how to get more reviews

Consumers get blitzed with ads and promotions every day. With so many companies promoting themselves heavily, it makes it hard for customers to know which ones they can trust. Until they have an experience with your home care agency, consumers are likely to put more faith and trust in people that can provide a first-hand testimonial than to trust the claims in your ads.

Where do they find personal testimonials? The simple answer is in your reviews. The challenge for your home care agency is how to get more reviews to prove that the claims in your ads are trustworthy.

Just how important are home health care reviews for your agency? A BrightLocal study shows that 83% of consumers read reviews for local businesses. Also, the number of people that always read reviews has been increasing.  

A proactive approach for boosting online reviews is effective in getting you a host of great reviews that will lead customers right to your door. Here’s what you can do in your efforts toward how to get online reviews.

Get Set Up on the Right Platforms

The BrightLocal study shows that a third of consumers are searching for local businesses online every day. Consider this—they’re not just doing one Google search. They’re pulling up multiple platforms to perform due diligence in finding the best home care agency they can find. That means they’ll only view senior home care reviews about your agency if you’re visible on all the platforms they visit.

If you haven’t already done so, set up business pages or accounts on these platforms:

·   Facebook

·   Yelp

·   Google My Business

·   LinkedIn

As prospects are doing their research to find a quality home care agency, they’re bound to encounter a few home care lead generation platforms. These platforms give you online space with great visibility where you can highlight your senior caregiving services and give customers a chance to check out your star-ratings and reviews. Complete listings and honest reviews will improve SEO and boost your ranking in the search engines.

As a tip, avoid using stock photos. Many consumers easily detect listings that are disingenuous, and you’ll lose points for the lack of transparency.

In your quest for how to get more online reviews for your business, add listings for your home care agency to these sites:

Make sure your listings are concise and complete and monitor them to ensure they’re always up to date.

Your Caregivers Look at Reviews Too

In your efforts to promote your home care agency brand, be aware that caregivers are also checking out your reviews. Reputation goes a long way when caregivers are looking for a job. Honest testimonials reveal a lot about your agency’s culture and mission. Caregivers will be looking for reviews that indicate whether they’re a good fit as your employee.

These are some of the sites where jobseekers will be looking for caregiver reviews:

·   myCNAjobs.com

·   Indeed.com

·   Glassdoor.com

How to Request Customer Reviews for Your Senior Care Business

When customers are happy with your home care agency services, they’re happy to give you a positive review. Often, it happens organically, and it’s great when it does. However, you don’t have to sit back and hope it happens on its own.

When you ask your clients to provide a review at just the right time, they’ll do it with pleasure. It creates a win for you and your future clients. The key to how to get positive reviews is to ask for them consistently.

Who do you ask to write reviews and when do you ask them? Ask happy clients that express gratitude for how they benefitted from your services.

The following steps are your guide on how to get reviews for your business:

1. Build workflows around asking for reviews. Train your staff to ask for reviews when making follow-up calls. Emphasize that honest reviews are the best thank you they can give you.

2. Take advantage of automation. Send out polite reminders at regular intervals asking for reviews using emails, texts, or other communications.

3. Link your requests to review sites. Make it easy for them to leave a review on Facebook, Google My Business, and other sites. As a word of caution, Yelp penalizes businesses that actively seek reviews. The workaround is to add a “Find us on Yelp” icon in a visible place where clients can’t miss it.

4. Ask customers if their experience with your agency is positive or negative. If their response is positive, it’s an opportune time to ask them for a review. If it’s not, it gives you an opportunity to make amends and take action to discourage a negative review.

5. Thank customers for their reviews with a prompt response. Whether reviews are positive or negative, be sure to thank them for taking the time to post a comment. Reply to negative reviewers with contact information on how they can properly address their complaint. Such a response tells visitors that you’re willing to address concerns in a timely manner and that you don’t skirt around problems. An occasional negative review can turn into a positive impression when you’re willing to address issues responsibly.

During their search for a quality home care agency, customers are looking for agencies that are ethical and reflect a sense of integrity. It’s not ethical to offer customers incentives in exchange for reviews.

Avoid any strategies for getting reviews that wreak of blinking lights annoying pop-ups. The right approach to getting positive reviews is to encourage your clients to give you feedback and gently guide them toward the best places to post reviews.

Ultimately, your end goal along the journey for how to get positive reviews for your home care agency is to ensure that the online presence for your brand is one that reflects the qualities that customers are looking for in caregiver services—honesty, quality, integrity, and professionalism. Lots of positive reviews encourage readers to choose your agency over another.

As for negative reviewers, they generally describe a particular incident. As long as you respond promptly, commit to righting any wrongs, and you handle concerns professionally, it still leaves a positive imprint on your services.

Overall, customer feedback gives you the insights to help you develop a culture that centers around what it means to provide quality senior care services.Are you still feeling overwhelmed by the day-to-day challenges of running a home care agency? When there’s no time or energy left at the end of the day, call on SeniorCareClicks to help you get the support you need with online marketing. You’ll be able to deliver even better care to your clients and have more time to grow your business when you leave the task of getting great reviews to a professional marketer.

content marketing

With the level of competition increasing in the senior care industry, a high ranking on search engines is a necessity for every home care agency. When you have the right strategy for content marketing, you’ll rank high on internet searches and that means you’ll get more customers and be able to recruit quality caregivers.

When you hear the term content marketing, it seems like it should be pretty self-explanatory. The term content marketing is composed of two simple words in the English language, but digital marketers know that there’s a whole lot behind them. Content marketing is a very important term in marketing for the senior care industry, and it covers a wide variety of marketing activities.

SeniorCareClicks is an expert in content creation services and content automation for home care and senior care agencies. If creating engaging content on a regular basis is more than you can do on your own and still run your business successfully, SeniorCareClicks can get the job done with pricing that meets your advertising budget.

How to Define Content Marketing?

What exactly is content marketing? When you think of the word content, you probably think of written text. That’s correct, and it encompasses much more as well. In its entirety, content marketing is actually an online marketing strategy where you can create and distribute text, images, and videos that are relevant to your business to attract a target audience. 

The goal of content marketing is to drive qualified leads to your website and convert them into customers. The challenge of content marketing is to create content that people are actively looking for and that they’re so enticed by it, they just can’t wait to learn more about it.

Content is a main component of the many factors that Google considers as part of its search algorithms. In your quest to get Google to boost your ranking, you have many choices to make as to the type of content you use to get the best results. It all starts with the right content creation strategy.

Keep these three things in mind to get you on the right track:

1. Defining your target audience segments

2. Establishing relevant content themes

3. Developing a successful SEO content marketing plan

A content creation process that puts these three factors first tells future customers and their families about your mission and your commitment to serving them. With that in mind, let’s look at how to make content marketing work to your advantage.

Define Your Target Audience

Before writers pen the first word, they’re already thinking about their audience. Some things that should excite you about branded content marketing for the home care industry is that there’s no shortage of people looking for home care services, and there’s a limitless variety of senior care topics to write about.

If that’s not enough on its own, between your website, blog, and social media platforms, you have multiple opportunities to implement your content distribution strategy.

Hopefully, you have a general idea of your target audience. To get the best results, you need to segment your general audience into specific buyer personas. The way to do that is to write descriptions for specific customers.

