A local care provider contacted me to help them to attract more self-pay clients. The local authority were continuously squeezing down the rates they would pay and the organisation felt that they would not be able to continue to operate without other more profitable income streams.
I started by looking at their organisation including what they do well and less well in terms of service delivery and communications and the revenue and profitability generated from each customer. They had really not done much marketing in the past so I didn’t have anything to review, but had they done so, we would have reviewed what was working and what was not.
I then carried a mystery shopping exercise of their local competitors to see what they were up against. This enabled me to identify my client’s relative strengths and weaknesses and develop a marketing strategy that helped them to identify and shout about their strengths and ensure these were communicated at every stage of a more robust enquiry management process. The information I gathered also enabled them to confidently increase their prices by around £2 per hour. I put together a marketing programme and a draft structure for their website which they were happy to take away and run with.
The client reported back that within a couple of months they had reaped back the costs of the marketing review and were confident that they knew what to do to continue to generate more self-pay business.