Care home marketing

Are you looking to fill empty care and nursing home beds, increase your prices or offer a new service? If your care home marketing needs reviewing and you’re looking for a cost-effective and pragmatic approach from a care home marketing expert then you’re in the right place.

Are you concerned that your care home is invisible or worried about competition from a new local home? Would you like to understand how prospective customers perceive your care or nursing home so you can turn more enquiries into residents? Would you like to make more of the interactions you currently have with healthcare providers and tap into the contacts in your local community?

A must read BEFORE investing in websites or marketing promotion

I offer strategic marketing consultancy to help fill your residential & nursing home beds:

Understand why potential customers are choosing other care homes and different types of care
Recognise and leverage your strengths
Increase visibility – online and offline
Turn more prospects into customers
Turn staff & sign posters into sales people
Track what is working and focus your resources

A care home marketing strategy should always be the first step to filling your empty care home beds. Using my 25 years of strategic sales and market experience in health, social care and multi-site service businesses I help care homes to see themselves objectively so they can gain more customers, cut waste from ineffective marketing and improve effectiveness by integrating marketing into day-to-day operational activities.

With every empty bed costing you tens of thousands of pounds a year you know you need to do something, but marketing is probably not your area of expertise. So where should you focus your marketing efforts?

Have you been able to step back and look at your home as your potential customers do? And do you know the specific reasons your care or nursing home is struggling? Is it clear why other local care homes are more successful than yours? And can you see how your promotion, website, enquiry management, internal communications and operational processes help and hinder your ability to win business?

MID-SIZED SOCIAL CARE PROVIDERS
Visit the social care marketing page

Social care marketing

HOME CARE PROVIDERS
Visit the home care marketing page.

Home care marketing

Why having an effective marketing strategy is so important right now

More and more care homes are realising that they need to increase their proportion of self-pay clients in order to survive. The good news is that there are people able and prepared to pay for good care, but these are the exact same people that other care homes in your local vicinity are also targeting.

About a quarter of care homes had more than 75% of their residents funded by the local authority and these are the ones most at risk of going out of business.

(CQC State of Care, March 2020)

Unfortunately, the pressures of reduced margins and the knock-on impacts of COVID-19 have increased the stakes. The care homes that fare best may be those with a better understanding of marketing rather than those necessarily providing the best care.

A must read BEFORE investing in websites & marketing promotion

Where to start with marketing your care home?

It can be nerve racking when you need to invest in an area you know little about, particularly when there are so many pressures on your time and budget.

An online search for care home marketing brings up long lists of things you could do and a host of people talking about different solutions, some of which are pretty niche. When marketing isn’t your area of expertise, it could be helpful to get some objective advice tailored specifically to your care home up against your unique competitors. Why would you pick from a list of 100 things you “could do” when you could identify the quick wins that will have the biggest immediate impact?

Often care homes assume that they need to start with a (new) website to attract potential self-pay customers and then they simply need to drive traffic to the site. Having a good online presence is part of the answer, but there may be more pressing issues and there are certainly lots of questions that need answering before you start building your site or spending money on online advertising.

What does care home marketing involve?

Marketing in its widest sense means looking at how you compare to the best and most visible care homes and how you can convince more potential residents and their loved ones to choose your home.

Identifying the best things to do requires seeing your home from many different angles exactly as your potential customers do and recognising that in reality yours is just one of many care homes they could choose. This becomes more complex when you offer a range of services, cater to different service users, have several revenue streams and need to engage with multiple audiences.

The importance of understanding the sales funnel

Getting a new care home resident involves lots of stages. If it’s not a dire emergency, the family member leading the search may come across dozens of care homes and receive a personal recommendation from a trusted source. They will probably research several online, call a handful and visit two or three.

If you think of marketing purely in terms of promotional activities you could easily end up spending loads of shouting about your organisation and driving people to your website. However, if your staff are effectively selling your home, your website says the things that encourage people to call, enquiries are answered and handled effectively and visits are converted into residents you’ll have wasted your money.