For example:

·   A couple in their late 50s looking for home care for their elderly parents

·   A senior individual seeking care for themselves

·   A certified caregiver that’s just completed training

·   A caregiver with years of experience in the senior care industry

When you know exactly who you’re writing to, it’s easier to gear your content to their needs.

Define Your Main Content Themes

As a home care agency professional, you have a pretty good idea about what your customers know about home care services and what you’d like them to know.

It’s worthwhile to spend some time brainstorming ideas for the most important topics for content in the senior care industry. In the field of digital marketing for senior care, you have 3 basic target audiences:

  1. Recent retirees
  2. Personal caregivers
  3. Professional caregivers looking for a job

Put yourself in the shoes of one of these 3 categories of audiences, and consider the types of blog posts that you might be interested in and plug them into your content marketing strategy.

Some of the best content marketing strategies start with basic content information like:

·   What you need to know as you near retirement

·   What to expect for senior living

·   Is it time to consider assisted living?

·   What to expect from memory care

·   How rehabilitation care can get you on the path to recovery

·   Content announcing local events

·   Maintaining an active, healthy lifestyle for seniors

Articles on Alzheimer’s disease, respite care, living as a retiree, and companionship are good ways to attract the attention of recent retirees and personal caregivers. If one of your goals is recruiting professional caregivers, you might post blogs about how to get various certifications or heartwarming stories about caregiving.

Develop lists of topics for each of your target audience segments including seniors, their loved ones, and caregivers. Next develop a range of titles for specific blog articles, social media posts, infographics, and other marketing strategies.

Keep adding to your list of ideas whenever a topic comes to mind.

What Are Some Examples of Content Marketing?

If you pay attention, you’ll find plenty of content marketing examples all over the internet. While there are numerous types of content marketing strategies to choose from, we’ll focus on the most common types of content marketing for now:

  • Landing Pages
  • Blog
  • Facebook
  • Infographics
  • Videos
  • Podcasts
  • Reviews
  • Case Studies
  • FAQs
  • eBooks
  • Press Releases

Landing Pages Are a Key Senior Living Marketing Strategy

A landing page is also called by a few other names like these: 

  • Lead capture page
  • Static page
  • Destination page
  • Single property page 

No matter what you call it, a landing page is a web page that site visitors land on when they click on an SEO term, online ad, or marketing promotion. You can put almost any type of content on your landing pages including blog articles about the services you provide, informative videos, or other content about the quality of your services.

Content is important, because if people like what they read and see, they’re likely to continue browsing your site, and they’ll eventually convert.

Adding a Senior Care Blog to Your Content Creation Strategy

While your target audiences will certainly benefit from informative content on the topics they’re interested in, your home care agency also gets the benefit of increased traffic via organic search, social media, referral links, and email.

People like to read blogs and when you can grab their attention with interesting, educational content about senior care, you’ll develop brand loyalty among your current clients. As an added value, blogs lead to a higher search engine ranking which will also draw people to your home care agency that have yet to discover the compassionate services you provide.

Just as in real estate, location matters is of great significance to search engines. When you focus on local SEO within your content creation strategy for your senior care blog, Google gives you an even greater boost in the rankings.

People within your community have lots of questions about how your agency might deliver care for them or their loved ones. Blogs that answers their questions about the value you provide in your local community have great value.

Here’s what they want to know:

·   How to talk with a senior about home care services

·   Home care services that are available in your community

·   The right time to transition to senior living

·   What to expect for socialization in an assisted living community

By publishing content that’s stimulating and engaging, you’re demonstrating that you’re truly an expert in senior care at the local level.

Your expertise within the industry has given you a wealth of wisdom about the worries that your customers have as they transition to senior home care services. Use this knowledge to your advantage as you develop content that your blog and website visitors can’t get enough of.

The Best Content Marketing Strategy Incorporates Facebook

Regardless of which target segment you’re developing content for, you have to recognize that they’re all on social media. Facebook is one of the most popular social media sites on the web. Seniors, family members of seniors, and caregivers are all on Facebook every day.

It’s essential to set up a business Facebook page for your home care agency and start posting on it on a regular basis. When you share your blog and website content on your social media sites, it does double duty for you. Be creative with your content creation process. Use it in various forms to add short or long content to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Take it a step further by adding icons for your social media platforms on every site. One of the greatest things about sharing your social media content is that the platforms are designed in ways that make liking, following, and sharing content as easy as one click. Beyond that, your followers also have an opportunity to give you rave reviews on social media sites, just like Yelp and Google.

In short, be active and engaging on social media.

Infographics Say a Lot in a Small Space

If you’ve ever visited a website and read a colorful vertical graph splashed with statistics, graphs, and charts, the graphic is actually called an infographic. Infographics make good content or websites because they provide factual information in an engaging way. 

It takes a bit more effort and creativity to design an infographic than a standard ad. You’ll need to do a bit of research to get accurate statistics to display. You’ll also have to include short bits of content and a bit of expertise on how to use color and design to attract your target audience. You may find that it’s more cost-effective and profitable to enlist the help of content marketing services to create informative and engaging infographics. 

One of the great things about infographics is their versatility. In addition to using them to enhance your website, infographics make engaging ads for Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Another thing to consider is that infographics lead to organic backlinking and that will strengthen your SEO strategy and establish your agency as a leading authority in senior care services.

Videos Provide a Powerful Way to Demonstrate Compassion in Home Care

While you can’t deny the importance of creating engaging content, seeing is believing. Caregiving is a personal issue. Often, the way to attract customers in senior home care is by invoking their emotions. Videos are an important part of content creation strategies because they help to make a warm connection between you and your customers.

Hubspot offers up the following statistics to demonstrate the power of using videos in content marketing.

·   6 of 10 people prefer short videos over television ads

·   55% of people view online videos every day

·   YouTube is second only to Google

·   75% of all videos are viewed on mobile devices

·   92% of video watchers on mobile will share them with others

Compelling, isn’t it?

Besides being hugely popular, videos are a versatile form of content marketing. Consider the following ways to showcase the quality of senior living that your home care agency offers:

·   Video blogs

·   Ads

·   Customer testimonials

·   Interviews

·   Live videos of holidays and special events

·   Presentations of your services

·   Special programs

·   Socialization and daily life

·   Compassionate caregiving

Keep your videos updated so visitors know that your content is current. Target the questions that are keeping your prospective customers up at night and utilize them to assuage their fears. Short videos allow prospects to get an inside view of your home care agency. By giving them a realistic vision of the services you provide, you’re helping them envision themselves or someone they love under your compassionate care.

Podcasts Are an Innovative Content Marketing Strategy

If you’re not familiar with podcasts, they’re a huge collection of audio recordings you can download and listen to whenever you want. A podcast consists of a digital audio file that you can download to any electronic device. You can set up  podcasts so that subscribers receive them in their inbox automatically. Podcasts provide a convenient source of content because people can listen to them while they’re working,  commuting, or doing chores around the house. Podcasts provide an innovative way to put content in front of your target audience.

Showcase Star Reviews on Your Website

You’ve worked hard to earn your reputation as a quality home care provider. Why not share proof of genuine star reviews on your website? Star reviews send the message to prospective customers and their families that you’ve proven your worth in the home care industry. That’s the beginning of building a trusting relationship.

