Home care marketing
Do you run a domiciliary or live-in care organisation with recognisable strengths and an existing client base? Are you wanting more self-pay clients? If you’re looking for a cost-effective and pragmatic approach from a home care marketing expert then you’re in the right place.
Are you thinking of offering home care in a new geographical area? Is one or more of your local competitors winning business that could be yours? Are you worried about wasting money on marketing that won’t yield the required results? Do you need a marketing plan that attracts staff as well as service users?
A must read BEFORE investing in websites & marketing promotion
I’ve worked with dozens of organisations providing domiciliary care, live-in care and supported living to the elderly and people with a range of social care needs. I help established home care organisations to gain more customers, cut waste from ineffective marketing and embed marketing into the fabric of their organisations. And, in as little as a day I can do this for you too.
I offer strategic marketing consultancy to help grow home care organisations:
- Understand why potential customers aren’t contacting you
- Use your strengths to attract service users & staff
- Get more referrals and become more visible
- Turn more prospects into customers
- Focus your resources on what will have the biggest impact
Having an effective home care marketing plan is vital when each new self-pay customer is likely to be worth thousands of pounds to your organisation over their lifetime and creating a viable home care business involves an ongoing process of recruiting new service users and staff.
I’ve worked with dozens of organisations providing domiciliary care, live-in care and supported living to the elderly and people with a range of social care needs. I help established home care organisations to gain more customers, cut waste from ineffective marketing and embed marketing into the fabric of your organisation. And, in as little as a day I can do this for you too.
CARE HOMES
Visit the care home marketing page
MID-SIZED SOCIAL CARE PROVIDER
Visit the social care marketing page
The importance of marketing your home care business
With an ageing population, the tightening of eligibility criteria for statutory funded home care, and people’s increasing reluctance to go into a care home, the demand for private home care is only going to increase.
At the same time local authority funding is in a desperate state and COVID-19 has had a disproportionate impact on the elderly and vulnerable people who receive home care. Increasing numbers of home care providers realise they can no longer exist purely on local authority contracts. Attracting more self-pay clients is the key to survival for many.
ADASS Budget Survey 2020
Being a good care provider, however, doesn’t mean that you’ll have queues of people knocking at your door. A search of the Care Quality Commission website often results in over 50 home care providers in any given locality. These other care providers are facing similar financial challenges and are likely to be chasing the same clients you are looking to attract.
In order to attract customers (and staff) you need to capture what makes your home care organisation better and different from the others. You’ll want to make sure that people looking for home care come across your organisation wherever they are searching or asking for advice. You also need to ensure that your website (or online presence) encourages people to get in touch and that you are able to convince the people you talk to choose your organisation to provide their care.
Where to start with marketing home care?
When you’re not a marketing expert it can be difficult to work out where to start, particularly when you’re faced with significant time and financial constraints. If you’re looking at outside help there are few home care marketing specialists and those that work in the sector often provide quite a niche service. Whilst people outside of the sector can certainly help you, it’s important to make sure they understand what is essentially quite a complex business, often juggling multiple revenue streams, engaging with multiple audiences and needing to attract an ongoing stream of enquiries from both potential service users and staff.
With the emphasis these days on online marketing many home care providers start by finding someone to create a (new) website for them and then think about driving traffic to the site. Having an online presence is a big part of the answer, however there may be more pressing issues and there are certainly things to think about before you jump in and get a website built. Your website needs to sell your organisation to potential service users, families and staff and in order to do this you first need to work out what your best competitors are doing and define why potential customers should choose your home care organisation over all the others they find.
What does marketing your home care organisation involve?
In its broadest sense, marketing is about how you compare to your local competitors and encourage potential customers to choose you.
It covers what services you offer to whom; how much you charge; articulating why people should choose you; communicating with a range of possible sign posters; being visible (online and offline); consistently communicating key messages; having an online presence that generates enquiries; effectively handling telephone enquiries and face-to-face assessments; and ensuring staff capture and share information that is useful for marketing your organisation.
Working out where the best opportunities lie, means experiencing your home care organisation just as your potential customers do and acknowledging that people will use a variety of criteria to select the best organisation for them.
It’s vital to understand how the sales funnel works
Marketing is not only about promoting your organisation. It’s also about how your website, staff and sign posters turn prospects into enquiries and how you convert those enquiries into customers.
The best way to get a prospective customer to choose you is via a recommendation from a trusted source. For people that are searching blind, they’ll likely come across lots of potential providers, short list them based on the information they see, call a handful and then potentially meet up with a couple.
