scott Knoll

What works offline does not necessarily work online, as one marketer found out.  After running a successful marketing program based mainly offline, Beltone, a global leader in hearing products, sought to expand its’ digital presence and explore new audience channel opportunities for its line of hearing aids.  Beltone’s primary goal was to drive sign-ups to its Web site and increase sales while utilizing technology that could target consumers similar to the direct mail campaigns they had been successfully using for so many years.  

Beltone was well aware of its core audience – seniors over 65 with hearing loss.  However, being relatively new to the digital space, Beltone had reservations about their ability to successfully reach this audience online.   Beltone needed to understand the difference between their offline customers and their online prospects.

Beltone leveraged Aperture’s audience targeting and measurement platform to gain valuable insights on the makeup of its online audience.  After two weeks testing run-of-house ads within a New England DMA, Aperture delivered comprehensive audience findings based on impressions, clicks and conversions.  Aperture painted a clearer picture of the prospects interacting with Beltone’s marketing messages.  To Beltone’s surprise, Aperture identified an entirely new audience: women aged 35 to 42 that have an older person living with them. 

“Before Aperture presented these findings, we never would have thought of targeting women 35 to 42,” explained Beltone’s director of marketing and business development, Perry Ebel.  “Aperture’s insights have led us to change our offline marketing strategy to now include this group.”

While Beltone knew it wanted to reach seniors, what they discovered was the children of their original target audience were engaging with the company’s online ads.  It is this previously overlooked audience that represented the majority of buyers and influencer’s of Beltone’s products on behalf of their parents.

Leveraging this new insight, Beltone reshaped its marketing strategy and was able to optimize their creative for hyper targeting with fewer wasted impressions.    

This level of audience discovery can be applied to any campaign in any vertical to help advertisers reach their true target audience and reduce wasteful media spend. Clearly, digital marketers need deeper insights than simply learning how many consumers have clicked on an ad.  True audience insight will deliver much more than numbers, it will combine demographic and physiographic data to define the ideal audience.”

Beltone continues to use Aperture to understand their customers and deliver messages specific to their needs.  The 2010 IAC award winner for Best Health Care Campaign Online leverages these new insights into their newspaper and direct mail campaigns. 

"Beltone New England is proud to be honored by the Internet Advertising Competition for our Beltone Hearing Aid online advertising campaign. Online advertising makes it easier than ever to build loyal and profitable relationships with Beltone customers who appreciate the ease of Web engagement with Beltone brand," said Michael K. Andreozzi, president and CEO of Beltone New England.

Scott Knoll is general manager of the Aperture Division of Datran Media, a New York City-based digital martketing technology company. Reach Scott at sknoll@datranmedia.com.