Which methods do home care agencies find successful?
As a home care agency, you need good marketing like a man in a desert needs water. But are you running up against a brick wall in your efforts?
You might think, this or that method doesn’t seem to work, Many agencies are frustrated. This is not an exact science, they find out.
But your methods might be faulty or insufficient. And there are drawbacks to each method.
In any case, it’s good to know of the best online and offline marketing methods used by home care agencies. We have come up with five top marketing methods for home care agencies, based on our own interviews with agencies, as well as on research by industry leaders in the area of home care and home health care marketing.
1. Client cultivation
Your current clients and their families are your best marketers. Although your clients eventually pass on, you need to keep in touch with them now, get their feedback, and show them you care.
Nearly all business owners know that it takes five times or more effort and dollars to get a new client than to keep an existing one. Know what is on their mind with email surveys, postcard or letter engagement, or occasional phone calls. They might want to change their current service, or increase it. Or it might be time to go from four hours of care service to 24-hour care.
One way to do that is to keep them educated. Forbes magazine says,
Today’s customer wants to be educated, and thanks to the internet and social media, information is only a click away.
Read our article on Home Care Pulse’s two best referral sources.
2. Networking / sales
This is hitting the pavement. Attending networking events, trade shows, planning business events, and driving to homes to follow up on individual leads.
One home care agency owner we know set up his own networking business group similar to BNI, or many of the chapter-based organizations. He avoided the large membership fees because 90+% of their work is done by the members anyway, not the corporate headquarters. His group consists of real estate agents and other local professionals who get to know each other and make referrals among members.
When you go to a meeting, you must know how to work the room, make contacts, and build trust with other members. We have seen some such participants who are wallflowers, and they don’t get leads that way.
3. SEO (Search engine optimization)
Not everyone has friends who can recommend a good home care agency. A Google search is one of the most common ways people find home care agencies, and compare them one to another. Thus, your website must look attractive, be readable on mobile devices, and must highlight your unique selling proposition.
If you want to rank on the first page, you have to fight for one of the first three positions. You’re talking SEO. There are two basic sources of good SEO: inbound links, and quality content. Since getting inbound links is a whole science to itself, many home care agency owners turn to doing their own SEO. This is done by regularly producing articles based on keywords (which are usually phrases) that people use to find home care services. Writing an article once a week is the minimum.
SEO is an ongoing activity, with the practitioner proving to the search engines that they are a reliable source of helpful information for one’s location. Small agencies will have a difficult time competing against the large national chains, however, since the corporations can do it for all of their franchises with one website. Read our review of one home care agency’s website in regard to SEO.
Paid SEO services can be found for $500 per month or more. One that we know of charges $1,500 per month. If you want to rank high, it pays for itself.
4. Paid ads and PR
Facebook, Google and other social media ads can bring in leads, but you must cultivate them to make them into paying clients. Google leads are better, since people are in a searching mode; they are further into the sales cycle. But they cost a lot. Facebook, Instagram and other social media ads cost less. But Facebook is used by people enjoying themselves, not looking. Since the advertising is passive, you must work harder to cultivate them into clients.
Either type of ad is most successful when you are retargeting, also called remarketing. This is when an ad follows you around the internet when you have visited a website. Some ad experts say that retargeting is a must for a successful marketing funnel. The drawback is that you typically need, as with Facebook, fifty page visits per week for the retargeting to activate. Thus you might be looking at $300 to $1,000 per month in ad spend alone for this.
Public relations can be very effective, although it is hard to measure. Although the big-city newspapers are in decline, people still read the local papers. TV and radio is another possibility. You must have a news sense, and that means possessing the mind of a reporter. Find some aspect of your home care company that addresses a current trend in the field. Anything new or unusual. The local angle to a national news item. One definition of news is anything that makes you say “wow.”
5. Social media
Social media is perhaps the big stickler here. Everyone says it’s effective, although few can make it really work well. We are talking mainly of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. For social media to be effective, you must be constantly putting out posts, memes, infographics, pictures and so on. You can schedule them with softwares such as Hootsuite or eClincher. (See the top ten social media management softwares.)
One important fact here is that you should have someone on staff monitor your Facebook page at least several times a day. This is so you can respond to questions and thank those who comment. You want to get that coveted message, “This business typically replies within an hour.”
You need some kind of offer, survey or freebie to get your Facebook fans to increase their interest and involvement with you. This can be a newsletter, whitepaper, or even a print-on-demand book.
In all, the marketing methods should be used properly. And you have to make enough of an investment to see results. It’s better to get good at two or three than to try all five with a shallow attempt.
Why go through a learning curve of finding out which method is best for you? Hire us as experts and save time and money. Let us explain to you how a home care marketing program might work for you. There’s no obligation to begin a program with Savvy Senior Marketing. Call us at the number at the top of this page, or contact us by email.