There is little point spending money promoting your organisation or creating a website before you’ve fixed the holes in the bottom of the sales funnel – how you handle the enquiries you receive and the assessments you carry out.
A must read BEFORE investing in websites & marketing promotion
The importance of having a marketing strategy
Whatever the size of your domiciliary care business you’ll want to follow these steps.
1. Marketing strategy
It’s important first to understand your local market and define what you will offer to whom and at what price.
2. Marketing plan
Next comes the plan outlining how you will do it and measure the results as well as what order things will happen
3. Implementation
This is the doing of the specific tasks and may include changing your pricing, updating your website or testing out new marketing activities.
Starting with a home care markeitng strategy will help you work out whether your quick wins will come from a new marketing channel, changing your pricing, altering your processes or something else?
Whether you are recruiting service users or staff you’ll want to answer the following questions:
- What do your ideal customers (staff) look like and what are their needs, wants and fears?
- Who are the competitors that potential customers (staff) are most likely to find and choose?
- How does your offering compare, and what makes your home care organisation better?
- Are you consistently communicating your key messages online, through your staff, on the phone etc?
- Is your pricing (pay) pitched at the right level? Are you providing the right services (conditions)?
- How much is a new customer (staff member) worth to your organisation? What are you currently spending and how much should you be spending? How are you tracking results?
- Do your best prospective clients find your home care organisation when they search online or seek a recommendation?
- What is stopping more web visitors calling you or more enquirers becoming customers (staff)? How effective are your existing processes, staff and or systems at supporting your marketing efforts?
“It often feels like all we hear about in the media is poor care, but for every bad story there are thousands of people we should be celebrating and empowering to carry on delivering the best care” (Nadra Ahmed, Executive Chairman of the National Care Association, 2019 Newsletter)
Why Straight Up Marketing
I’m Nicki Wakefield and I provide marketing consultancy and create marketing strategies for established home care and other social care providers. Over the past 25 years I’ve helped health and social care providers including home care and live-in care providers to grow their businesses. I’ve worked with the likes of Bupa and Care UK, with stand-alone providers, those with multiple services, franchisees and franchisors, and I’ve helped organisations providing services to older people and those with a learning disability or other social care need.
I’ve carried out mystery shopping on dozens of domiciliary care and live-in care providers and I know what makes customers choose one provider over another. I’ve also headed up the marketing for a recruitment organisation and can help you to think about recruiting staff as well as clients.
I aim to help good quality home care providers so that vulnerable people can receive the quality of care they need and deserve.
My expertise lies in being able to objectively see your organisations as your prospective customers do. My work involves analysing data and processes, identifying and leveraging home care providers’ existing strengths and using these to help them build their business. For that reason I work with established home care providers rather than brand new start-ups.
I understand that marketing is not your area of expertise and that you need cost-effective pragmatic solutions that show immediate results. I’m used to working with extremely tight budgets and my aim is to identify lots of low or zero-cost quick wins. I don’t have a vested interest in selling you any specific type of marketing which means I am able to focus on providing advice that is right for your organisation not mine.
Find out more about my background and areas of expertise
Choosing the right marketing help
If you’re thinking about getting some external help before you dive in and create a (new) website or start spending money on PR or online advertising, ask yourself the following questions:
- Do they understand the intricacies of the home care market?
- Are they able to help with your sales, marketing and wider business strategy?
- Are they purely focused on driving self-pay service users to your website or can they help you think about other audiences, your services and pricing, enquiry management and recruiting staff?
- Have they helped similar organisations to resolve similar issues?
- Are you confident their offering will give you a good return on investment.
- Are they simply trying to hook you in to sell the type of marketing they specialise in, regardless of whether it’s the best place for you to invest your time and money?
Discover more about the consultancy process
Testimonials
See what more of my customers have to say
Case Studies
Marketing strategy – local care provider
I gave this client enough evidence so they could confidently increase prices by £2 per hour plus the tools to generate self-pay business read more
Marketing workshop – health & social care providers
“I found yesterday useful & it was so good to have a presenter who really knew the sector & understood the problems we are all facing.” read more
Get in touch
Whilst it would be ideal to spend a few days creating a comprehensive marketing strategy, one day of consultancy is often enough to identify the barriers to winning customers, work out how much you should be spending to acquire a new customer, come up with a list of quick wins and help you prioritise where you will focus your marketing efforts over the longer term.
If you are an established home care business with an existing customer base and some recognisable strengths do get in touch to discuss how I can help.
Talk through your current issues and how I might be able to help
Find out more about my background & areas of expertise
Discover more about the
consultancy process