Genuine reviews from current and former clients and their families speak volumes. Real testimonials give your home care agency credibility. They extend reassurance to new customers that they can expect the highest quality of care. Highlight reviews on a separate page dedicated to testimonials or sprinkle them throughout your site. Either way, they make a grand impression.

Content Creation: Documenting Your Customers’ Journey

Stories are convincing. Anytime people are dealing with some kind of transition, it’s a little scary. Elderly people are already feeling vulnerable. Something you can do to ease their path is to help them understand what their journey will look like as they transition to home care services.

The stories of your current residents, for those who are willing to share it, along with anonymous case studies show your prospects what they can expect moving forward. Storytelling offers a way to ease their anxiety and envision themselves as happier when they get the right care for their circumstances.

Dedicate a Website Page to FAQs

Before a prospect picks up the phone to ask you questions, they’re usually doing as much research as they possibly can online. A popular page for website visitors is the FAQ page. Your prospects have lots of questions and an FAQ page gives them the answers to the most commonly asked questions. A question and answer format works nicely here.

eBooks: A Content Marketing Strategy that Inspires Credibility

The internet has made it easy and affordable for almost anyone to self-publish an eBook. EBooks give you an additional content marketing strategy to inform your target audience. There’s an even greater benefit of publishing eBooks. As an author of an eBook, your agency can list itself as a credible author that has knowledge and expertise in the field of senior care services.

Using Press Releases as a Content Marketing Strategy

If you have some breaking news to announce, a press release is a great way to engage your target audience. Whenever you’re offering a new service or bringing someone new on staff, you’ll want to shout the news out loud. A press release gives you an opportunity to do just that. In fact, press releases have proven to be highly effective for attracting audiences when you use them strategically. 

A press release offers a strategic way to attract readers that may be interested and a new offering from your agency and help you build a list of high-quality leads.

In summary, the best content marketing strategies require a thoughtful approach to be successful. Your content creation strategy should include a combination of blogs, social media, and videos to hit all communication channels in the most engaging way.

There is no question that these content marketing strategies require an investment of your time and other resources. The best news is that you don’t have to do it alone. Why not leave your digital marketing needs to SeniorCareClicks, an expert digital marketing for senior care services? Contact SeniorCareClicks today to help you set up and implement a comprehensive digital marketing strategy for your senior care agency, and let you get back to the business of providing senior care services today.

Call us now at (954) 401-9058 or contact us today to learn more.

Get Home Health Care Referrals

Referrals offer a great avenue for how to get clients for home health care. A proactive approach to home health care referrals will provide your home care agency with a stream of referrals that keeps on flowing. Referrals can come from many places like the these:

·   Past clients

·   Current clients

·   Government funders

·   Community partners

Networking and relationship building are productive ways to get referrals to keep your home care agency growing. Requests for proposals will help you acquire more referrals from the government. Your good name and reputation are key ingredients to getting referrals from current clients. Home health marketing strategies will take all these referral efforts to the next level.

How to Be Viewed as a Quality Elder Care Referral Agency

As a home care agency, you work hard to earn your reputation as a quality in-home caregiving service. While many people are able to pay for their services privately, many others rely on a separate funding source to pay for their care. Third-party payors often require high standards in caregiving before they’ll agree to a contract.

One way to add to your credibility as a quality home care agency is to use your digital marketing strategy to showcase the quality of your services. Your web pages and blog serve as good resources for educating funders and others about your certifications and other quality assurance documentation.

Home Health Care Referrals Stem from Client Satisfaction

Good or bad, it’s always helpful to get feedback. Third-party payors listen to the feedback from their clients because they’re looking for assurance that their money was well-spent. Good feedback encourages them to keep sending clients your way, while negative comments will have them second-guessing whether referrals should go to you or someone else.  

To keep those referrals coming in, take stock of the types of issues home care clients complain about:

·   Caregivers are late.

·   Caregivers don’t show up.

·   The agency didn’t provide a substitute when needed.

·   Poor fit between caregiver and client.

Online surveys are a great way to gather feedback about your services. When it’s good, you can use it to share statistics that prove client satisfaction and bill yourself as a leading elder care referral agency.

Use Feedback to Improve Service and Ensure Client Satisfaction

Do you really know how your clients feel about your home care agency? You can’t know for sure unless you ask them.

It’s easy to believe that everything is fine when you don’t get wind of problems or complaints. The reality is that people have their own reasons for not bringing up issues that annoy or frustrate them. Unfortunately, that leaves you in the dark, and it can prevent you from getting valuable referrals. Feedback will keep you on your toes and ensure that the quality of your services is good and that will set you up to be a valued senior referral agency.

Happy Clients Lead to Home Health Care Referrals

In your years of home care service, you’ve surely had some memorable clients that raved about the quality of your services. These are the types of people that are happy to tell others about the great experience they’ve had with your agency—if they only knew who to tell. They also probably don’t know the value that a strong testimony could bring to your home care agency in the way of referrals. 

When you reach out to these special clients, their testimonies can become an important part of home care marketing strategies for building your business through referrals.

Caregiver Retention Is Essential for In-Home Care for the Elderly Referrals

Part of your home care agency’s reputation depends on employing your caregivers for long periods of time. Staffing is a big problem for many home care agencies. When prospects or funders see that many of your caregivers have worked with your agency for many years, it tells them that you value an environment where caregivers are as happy as your clients. Caregiver retention is an indicator that clients trust your agency and that gives you high marks for quality of care. High marks will net you lots of quality home health care referrals.

Keep Making Strides of Improvement as a Senior Care Referral Agency

Try as you may, things don’t always go as you anticipate. Due to the personal nature of home care, the environment can be highly unpredictable. Clients and payors alike understand that things can happen that are out of your control. While they don’t expect perfection, it’s reasonable for them to expect you to continue making improvements in the quality of care.

When the quality of care comes into question, documenting your workflows is a good way to demonstrate how things should flow under normal circumstances in home care for the elderly. For example, it’s reasonable to predict the length of appointments based on the history of clients with certain conditions.

Being able to demonstrate caregiver efficiency is a data-driven way of how to market your home care business.

Send Out Cards for Referrals Requests

After your clients have received services is an opportune time to ask referrals. If clients were satisfied with your services, they’ll be happy to tell others. An effective strategy that some home agencies like to use is to send out a referral card every few months offering a discount on services for former clients that refer a friend.

Seek Out Referral Resources Within Your Community

Your home care agency is a vital part of your community. Other businesses often get requests for recommendations for home care services. By networking with them, you will get the benefit of a stream of referrals.

Here’s a list of some organizations that refer individuals for home care:

·   Physicians

·   Churches

·   Senior centers

·   Food pantries

·   Community centers

Social Media Is an Effective Online Marketing Tool

Seniors and their family members are active on social media sites. Posting on your sites is free, and you have the option of buying paid ads as well. Interesting posts grab attention and people that like or follow your posts often share them with others. Social media posts are an effective way to build your brand.

Relationships Drive Strategies for Increasing Referrals

It’s not that difficult to form a plan for how to get clients for home health care when you give it the time that it demands. Referrals can be your lifeline, especially when times are slow. New clients trust your referral sources and that forms the beginning of a trusting relationship with your home care agency.

The main goal of your agency is to provide excellent care and provide a good home health care environment for your caregivers, as well as your clients.

Quality home care leads to client satisfaction, and that leads to an increase in referrals. When you combine your referral sources with a strong digital marketing plan, you have a winning combination.