Before you spend money increasing your visibility it is vital to understand how your processes impact on the customer experience and to fix the leaks at the bottom of the funnel first.

It takes, on average, 25 touches to convert senior living customers. Throughout their research, family members will engage with senior living facilities through numerous touchpoints and channels.

Dialtech Senior Living Marketing

The questions your marketing strategy should answer

To help you work out what you are going to do, it’s always best to start with strategy. Your care home marketing strategy should answer questions like:

Who are your ideal customers, what specific needs do they have and what are they looking for?
How does your care home compare to your best and most visible local homes? What are your key selling points? Are you consistently communicating these?
What services could you be providing and at what price?
How much should you be spending to acquire a customer? And how will you track return on investment?
How well are you reaching your ideal customers when they are searching online or talk to potential sign posters?
How does marketing interact with finance, recruitment, and your systems, processes and culture?
How do your current activities and website help and hinder your ability to generate and convert prospects into customers?
And are the quick wins likely to come from online marketing, increasing your pricing, engaging with people outside of your organisation or something else?

Choosing the right sales and marketing help for your care home

If you’re just starting out on your marketing journey, before you dive in and book someone to create a new website, go down the PR route or set up a pay-per-click Google advertising campaign consider the following questions:

Are you sure this is the very best place to spend your time and money right now?
Will they help you to see your organisation from your potential customers’ perspective?
Do they have the breadth of expertise to help develop a holistic sales and marketing strategy that covers online marketing, traditional marketing and integration into existing operations?
Have they helped similar organisations to resolve similar issues?
Will they help you think about all your audiences, services, pricing and revenue streams?
Are they trying to hook you in so that they can sell you the “type of marketing” that they specialise in, regardless of whether it’s right for your home.

A must read BEFORE investing in websites & marketing promotion

Why Straight Up Marketing

I’m Nicki Wakefield and I provide marketing consultancy and create marketing strategies for care homes and other care providers. I have over 25 years marketing experience working with health and social care providers and multi-site service organisations. I worked for Bupa for several years, led a project at Care UK to centralise their enquiry management and have worked with many medium sized care home groups and individual care homes.

I know what families and residents are looking for and what turns them off, and I want to help good care homes so that more people experience the type of care they need and deserve. With no vested interest in selling you any particular marketing solution I’m only interested in helping you to fill your care home as cost-effectively as possible so that you can focus your time and budget on providing great care.

Find out more about my background and areas of expertise

About Nicki

Consultancy

Book me for a day of consultancy or a bit longer to create a marketing strategy and plan and I will help you to understand how would-be residents and families see your home and your direct competitors. I’ll help you to clarify WHAT to do and WHERE best to invest your limited time and money. I’ll identify some low or zero cost quick wins as well as longer-term opportunities for you to pursue.

I’d love to come and visit you at your care home and talk through the quick wins and longer term actions that will give you the success you’re looking for.

Discover more about the consultancy process

Consultancy

Testimonials

I commissioned Nicki to carry out a marketing review of the care home to help us to get more self-pay clients. After the first day spent with Nicki I was able to make changes to our services, enquiry management process and pricing which would all have a positive impact on our bottom line. Nicki then...

Nursing Home Manager (Older people)

Nicki recommended an overall approach which is flexible enough to work for the different parts of our organisation. She also provided a number of useful tips on how we manage our brand and the balance between national and local marketing. Nicki helped us look at how we can fill beds in our residenti...

Stephen Lenton, HR Director Heritage Care, now part of Ambient (Older people, mental health, learning disabilities)

“Nicki helped us to develop our first marketing strategy and to recruit two new roles. Following an in-depth analysis of our organisation she pulled together a cohesive strategy that both the senior management team and board were very pleased with. I was impressed with Nicki’s knowledge of our s...

Steven Rose, Chief Executive Choice Support (Learning disabilities, mental health)

“When we needed to handle enquiries direct from the public for the first time we brought in Nicki to help us manage the customer experience. Nicki helped us to split the project into manageable chunks looking at where we direct our calls and emails; what data we need to capture in our CRM syst...

Jeff Palmer, Director of Business Development Dimensions