How to Market Home Health Care Services

how to market home health care services

If your home care agency has been growing at a steady pace, you’re doing a lot of things right. When you don’t give your overall digital marketing strategy a regular review, your steady growth can begin to slow down to a snail’s pace overnight. Past strategies can become disconnected and even the best marketing plan can become stale and outdated over time. Then you have to do the changes needed to market home health care services in the right way.

 

Change is a good thing and there are certainly a lot of changes going on right now in our industry, marketing technology, and social media. Each one of those things has a strong bearing on creating a home health care marketing strategy. It’s time to update your marketing strategy to make it more connected and prime it to meet the business challenges of today.

 

Marketing for home health care services is more than just bringing new clients into your sales funnel. In addition to sales, a strong home care digital marketing plan incorporates customer service and hiring.

 

Why Your Home Care Business Needs an Updated Digital Marketing Strategy

 

When marketing home health care services, there’s no better time than today to take a more strategic review of your master digital marketing plan. The gradual aging of the baby boomer population is a big reason for that. 

 

 

We have to also be honest about the lessons that we’ve learned most recently from the COVID-19 crisis that can help prolong the lives of seniors and also improve the quality of life for seniors. The National Council on Aging (NCOA) surveyed nursing facilities and assisted living facilities on how changes they’ve made to protect the spread of the disease. The survey shows the following:

 

  • Just over 80% of the facilities are closed with some staff reporting and they’re limiting the programs they normally offer. 
  • A bit over 15% of the facilities reported that their centers are closed, and no staff is reporting. 
  • Slightly over 4% of facilities are open and are operating a limited number of programs. 

 

It took a rapidly spreading, often deadly disease of a pandemic proportion to call our attention to the need to protect high-risk, vulnerable populations. There’s no doubt that the COVID-19 crisis has shone a spotlight on the benefits of the increased safety that can be provided through home care.

 

How To Market Home Health Care Services

 

Every day, 10,000 baby boomers celebrate their 65th birthdays. That means that the home health care industry is booming right along with them. As the industry expands, it creates a concurrent need to train and recruit a qualified workforce of senior caregivers. 

 

With unemployment on the rise and a workforce shortage in this area, recruiting and hiring will continue to be a challenge for the foreseeable future. Your website can be a vehicle that lands the best talent right at your door. 

 

Don’t forget to consider the growth of your competition. They’re taking advantage of local and franchise opportunities and they’re investing heavily in media and marketing promotions to capture a market share. 

 

When making your review on how to market your home health care services, be sure it includes the following four marketing tools:

 

  1. Facetime
  2. Earned media
  3. Advertising
  4. Digital marketing

 

Facetime

Facetime is a handy tool for salespeople in the field to pursue community outreach, client and family referrals, and institutional referrals. As you’re busy managing caregivers and clients, you can outsource the printing design to an experienced agency that focuses on senior care marketing which will connect you in a personal way to influencers that will send you new business. 

 

Earned Media

Use this tool to connect to your community in a meaningful way. Use traditional and digital press to make your brand shine. Enlist the help of a professional writer to write press releases to attract those baby boomers to your agency when they have the need. 

 

Advertising

Advertising is a good area to put in extra marketing budget dollars, but that doesn’t mean that you need to break the bank. If radio and TV ads are out of reach at this time, invest in social media, pay-per-click, and Google adwords, all of which will give you valuable data. 

 

Digital Marketing

Spend a fair amount of effort on inbound marketing that includes quality content, SEO, social networking, social ads, video (add in social media), mobile ads, email, e-news, and websites. 

 

Make it easy on yourself and work with a home care marketing agency to maximize your time and budget with advertising and digital marketing.

 

How to Market a Home Care Marketing Agency Using Digital Marketing Channels

 

Have you considered that the way that people look for services of all kinds has changed? Does your digital marketing strategy connect your home care agency directly with the channels that prospects are pursuing? 

 

Take a moment and put yourself in your customer’s shoes. If you’re like most people, when you get a referral for a business, you grab the nearest electronic device and check it out. 

 

The landing page offers up the first impression so make sure it’s great! As a customer, you’d want to know more about their services. If you were impressed, you’d take the time to check out the reviews and ratings and find the contact information. You might even glance at the FAQs to gain further insight. 

 

How does your website measure up to the expectations of your future clients?