A professional digital marketer has the knowledge and expertise to elevate your home care agency’s brand and increase referrals.

Call SeniorCareClicks to learn more at (954) 401-9058 or contact us today!

Home Care Marketing Plan

The right home health marketing strategies give you a win-win advantage. Why? Because you get the best of both worlds where you can attract lots of new customers and the most highly-qualified caregivers to care for them.

The good news is that even if you’re not a creative person, it’s easy to get creative with digital marketing when you integrate multiple channels into your marketing strategy.

If you consider the news from AARP that 87% of people over the age of 65 want to age in place in the home they love, and you consider that 73 million baby boomers fit into this category, it’s clear to see what a booming industry home health care is.

Getting creative with home care online marketing is the key to establishing your reputation as a top home care agency in the industry. The climate is ripe for you to attract new clients, hire quality caregivers, and increase your bottom line.

Home Care Advertising: A Current Window of Opportunity  

The U.S. Census Bureau refers to the current climate as the “gray tsunami”. That’s a creative and accurate description to describe the recent changes in the U.S. population.

Here are some facts that support the storm:

·   As of 2009, about 12 million people were receiving care from over 33,000 home care providers.

·   The 2000 Home and Hospice Care Survey showed that 69% of people receiving home care services were over age 65.

·   Baby boomers are reaching the age of 65 at a rate of 10,000 per day.

On a related note, the majority of those baby boomers use the internet at least weekly and they’re reading online reviews before making choices about products and services. About 90% of internet searchers rely on online reviews to form an opinion about a company’s reputation.

The demand for home care services has never been greater and that means that home care marketing will set you on course to strike while the market is hot.

Build the Foundation of Your Home Care Marketing Plan

Just as you have goals for growing your business, you also need to establish goals for home care digital marketing. Your business goals should dovetail with your home care marketing goals.

Social media platforms are bursting with activity. Your competitors are using them to grow their businesses and find the best local talent in caregivers. If you’re not doing the same, you’re missing a huge opportunity.

Another major part of successful home health marketing strategies is defining your target audience. In home care marketing, you generally have three target audiences:

1. Seniors

2. Adult children of seniors

3. Caregivers

A few home care marketing ideas will help you take that foundation and start building on it.

Adapt Your Home Care Marketing Plan to Industry Trends

Two things are causing great evolution in the field of home healthcare:

1. Advancements in health care

2. Advancements in technology

The really great thing for home care agencies is that these two developments work very nicely together. Tweeting and commenting online helps to develop an “online buzz” about the value your agency provides. Even the president of the United States pumps out tweets on a regular basis.

Your Mission Defines Your Unique Selling Point (USP)

Home health care is a niche area of the greater health care industry. As a home care agency, you have a very specific audience. That’s a feather in your cap when it comes to home care advertising because when you use the right marketing strategies, you can tailor your marketing messages to attract the right audiences.

Be clear on the issues that separate you from your competition. If that seems challenging, look to your mission to guide your path.

Your Agency as an Industry Leader: Home Care Marketing Ideas that Work

Chances are that you’re using technology in several different ways in your daily operations. Your home care marketing plan offers a convenient way to describe how technology makes it more efficient for you to deliver home care services.  

Blog about how you use software solutions to book appointments, track caregiver time, manage payroll, and automate billing. Your website, blog, and other online postings are the best platforms to get the word out that you prioritize health care services and you’re willing to invest in the latest technologies to maintain your reputation as an industry expert.  

Blogging: An Essential Tool in Home Care Marketing

Your clients and caregivers have a wealth of heartwarming experiences to share. By adding a blog to your website, it gives you the following ways to interact with your target audience:

·   Informs

·   Educates

·   Engages

·   Highlights solutions

·   Storytelling

·   Features use cases

Post content according to your designated marketing schedule to stay active on all marketing platforms. Drive traffic to your website with every post in ways that focus on generating leads and attracting potential caregivers.

Keywords and SEO Are the Heart of Homecare Online Marketing

To get people looking at your website, you first need to get Google’s attention. The way to do that is with search engine optimization (SEO) and using keywords properly. Something that should get your attention is that using SEO strategies is free, which means it’s easy on your marketing budget.

A little keyword research will give you the terms that will attract people interested in home care services. All you need to do is add them to your web pages, blog, and other home care advertising messages and reap the rewards in higher traffic and leads.  

Get Creative with Social Media to Bolster Your Home Care Marketing Strategy

If you’re new to social media marketing, start with one platform and add more platforms gradually so you can get used to how each platform works.

Some good social media platforms to start with are:

·   Facebook

·   Twitter

·   LinkedIn

SeniorCareClicks authored a great article on social media for home health care that can help you get started.

Use a tone that’s consistent and professional on all platforms. Here are a few ideas about home health care topics:

·   Talk about your expertise within the industry.

·   Tell about how you deliver on the promise of compassionate, personalized care.

·   Highlight the types of services you provide.

·   Showcase individual caregivers.

·   Feature best practices and new trends in home health care.

Using Paid Advertising for a Big Pay-Off in Home Care Marketing

While it’s smart to take advantage of free advertising whenever you can, you can bolster your SEO efforts exponentially by investing in the right paid advertising promotions. Paid ads and press releases, which are brief and easy to read are good tools to capture your audience’s attention for people that aren’t inclined to read full articles.

The best approach is to invest your marketing dollars in a few quality ads rather than many ads that aren’t eye-catching.

SEO, blogging, public relations, and social media are all components of a strong home care marketing plan. If that all sounds overwhelming to you, the right choice for you may be to outsource your home marketing plan to a professional marketing team that has the right tools and expertise to give your home care agency the greatest advantage.

Call SeniorCareClicks at (954) 401-9058 to learn more!

Senior Care WordPress Website

Of the many website platforms you have to choose from, there are a lot of reasons to love WordPress. According to Search Engine Journal, almost 34% of website owners prefer WordPress. If WordPress is good enough for major corporations like Sony Corporation, Time Inc., NBC, and the New York Post, you can rest assured that it will work just as well for home care websites.

WordPress is popular among large and small businesses alike because it’s so versatile and user-friendly. Some of the other platforms require a certain level of technical know-how. That’s great if you have a developer that understands HTML CSS and programming language. With WordPress, it doesn’t matter if you have a little technical language or a lot.

If you’re looking for the best way to create a website for a home care agency, You’ll learn to love WordPress.  

Advantages of Using WordPress

As a busy professional in the home care industry, many issues demand your attention every day. While you probably wouldn’t mind spending hours and hours building your website, there’s just no time. It’s not practical to call a developer every time you want to make a minor change to your website.

These are just a few of the reasons that people like WordPress:

·   One-click installation

·  Wide array of plugins

·  Lots of add-ons

·  A host of extras

·  Open source

·  Up to date on SEO standards

·  Anyone can customize a website

·  It’s free

Besides all the features that WordPress offers, it has a number of characteristics that make it popular for senior care websites and other sites across the board:

Security-WordPress websites have automatic updates, which makes it secure against hacker attacks.

User-Friendly-Nearly anyone can put up a WordPress website without prior knowledge or experience. The platform is user-friendly and intuitive, so it offers a great user experience. All you need is a domain name and a web hosting account. The admin dashboard virtually leads users through the setup which you can do in minutes.

Support-WordPress offers help and support through their online community if you need assistance with troubleshooting or just want to ask a question.

