Perhaps one of the most challenging issues in the home care industry is finding strategies to ensure a steady stream of new prospects. With the baby boomer generation aging, home care agencies have never been busier.
Sales tact, sales skills, and experience are no longer enough for home care agencies to be competitive against other agencies that are leveraging data in their marketing strategies. With the baby boomer generation aging, home care agencies have never been busier.
Between the growing need for home care and strong competition, customer acquisition is a growing priority for home care agencies. To effectively keep up with the evolution in the home care industry and the challenges that come along with it, data-driven strategies are the way to go.
Challenges Associated with Senior Care Marketing
The first step in combating the challenges that home care agencies are facing is to identify them. Here are 5 key challenges that should be getting your attention:
- Lean marketing budgets. As the saying goes, it takes money to make money. Advertising budgets for home care agencies vary significantly based on the company’s size and phase of business development. If you’re not getting the results you’re after, a boost in your advertising budget could give you more avenues for home care marketing.
- Increasing the flow of qualified incoming leads. Word of mouth and random referrals are always good, but it’s more effective to set up machine learning marketing to generate strong results from online paid ads. Email marketing also leverages automation to increase the flow of qualified leads.
- Aligning your sales and marketing efforts. When you’ve clearly defined your audience, your marketers will target the right leads and you can set up a workflow that leads prospects flawlessly through your sales funnel.
- Timely follow-up. When prospects are making inquiries about home care, they’re ready to buy. Inefficient processes could mean that salespeople are wasting time following up on cold or old leads. The right marketing strategies will position your home care agency to follow up on leads within an hour of the first contact.
- Effectively using CRM, sales software, and machine learning marketing strategies. CRMs and marketing outreach software are big time-savers. They can help your home care agency to gather and record new data with every customer contact. Automation effectively engages prospects and customers and promotes brand loyalty.
How to Get Senior Care Leads with Digital Marketing
AI and machine learning in the field of digital marketing are core technologies that have the potential to give your home care marketing initiatives a massive boost. Machine learning gives you a distinct advantage over your competitors because it’s able to mine and organize huge amounts of data. Machine learning is a great tool for executing simple, routine tasks. It helps you to spot trends and optimize your results. It’s worthwhile to invest a portion of your budget in digital advertising.
Here are three reasons why digital marketing is gaining in popularity:
- It’s cost-effective.
- It gives you an easy way to measure your results.
- It’s easy to figure your ROI.
Obviously, you want to know that the investment you make in marketing is paying off. That concept leads to the importance of running paid search ads as part of an effective home care marketing plan. Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are a valuable way to reach your target audience. What’s so awesome about PPC ads? You only have to pay when prospects click on your ads. As a result, you’ll naturally get a higher ROI.
In the home care industry, you’ll want most of your leads to come from within a reasonable geographic range from your facilities. The right digital marketing activities will help you to focus heavily on local searches which will lower your cost per lead.
Another benefit of machine learning marketing is that you can leverage lookalike audiences once you’ve built a solid customer base. AI and machine learning technologies put data together to create the right target audiences which point in the direction of qualified leads. Machine learning collects data pertaining to location, demographics, and other information so you can target PPC ads to audiences matching those characteristics. Just imagine how painstaking it would be to try to sort out all that data manually! AI and machine learning save you hours and hours of time.
Think of mining data as giving you a foundation to make good decisions about advertising. The more that you can learn about the types of people that will be searching around online for home care services, the better you can use it to establish accurate customer profiles. AI and machine learning combine data from your current target audience with interest groups and keywords to fine-tune your outreach. The algorithms automatically find new groups to display your ads.
How to Achieve Results Faster
Due to digital transformation, the marketplace is becoming increasingly specialized. While it long made sense to manage advertising needs in-house, it often makes better sense now to partner with a marketing agency that has experience with home care agencies.
An independent marketing agency has the expertise to bring in qualified leads and help you identify quality caregivers in efficient, cost-effective ways. An expert marketer will be able to look at your goals and objectives and develop a few strategies to help you meet them. It’s expertise that’s simply hard to match in-house.
There is also value in working with a digital marketer like SeniorCareClicks that’s well acquainted with the home care industry. Our marketers that understand the joys and challenges of providing senior care have a good familiarity with the types of keywords and strategies that produce results and lead to conversions. Our senior care marketers have experience in setting up a well-rounded marketing process where they utilize the right personas and understand this market’s buyer journey.
These are some of the ways we accomplish that:
- We use current client data to feed AI and machine learning.
- We create different audiences and run ads on different platforms.
- We collect leads and guide them into inbound call centers.
- Call center agents nurture leads and guide them through the sales funnel.
- As calls ring in real-time, call center agents can respond quickly and transfer the call to your home care agency, so you never miss a lead.
- The call center then sends an automated email to the home care agency with all the customer details.
- Customers get a follow-up email a few days after the first interaction.
Our marketing agency leads the way and keeps prospects engaged from the first contact to the conversion with a comprehensive marketing plan that sets your home care agency on the path to growth.
Remember the Importance of Timely Calls
Inbound call centers are designed to handle large amounts of incoming calls. Our marketing agency takes a holistic approach to marketing and it has the expertise to drive lots of calls into the call center where call center agents can help prospects get answers about home care services fast when they’re ready to make a decision.
As expert marketers in the home care industry, we do much more than provide your agency with massive numbers of leads. Call center agents are trained on how to personalize calls which begins the process of building trust with customers which is so important in the decision-making process. They’re well-trained in the art of active listening, and they know how to respond in ways that assure customers they’re being understood.
Wondering how it works in a practical sense? Let’s say that a prospect calls in and the call center agent discovers that the caller mistakenly believes they’ve called one of your competitors. Rather than correct the caller right off the bat, the call center agent will ask what they can do for the customer and guide them to the answers to their questions. The initial calls offer a good opportunity to engage customers in conversation. At the proper moment, the call center agent will clarify that the caller has actually called your agency and they’re happy to help them on the spot.
The senior care industry is learning what other types of businesses have already discovered. Digital marketing works! Pay-per-click ads are highly effective as an inbound marketing strategy. The right strategies help you to develop detailed profiles of your target audiences and display attractive ads in online locations where home care consumers are most likely to see them and act on them in real-time.
The best news is that you don’t have to spend hours and hours studying analytics and doing ad testing to see which strategies are the most effective. Leave your marketing needs to a digital marketing agency that understands the specific challenges connected with home care agency marketing. Call SeniorCareClicks today to learn how we use AI and machine learning marketing strategies by leveraging data from your current clients to get leads into your sales funnel and convert them expediently. 954-401-9058
Karina has spent most of her career working in the senior care industry, mostly as a digital marketing manager for home care and nursing home facilities. With 8+ years of hands-on experience in digital marketing to her credit, Karina also worked as a consultant for senior care businesses. As someone who cares deeply for seniors and has expert skills in digital marketing, Karina founded SeniorCareClicks to fulfill her passion for her permanent career.
Karina and SeniorCareClicks have been featured in Home Health Care News, HomeCare Magazine, Forbes, The Nursing Home Podcast, and other media. Karina is “the premier expert in senior care marketing”!
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