 

  • Is it mobile-responsive? How does it look on a smartphone, tablet, or laptop?
  • Does it utilize SEO effectively? Can you manage it on your own, or would it be better by hiring a home care digital marketing agency?
  • Is it conducive to attracting attention from consumers and search engines?
  • Are you sharing helpful information via regular blog articles? This will enhance your efforts to attract consumers and search engines. 

 

Marketing Tips for Things to Avoid

 

Be aware of some of the things that won’t help your marketing efforts. Best practices hint at a few things not to do:

 

  • Craft a website using limited skills. Your website is a major reflection of your brand and it’s the most important place for it to shine. Some things are better left to a professional digital marketing agency that will design an engaging website and commit to keeping it current.
  • Create a website that’s too similar to your competitors. Your goal should be to develop a well-crafted brand story that uniquely connects your customer base to your agency.
  • Limit your marketing strategy to your website alone. Blogging, social media, email marketing, reviews, and other tools will expand your SEO efforts exponentially. 
  • Forgo investing in security and maintenance systems. It won’t help you attract clients if your website is down or poorly functioning. The last thing your reputation needs is to get hacked which could cost you far more than the cost of security measures. 

 

SEO for Home Care Agencies

 

The home care industry is racing to meet the demands of society for today and in the coming years. Quality home care services are in command more than they’ve ever been in the past. For many people, enlisting the help of a home care agency is new territory and they have lots of questions. Your website is the solution to finding the types of services they need.

 

The home care industry is fiercely competitive. The only way that your company can compete is to have the strongest SEO strategy possible. 

 

Google Map Presence for Local SEO

Local SEO

 

 

Unless your home care agency is nationwide, you need to have a good assessment of the geographic boundaries of your service area. Be certain on the radius of how far your providers can travel to home locations and how far loved ones will travel to your facilities for on-site visits. A local SEO strategy will help you focus your marketing efforts only within your designated locations. 

 

Business Listings to Enhance Your Location

 

When prospects search for a home care agency, they may pull up a few business listings. An easy way to improve your digital presence is to claim and enhance online business listings. Outdated or inaccurate listings are bound to hurt your brand. As online business directories expand and the SEO landscape evolves, it’s crucial to ensure that your business listings are accurate and consistent. 

 

Build Your Online Reviews and Testimonials

 

Consumers appreciate reviews because they provide a genuine first-person experience with your brand. A good personal experience speaks volumes when your prospects are considering opening up their homes and trusting their care to a complete stranger, no matter how qualified they may be. 

 

As important as reviews are, they’re not always easy to track down. A home care marketing agency has the necessary expertise to implement reputation management automation tools to collect reviews efficiently. Let a home care marketing expert take care of the marketing details so you can focus on running your business. 

 

Content Marketing to Promote Your Home Care Services

Because there are many moving pieces, marketing for home health care services can be a daunting task. That said, be careful not to put content marketing on the sidelines. 

 

Bear in mind that most people do careful research on small and large purchases. You can count on your clients to do their homework when researching home care for themselves or a loved one. Consumers are often motivated by their emotions to make a purchase or enter into a contract. Draw them in with engaging content using:

 

  • Videos-helps to form an emotional connection and instills trust and transparency.
  • Informative blogs-increases your organic search and expands your reach via social media, referral links, and email. Also, it serves as outreach for hiring.
  • Facebook-is an outlet that helps you develop trust, so you need to give it the necessary time and patience to build the right audience. 

 

Facebook also gives you the opportunity to connect with your own community using Facebook paid ads. If you have multiple locations, you can create a Facebook page for each one. 

 

While the marketing tips for Facebook and other digital marketing strategies are worthwhile, it’s obvious that many of them are also time-consuming. When you’ve exhausted your ability to devote the time and attention to your marketing efforts that your company deserves, it’s time to give it over to a qualified marketer or marketing agency that can truly give your marketing efforts justice. 

 

Putting All the Pieces Together for Your Home Care Marketing Strategy

 

Are you aware that health and healthcare information are the second-largest topics that consumers look for when they search on Google, Bing or Yahoo? By leveraging the internet, social media, and electronic data you can rank on the first page of all the major search engines. In the mind of your future clients, the home care agencies that appear on the first page are the top experts in their field and they won’t find that on page two. It’s not enough for you to know that you own one of the top home care agencies in your area. You want new clients to have the same assurance. 

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