Multimedia-Websites are far more interesting and engaging when you add photos, videos, and vary the types and size of the fonts. The technical aspect of how to add photos and videos can be overwhelming for a lot of users. WordPress makes it easy to add other types of media to an internal library that you can draw from to add media to the pages of your site and you can optimize them for SEO.

Mobile-Friendly-According to Pew Research, about 94% of people have mobile phones as of 2019 and about 76% own a smartphone. Smartphone usage is up 35% from 2011. Many of the WordPress themes include a mobile-friendly design, so you don’t have to take action on that end. This is important when you consider that four out of five online searches are responses to a call-to-action such as signing up for a service or making a purchase, according to Search Engine Watch.

Testimonials-It’s common for home care agencies to have multiple referral sources. WordPress allows you to add a section for testimonials to your pages, where you can showcase comments and testimonies where clients can boast how they’ve benefited from your services. Your prospects appeal to emotion, so a hard-sell won’t work for you. Before people try out your services, they’re looking for assurance from others that they’ll be in good hands if they work with your agency. Personal experiences can tip the scales in assuring them that they’re making a good choice in a home care agency.    

Scalability-WordPress was originally designed for the purpose of doing blogging. From the largest corporations to the single user putting up a website at home, the WordPress platform serves them all equally well. That’s a good thing for home care agencies because the need for home care is growing and that means that you can continue using the WordPress platform as your business experiences growth.

Multiple Options for Themes-WordPress offers a wide variety of theme choices for users to change the tone and appearance of their sites. Many are free through WordPress, and users can purchase other themes through third-party designers and design marketplaces. WordPress themes are SEO-friendly.

Built-In Blog Functionality-After you set up your WordPress website, you can add a blog and start adding content so you can start on-page SEO campaigns.

Plugins Give You More Bells and Whistles-WordPress gives you access to hundreds of plugins that give you tools like contact forms and shopping carts. You can also buy plugins from third parties. WordPress plugins are SEO-friendly.

WordPress Sites Rank High on SERP-WordPress plugins, mobile platforms, and blog functions are all SEO-friendly making WordPress the best way to create a website for a home care agency and make it work as a sales channel.

Home Care Website Customization

Home caregiving is a personal service. No doubt that your home care agency has many heartwarming stories to tell. A big part of your message is that you not only give tangible care, but your agency also offers compassion, comfort, and reassurance.

The WordPress themes are visually appealing. They offer you many options of colors, tones, and settings to tell your story in the most beautiful, appealing way. WordPress allows you to highlight your services with buttons labeled with services like personal care, companionship, dementia care, or skilled nursing care to guide your site visitors directly to the type of care they need. The right design and the right tools will draw prospects to your home care website to promote lead generation.

Easy-to-Use Navigation

Your target audience consists of seniors looking for care for their elderly parents and sometimes they’re looking for care for themselves. Older people often have sight problems, and WordPress gives you an edge because the platform makes it easy to read and navigate your site.

Along with readable fonts and text, WordPress themes put pleasing color combinations together for you, which takes the work out of designing a website that has the look and feel that you’re after. Your clientele requires a home care agency website that’s easy to navigate and WordPress sets up the flow for you right within the theme.

While WordPress makes website building easy, a professional web designer that specializes in home care agencies is your best bet for creating a visual experience for your target audience. Your home care agency website should be laid out to highlight the most important features without appearing too busy.

Getting Senior Care Website Referrals

Your WordPress website works hard for you when you take a few different approaches to lead generation.

These three tips will help you maximize your efforts:

1. Post blogs on topics related to aging and strategically place keywords that you’ve researched and found to be effective.

2. Ask your current clients for personal testimonies and ask their permission to post them on your website. Most clients will be happy to do that for you, and they’ll get you noticed on search engines.

3. You can attempt some SEO strategies on your own, but you’ll have greater success and measurable results when you use a professional marketer. Be aware the field of SEO is continually changing and it’s difficult for most home care agency owners to keep up with on their own.

Whenever you’re working on digital marketing campaigns for your website, social media platforms, or your blog, you’ll have better results when you’re on top of the latest changes and trends. Professional marketers will have you covered.

Implement On-Page SEO

When you’re developing the pages of your website, on-page SEO is a strategy that will optimize your pages so that search engines will easily find them. Pay attention to how you word your headlines, subheads, URL slugs, and metatags.

Need some tips? Try these on for size:

·   Use your primary keyword in your headline and place it close to the beginning of it.

·   Put your keywords in the slug and in at least one subheadline.

·   Your keywords should range between .5% and 2.5% of your content copy. (if you go over that, Google will take away points for keyword stuffing)

·   Don’t group your keywords together—spread them evenly throughout the page body, subheads, and image alt text.

·   Make sure your keywords have the proper context—don’t use them unnaturally.

Contact Senior Care Clicks to Work on Your Senior Care Website

Because we work exclusively with those who care for the elderly and their families, we know the specifics of the home care industry and the challenges you face in trying to increase your business.

We choose WordPress as our design platform so that you have a user-friendly website to maintain and update your website on a continual basis—today and in the future.

Call us now at (954) 401-9058 to learn more or contact us today!

videos are part of your home care marketing plan

Given the choice, most people would prefer to watch a video over reading a lengthy article. That’s why you should consider adding videos to your home care marketing plan.

Videos for home care agencies are an excellent way to get the attention of your target audience. A short video is a viable solution for people that are looking for preliminary information about home care services.

Why? Videos allow people to multitask. They can cook a meal, get ready for the day, or do some cleaning while a video is playing. They don’t have to stop what they’re doing to read an article.

You can use videos for various purposes to help you meet your marketing goals. Two of the primary reasons why a home care agency needs video marketing is to draw prospects and recruit caregivers.

If the thought of creating and publishing videos to promote your home care agency seems overwhelming, you just found help.

Why My Home Care Agency Needs Video Marketing

The effects of aging are a reality for all of us. For many people, there comes a time during their later years where they have to face the reality that they can’t meet their needs alone and it’s time to ask for help.

It’s an emotional time when you come to the realization that you’re losing your independence. The thought of not being able to take care of yourself drums up a lot of insecurities and it can be quite frightening. People often have trouble asking for help even when they know they need it.

Your challenge, as a digital marketer, is to advertise your home care agency services in ways that are genuine and informative, yet personal.

Videos will really give you an advantage that way. They give you a chance to deliver the proper tone, facial expression, and overall impression of your home care agency. Videos give your target audience a glimpse into the type of care they can expect if they decide to schedule services.

When crafting your messages, be sure to keep in mind the types of issues that your target audience will be looking for.

These are the things that should be on your list:

·   The right types of home care services

·   Kind and compassionate caregivers

·   A service they can trust

·   Reliable home care services

·   Caregivers they enjoy spending time with

·   Caregivers that make them feel comfortable

Video Marketing Data

If you still find yourself wondering why videos can help me to acquire leads, these statistics will make it pretty clear:

·   Businesses report that they get 66% more qualified leads per year through video marketing.

·   Videos have the potential to increase your brand awareness by up to 54%.

·   8 out of every 10 people are inclined to make a purchase after they’ve watched a video.

·   82% of the global internet traffic will come from videos by the year 2022.

·   About 54% of consumers said they want to see more video content, according to studies.

