Case Study: How Beltone Used Scout to Win More Patients in Every Local Market

Beltone has been the nation's most trusted hearing care provider for more than 80 years. With 1,200+ practices across North America, Beltone operates as a network of independent clinic owners — each responsible for winning patients in their own local market, and each relying on Beltone's corporate Marketing Operations team to help them do it.

That team has made Beltone one of the most visible providers in healthcare, with:

• 97–98% Listing Health Score across the network

• Nearly 1,900 booked appointments delivered monthly through automation campaigns

• Average Google Business Profile ranking improved from position 3 to position 2 across more than 1,000 locations

But the way patients find Beltone's individual clinics has changed. They no longer type keywords into a traditional search engine. Instead, they ask conversational questions – often using AI. And when AI answers, the question isn't whether Beltone's network is strong nationally. It's whether each individual owner has taken the right steps to make their location visible.

Beltone's independent clinic owners are hearing care experts first. They spend their days fitting hearing aids and building patient relationships — not monitoring AI search visibility. But earlier this year, many noticed their traffic was down and couldn't explain why.

The answer? AI search had changed how patients find care, and most owners had no visibility into where they stood.

Beltone's Marketing Operations team understood the shift. The challenge was translating it into something specific and actionable — not just for hundreds of owners competing in different local markets, but for the regional marketing managers and field teams who interact with those owners every day.

Beltone's Marketing Operations team saw their 2026 National Meeting, the one time each year the entire network gathers, as the moment to change that.

They built a campaign around a single objective: give every owner a clear picture of where they stood in their local market and a direct path to improving it. They called it "Defend Your Territory."

At the center of the campaign was Yext Scout. When a Scout audit revealed listing gaps or lagging reviews against a local competitor, owners didn't leave with a report and a to-do list. Every service featured at the meeting was purpose-built to close those exact gaps — right there in Orlando.

• Office Admin Portal Data Audits — Experts reviewed each clinic's listing data in real time, identifying and correcting inconsistencies that directly affect AI citations and search rankings. Because a clinic's Office Admin Portal data powers its Beltone.com page, its syndicated listings, and increasingly its AI search citations, closing those gaps directly strengthens the visibility Scout measures.

• Professional headshots and group photos — High-quality, consistent imagery is a measurable signal for Google and AI engines. Owners could capture new practitioner photos and team shots on-site.

• Practitioner welcome videos — Short, professional videos automatically sent to new patients before their first appointment. Google prioritizes rich media, and the videos double as content for Google Business Profiles.

For the first time, a Marketing Operations team member could sit down one-on-one with an owner and show them their own data: how their clinic ranks in organic search, whether AI recommends them or a competitor, and who nearby is generating enough reviews to become a threat. Scout turned an industry-level trend into a personal, local reality. Scout also gave Beltone's regional marketing managers and field teams a new tool to carry into every owner conversation — so the message didn't stop at the meeting.

The campaign generated strong engagement over three days and a pipeline of follow-up work that continued long after the meeting ended:

• 50 Office admin portal and Scout local marketing consultations completed, directly impacting hundreds of locations nationwide. 32 on site, 18 after

• 131 owners and practitioners completed headshots

• 51 recorded a personalized welcome video

Thanks to the momentum from their peers, weeks after the meeting, Marketing Operations was still fielding inbound requests from owners who wanted their own Scout audits. Some of the smaller owners who saw their review gaps during consultations enrolled in Beltone's co-op marketing program on the spot — including owners who, after seeing a side-by-side comparison with local competitors, understood for the first time how far behind they were.

In the two months that followed, compared to the same period the prior year:

• 34% increase in listings updated impacting search visibility at the local level, representing 70,000+ individual updates tied directly to audit activity

• 26.3% increase in profile updates across the network

• 2% increase in Google Win Rate

• 3% increase in overall Visibility Score

• 6% increase in Sentiment Score

• 186% increase in AI Citation Counts

• 7% increase in Listings Visibility Score

The bigger outcome wasn't the conference metrics. It was a change in how Beltone's entire network thinks about visibility — and who's responsible for it.

Beltone now tracks "How did you hear about us?" at the appointment level. Owners are reporting patients who found their clinic through ChatGPT. That real-world signal closes the loop between data quality and booked appointments in a way no abstract message about AI search ever could.

Scout has pulled Beltone's marketing and field teams closer together.

Regional marketing managers have a new tool allowing them to dive deeper into an owner's local search performance and competitive landscape. Marketing Operations has a way to show the value of its co-op program not through testimonials, but through direct side-by-side data. And independent owners — show-me types by nature — are seeing for themselves what's at stake in their own market.

Beltone is now expanding Scout licensing to its Canadian locations, extending the visibility program across the full North American network.

In a search landscape where AI decides who gets recommended, the brands that win won't be the ones that react fastest. They'll be the ones that gave every team the data to stay ahead.