·   A “Think with Google” survey showed that a third of baby boomers were using YouTube to learn more about products and services.

A quality video is sure to attract families that are looking for senior care options. That means that it’s a prime opportunity for you to add videos to your home care marketing plan and start engaging your target audience.

Your Google My Business listing is a highly visible place to showcase your videos. Just look at these statistics for Google My Business:

·   Google My Business has an extremely high rate of searches.

·   About 33% of companies state that they receive over 1,000 views on Google Maps.

·   Around 5% of listing views on Google My Business generate a click, call, or direct request, (which equates to an average conversion rate of 5%).

·   Google My Business listings grew by 29% from website clicks.

·   Companies state that 28% of their website sessions come from Google My Business listings.

Those numbers are strong enough that they should convince you of how important it is to start making some videos for your home care agency.

Now that you’re ready to get started with videos, you probably feel like you’re back at the drawing board with figuring out what kind of content to put into your videos. I can help you with that, too.

Video Ideas for Your Home Care Business

Once you get started making videos, you’ll probably come up with lots of ideas about what you can talk about during your videos. Your FAQs will also give you some ideas of the type of information your customers are looking for.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

1. Promotional videos-You can’t go wrong with a few promotional videos. Use these to provide a general overview of the services you provide. Video parts of the outside and inside of your facility. Talk about your history and mission.

2. What to expect from caregivers-Some people will be looking for a new home care agency after having a bad experience with another service. This is your chance to shine! Use your video to show what separates you from other home care agencies.

3. A career in caregiving-Your current caregivers are your best advertisement for recruiting other quality caregivers. Give your caregivers the chance to showcase why they love coming to work every day.

4. The joys of being a caregiver-Caregiving is hard work. In spite of this, many caregivers love working with seniors and helping them. Videos for home care agencies give your customers a chance to see some of the more tender, sweet moments that happen between caregivers and clients.

5. Caregiving in your community-Home care agencies play a vital role in communities. Create a video or two that shows your involvement in your community.

SEO and paid advertising campaigns should make up a large part of your home care marketing plan, but you need more to be competitive.

Does this information give you the confidence to give video-making a try? If it’s not your thing or you don’t have time, Senior Care Clicks is available to create professional-looking videos for you.

The baby boomer generation is driving the growth of the senior population—the 65 and over crowd. The latest research shows that people over the age of 65 now make up 17% of the total population in the U.S. and the growth is just the beginning. That’s the kind of data the senior care industry should be looking at to justify extra effort on digital marketing strategies.

Here’s another nugget of information that should get your attention. The second-largest topic that people are searching for on sites like Google, Yahoo, and Bing is also strongly connected to people over 65—healthcare, which is a hot topic on search engines.

Your role is to educate consumers about in-home care and other homecare services. Online marketing establishes your senior care agency as the local expert authority in home care and assisted living services. The right advertising approach gives your home care agency credibility and strengthens your reputation.

Digital Marketing and Senior Care Stats

If you’re still not convinced, the following statistics emphasize some important reasons why it’s a crucial time to go after your share of the senior care market:

·   Business Insider projects that the home care market in the U.S. is expected to increase from $100 billion in 2016 to $225 billion by the year 2024. This figure reflects a 125% increase.

·   By the year 2030, around 2 million Americans will opt for life in a senior care community. That’s double the number since 2016.

·   According to American Senior Communities, senior living will become a highly competitive industry.

Large percentages of these seniors will soon be in the market for professional in-home care. Now is the time to start steering them in your direction. Take a look at these statistics for a little more assurance that a boost to your digital marketing efforts will be worthwhile.

·   Every hour, U.S. seniors generate 6,000 searches online for in-home care or healthcare. According to Senior Housing News.

·   About 70% of consumers seeking senior care will place a call when researching their options.

·   Phone calls will convert to customers 10-15 times more often (30% faster) than internet leads and give you a more immediate return on investment.

·   Retention is higher from phone calls as compared to web leads and they’re more profitable in the long-term.

·   94% of healthcare patients evaluate their providers using online reviews.

·   84% of people have as much faith in online reviews as a personal recommendation.

·   Home care agencies spent just over $129 million on advertising in the U.S. in 2020.

·   The senior care industry is expected to increase ad spending to $136 million by the end of 2020.

As these numbers demonstrate, a strong digital marketing campaign, along with a robust management strategy for building good reviews, is essential for acquiring new customers in the home care industry.

Home Care Agencies and Digital Marketing

Just imagine how many new opportunities you’ll have for new clients with over 10,000 baby boomers moving into the senior season of their lives every day.

Here are a few more things to think about:

·   The low rate of unemployment and a shortage of qualified in-home care providers make recruiting and hiring caregivers challenging at best.

·   Your marketing activities are separate from your sales efforts and without an overall digital marketing plan and SEO plan, you’re probably not getting qualified leads.

·   Your hiring processes don’t closely relate to your marketing plan without connecting them directly to your marketing strategy, so you could be missing out on highly qualified candidates.

·   The senior care industry is growing with local and franchises and they’re competing hard for a share of the market.  

Don’t take a chance on falling behind the pack!

Don’t Fall Behind Your Competitors

With new agencies vying for their share of the senior care industry, you need a digital marketing strategy that lets you set the pace. Here’s how to do it successfully:

1. Use your content to emphasize the need for in-home care.

2. Highlight the many ways that baby boomers and others will benefit from quality in-home care including how it helps with aging in place and the quality of life.

3. Best practices for sales suggest “making the ask”, so be proactive and ask for referrals.

4. Point out what sets your agency and your staff apart from other home care providers.

5. Referral sources are checking your online reviews and scope of services, so strive to rank this information high on search engines.

6. Be active on social media. According to the 2020 Benchmarking Survey, about 44% of home care agencies indicated that most of their leads generated from Facebook and Google and you can track your leads this way too. (This compares with only 3.7% for newspaper ads).

7. SEO is the leading source for customer leads (over 30% admissions rate).

Where to Spend Your Marketing Dollars in Digital

Incorporate a mix of channels into your digital marketing strategy—PPC, social media, and SEO. Your potential clients for in-home care are on all of them. If you’re not, you’ll be missing them.

Also consider that one marketing channel can give a boost to another. PPC ads will give you a 10% conversion rate through your contact forms and 15%-20% through calls. Here’s the real beauty, PPC ads and social media visits will increase traffic to your website and that will also boost your SEO efforts. If you don’t convert a customer from PPC, they may give you a second shot when they go directly to your website.

As a few final words, think about your messaging. Tell your story in a way that prospects see themselves as part of it. When you deliver value to them and meet them in the places they’re already comfortable hanging out, you’ll know whether you need to change any of your campaigns.

Drive traffic to your senior care website

Increasing traffic to your senior care business website helps to drive business growth. By monitoring your analytics, you’ll know whether your marketing efforts to increase organic traffic are working well. They’ll give you insights about gaps and weaknesses in your SEO strategy.

All web traffic isn’t created equally. A heavy focus on quality traffic will drive the best results.  

Focusing on Quality Traffic Over Free Traffic

To increase traffic to your senior care or assisted living website, consider the two purposes of website traffic:

1. Increased traffic to your site will improve your search engine ranking.

2. A high rank drives traffic to your site organically.

If traffic isn’t creating conversions, shift your efforts toward improving engagement.

Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Assisted Living Website

It takes multiple channels working in concert to bring in lots of traffic. Your marketing strategies won’t be successful without investing sufficient time, money, and effort into tapping into various channels.

Try these digital marketing channels:

·   Email marketing campaigns

·   Social media campaign

·   Online directory listings

·   Online ads

·   Regular blog page

·   SEO strategies on your pages

·   SEO strategies coming from other sites

Google My Business

Most people search for senior living and assisted care living facilities using a Google search. Completing your Google My Business listing ensures that your listing shows near the top. Filling out your address, business hours, and other details is free and it’s sure to generate leads.

Benefits of Google My Business for Lead Generation

With a Google My Business account, you can post photos of your facility and your staff in action.

Google My Business is free for the taking and the benefits are priceless:

·   Displays your listing for relevant searches

·   Increases your branding and visibility

·   Brings more website traffic to your pages

·   Motivates prospects to schedule an on-site visit

·   Provides free testimonials

Boost Your On-Page SEO Strategy

Search engines weigh heavily on high-quality content when determining the rank for your senior living or assisted living facility website. Make sure that your blog articles and web page content is concise, well-written, and informative. Be sure to write impactful meta descriptions for your pages. Think of your meta descriptions as a sort of highly concise elevator speech.

Take Advantage of Free Listings in Online Directories

There are lots of free online directories and review sites where you can list your business. Keep a spreadsheet of all the places where you’re listed on online directories so that you can update all of them in the event of a change. Keeping your listings current gives you a better chance of getting more website traffic.

Build as Many Backlinks as Possible

When another site adds your link to their site, it’s called a backlink. Call on influencers in the senior care industry or some of your vendors to see if they’ll add your link to their site. Backlinks will yield a much larger audience and spread the good word about your senior care services exponentially. Google will reward your backlinking efforts too.

Social Media Postings Drive Free Website Traffic

Posting on social media sites is just as easy as it is free. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest all offer you free opportunities to drive traffic to your website. Social media sites are popular places to post informative blog articles, videos, and photos of how you’re helping seniors live a quality lifestyle.

Set Up Landing Pages for Senior Care

Landing pages are web pages where you can set up offers for discounts or referrals. You could use them to entice prospects to enter their contact information in exchange for a report or an ebook. Landing pages offer a great way to capture some of the details that will help you engage prospects and keep them coming back until they convert.

Target Long-Tail Keywords

More people are starting to refine their online searches by putting descriptive phrases into the search engine box. These are called long-tail keywords. There are tools on the web that will help you find appropriate keywords to help you get the qualified leads that are the most likely to create conversions.

Start Email Marketing

If you don’t already have an email marketing strategy, it’s time to start one—it’s also free. Send out regular newsletters and throw in a special offer here or there to grab your prospects’ attention.

As a word of caution—don’t blast them with too many emails or too many flashy ads or people will unsubscribe quickly.

Guest Blog

As an expert in senior health care, you probably have a large network of people that are vested in seeing your senior care agency succeed. Ask another industry leader if they’d be willing to contribute a guest blog post to your site and offer to do the same for them. Leave a positive review for them and ask the same in return.

Interview Industry Thought Leaders

Your prospects want answers to their questions about senior care. A good way to answer them is to interview industry thought leaders and they’ll feel honored that you asked. Email out a list of questions for them to answer and get their permission to publish them. If the interview publishes the interview as well, you just got another quality backlink.

Engage Online

You won’t have to look too far to find online groups about senior care within your community and in the surrounding areas. Sign up and be active. Other members will see you as an expert on senior care. The more you engage with people interested in the topic, the more exposure you gain for your agency. Be genuine and sincere. This isn’t the place for the hard sell.

Make Mobile Responsiveness a Top Priority

Internet searchers are just as likely to use mobile phones or tablets to search for senior care. It’s essential to optimize your website for mobile devices. If they have to swipe and scroll too much, you’re likely to lose them when the time is ripe.

Check the Loading Speed of Your Site

The senior care industry is competitive. A high bounce rate indicates that your site takes too long to load. If prospects have to wait too long, it makes you look unprofessional. Optimize your pages carefully and pay special attention to your image file sizes, page structure, and plugins.

Share Videos on Your Website and Social Media Pages

Videos are highly engaging for users. It gives them a chance to see you and hear what you have to say. The senior care industry is a highly personal field and a clip of your services gives them an indication of how you provide care.

Present at Senior Care Conferences

When you present at conferences, it establishes you as an expert and a thought leader in the industry. Record your presentation or slides and incorporate them into your overall marketing strategy.

Post Content on Senior Care Online Communities

Many sites have online hangouts for you to post content on senior care:

·   Facebook groups

·   Reddit

·   Online forums

·   Quora-answer questions

Finally, the hardest part of getting higher quality traffic that’s free is just learning a few tricks of the trade. Try a few of the strategies listed here and watch your conversions increase.

reviews online

The longer you’ve been providing in-home care, the greater the chance that you’ll get a negative review somewhere along the way. Any number of issues could trigger a bad review—a problem with a caregiver, being short-staffed, a miscommunication, a scheduling error, or something else.

Everyone has an opinion and the internet gives them a forum for sharing it with others whether it’s good or bad. When you get a bad review, you might be tempted to ignore it, but it’s better to address it. Feedback can help your business grow and build trust even if you get an occasional bad comment or review.

Use a Reputation Management Software

It would be great if you had the chance to intercept a bad review before it went public. Reputation management software allows you to do just that.

Here’s how it works. You send in a review request and if a customer posts a bad online review, it will go to your email address first. That gives you an opportunity to address the issue directly with the customer. That way, only good reviews get posted.

Google My Business allows you to see reviews on your dashboard and you can set your account so that you get automatic notifications when a review goes live. Getting live updates gives you the chance to respond to bad reviews quickly.

Also, Google My Business gives you a link that you can include in email campaigns to request reviews.

Respond Quickly to Reviews

When people read a bad review, they’ll probably give you the benefit of the doubt and look for a response from you. If you don’t address negative reviews for long periods, it sends a message to the reviewer and others that you don’t care enough to be responsive.  

It’s crucial to post responses to reviews in a timely manner, especially when they’re not flattering. Be sure to address the issues directly in bad reviews. Be polite and professional, and above all, be genuine. That’s the way to minimize the impact of a bad review.

How to Respond to a Negative Review

There are a few things you need to take into account before responding to a negative review.

1. Accept responsibility for the customer’s experience with your home care services. Be sympathetic and offer a sincere apology, even if you feel the review is unfounded.

2. Give a short description of the kind of service your customers are accustomed to receiving. Respond to negative reviews by stating something along the lines of, “We strive for exceptional customer service and we’re disappointed that we didn’t meet your expectations.”

3. Part of your approach for how to manage bad reviews is to offer the reviewer an opportunity to take the conversation offline. Give them contact information for someone at your home care agency that can solve the problem or respond more fully.

4. Avoid asking too many questions or going into too many details about the issue with home care services. Limit your response to about three sentences. This will help you avoid adding fuel to the fire.

Focus on Solutions Rather than Proving You’re Right

As you consider how to handle negative reviews, it’s important to resist the temptation to prove which of you is right. In the interest of diffusing the complaint, just let it go. Redirect your approach toward solving problems and finding some common ground. That’s the best method for how to answer reviews so that everyone wins. Your aim should be to move forward in a way that shows you care and rebuilds the trust that was diminished along the way.

Don’t Just Wish It Away and Forget About It

Don’t talk yourself into believing that bad reviews won’t matter if you don’t respond to them.

Bear in mind that the reviewer was upset with your service when they gave the review. The best thing that you can do is to acknowledge their concerns directly and do your best to resolve them. The reason people post reviews is that they want to be heard and know that they have value.

Most people will give you credit for meeting the issue head-on and not side-stepping it. Honesty and humility go a long way when your home care service didn’t meet a client’s expectations.  

Express Empathy Using a Sincere Tone

The nature of service industries is such that it’s nearly impossible to please all the people all the time, even when you’re doing your very best to provide top-quality home care services. You won’t always be able to solve past problems.

Bad reviews sometimes reflect someone’s need to vent rather than to place blame. They simply want to know that someone in a position of authority cared about their feelings. That’s especially true in the home care services industry because of the personal nature of caregiving. You may be able to overcome a bad review by being sincere in your responses and always expressing empathy.

A Little Good-Will Goes a Long Way

There will be times when it makes perfect sense to give unhappy customers a little something extra. It’s easier to win certain customers over by offering some concessions in the way of free services or a discounted rate. That’s not to say that you have to offer some form of compensation to everyone that gives you a bad review, but under the right circumstances, it can be meaningful.

Negative Reviews Improve Your Services

While it’s always difficult to read a bad review, it’s important to view it from the perspective of the customer. Try to be objective in your assessment of the review. Even if you think it’s unfounded, there may be a vein of truth to it. The truth can be masked in negative reviews, so take them seriously and address the situation that triggered the complaint. Take this as a red flag that your agency may have some areas that need improvement and take action.

No company is perfect all the time. When you have 100% positive reviews, some people will think they’re too good to be true. Customers expect to see a mix of comments and ratings. A few negative comments sprinkled in with all the good ones assures customers that your agency is legitimate.

social media to grow your home care agency

A digital marketing campaign today isn’t complete without a social media presence. More people are active on social media every year. That’s a viable reason for using social media to grow your home care agency. Rather than writing random posts on Facebook, Instagram, and posting a few images on Pinterest, your time is better spent on developing an effective social media plan and setting specific goals.

Some of the social media goals you might set are:

·   Gaining followers

·   Boosting your brand

·   Viewing your agency as the expert in home care

·   Recruiting caregivers

Once you’ve identified your plan and your goals, it’s time to learn how to use social media effectively.

How to Use Social Media Effectively

Perhaps the most challenging part about developing a social media strategy is setting your goals. Consider the types of goals that will inspire people to engage with you in some fashion—getting likes, gaining followers, commenting on your posts, and visiting your website.

Here are some social media tips that will attract attention on social media:

·   Clarify and define your brand.

·   Write a captivating bio of your story and mission.

·   Set up an editorial calendar and schedule your postings.

·   Post consistently-your followers will be looking for weekly posts they like.

·   End your posts with a strong call to action to increase conversions

Social Media Marketing to Acquire Clients

Just as you beautify the outside of your home health care agency to draw the attention of people within your community, it’s equally as important to make your social media marketing strategy attractive as well.

You have multiple options for inviting people to get to know more about your caregiver agency through social media. It will take a bit of time and effort before you meet your goals, so plan to get started with the following types of posts:

  • Posting blog articles.
  • Setting up events and posting them online.
  • Creating videos to post on your website and social media platforms.
  • Announcing awards for home care services
  • Celebrating your caregivers.
  • Posting upbeat and inspirational messages.
  • Sharing Videos reviews of happy clients
  • Collecting reviews in Facebook

How to Use Facebook

If you use Facebook for personal use, you’ll really like learning how to use Facebook to take advantage of social media.

Recent statistics show that Facebook has over 2.7 billion active users. According to Hootesuite, about two-thirds of people check out local businesses on Facebook at least weekly. You can even learn how to use Facebook live to post videos of your events in real-time.

Marketing on social media requires a softer sell than other forms of marketing. Facebook users expect it to remain a fun place to hang out. Too many sales post without engaging people in a conversation are a turn-off. The way around this is to post something every day or every week and post promotions occasionally. Use pictures, photos, and videos in your posts to attract comments and likes.

Ask a question to get some comments rolling. Be sure to respond to questions and comments in a timely manner so followers will keep coming back to join in on the conversation.

Use Facebook’s pop-up messenger to ask visitors to your Facebook business page two or three questions. It will tell you why they came to your page and give you a chance to engage with new prospects in real-time.  

Promote your Facebook business page on your website, business cards, letterhead, and other forms of media to maximize its potential.

Also, be sure to check out Facebook Insights, which is the back-end analytics on your business page. It provides valuable data about the characteristics of your target audience that you can use to enhance your overall marketing plan.

How to Use Twitter

If you’re interested in how to use Twitter, a few quick tweets on a regular basis will tell people within your community about all the wonderful things that are going with your in-home care services.

To set up your business Twitter account, create a Twitter handle that incorporates your company’s name so your followers can find you easily—for example, @ABChomecareagency.

You’ll also need a header, which is your background image. You can use a photo of your location, staff, a caregiver on the job. Add a profile picture, which could be a photo of your CEO or your logo. Choose this image thoughtfully as it will accompany your tweets and interactions.

You also have the opportunity to include a bio using 160 characters or less. Use your mission statement for inspiration. Input your company website’s URL to direct traffic to your site. In the section labeled birthday, put your company’s founding date.

How to Use Pinterest

Pinterest is much like having a bunch of different bulletin boards, each with a different topic, and being able to share them with your prospects and referrals. Pinterest provides a place to connect with followers and influencers. It gives you the chance to show them the benefits that you provide as a reliable in-home health care service, rather than tell them about it.

Pinterest is the fourth most popular social media platform in the United States and the number of “pinners” is growing rapidly.

To extend your social media reach even further, you can connect your Pinterest account to your Instagram and YouTube accounts. You can run ads on Pinterest and collect contact information for follow up and adding to your list of prospects. Add a Pinterest tag to your company website to direct interested prospects to photos of your caregivers in action, informative articles, and interesting videos about in-home caregiving.

How to Automate Social Media

Unless you have the budget to hire a marketer to post on all of your social media platforms on a regular basis, it will be hard to find the time to post every day on social media. There is a better way for how to use social media wisely. That’s by using other programs to automate your stories and postings.

Your editorial calendar is your guide to when your postings should go live. It’s not possible to automate all postings, but certain tools will streamline the process of posting on social media.

Here are some of the tools that you might want to use to automate your social media postings:

·   Hootsuite

·   Ganto

·   Buzzsumo

·   Sprout social

Social Recruiting

Lots of caregivers are searching for jobs on social media platforms which makes it a fantastic place for social recruiting.

There are two ways to post help-wanted ads of Facebook. If you have the budget for it, you can use the Facebook feature called “create a job” and it will intuitively walk you through the process of posting a job them you boost the post following Facebook guidelines and choosing the right demographics. You can also share your job posting on Instagram, Pinterest, and other social media platforms. It is recommended to pay ads to recruit caregivers.

Finally, be sure to respond to messages and comments in a timely manner. Offer up a soft call-to-action on a regular basis to keep them engaged. Social media platforms present opportunities for growth and engagement which will yield some great connections and conversions.