Is Your Home Health Agency’s Marketing Strategy Not Working? Here’s How To Fix It
Six ways to troubleshoot a struggling marketing campaign
Few things are as frustrating as investing your time and money into a marketing strategy only to see no results, or pitiful ones at best. It’s unlikely that your marketing plan needs a complete overhaul. Sometimes all it takes is a few tweaks to get everything back on track.
Here are six steps to troubleshooting a home health agency marketing strategy that’s not working.
1. Apply Occam’s Razor
When looking for a solution to the problem of a failing marketing strategy, apply Occam’s Razor by looking for the simplest possible explanations first. Is there a key element missing from your strategy, like investment in local SEO or a client referral program? Is your messaging targeted at the right demographic segment? Are you failing to address a specific problem your clients have (like budget) in your marketing materials?
Before you invest even more time and money redesigning your entire marketing strategy, take a moment to examine and question everything in your tool kit.
2. Identify your goals
OK, you applied Occam’s Razor and learned that the easy fix you hoped for isn’t there. No sweat. For every problem, there is a solution. Try this next.
Can you sum up your home care marketing goals in a single sentence? “Increase the number of clients” is too broad to be effective. Try instead, “increase the number of habilitation clients” or “improve our Net Promoter Score.”
When you cast clear, focused goals, you’re more likely to reach them. Plus, it’s easier to design and test a strategy aimed at a specific goal.
3. Audit your SEO strategy
The next thing you should do is audit your search engine optimization strategy. Ask yourself these basic questions.
- Have you updated your Google Business Profile? This is the information that appears on the right side of a Google results page when someone looks up your business.
- Is your sitemap updated? This ensures Google can find and index the most recent version of your site.
- What is your site speed? A sluggish site speed or page speed could cost you rankings and cause visitors to your site to bounce quickly.
- Have you identified your primary keywords? Yours might be home care portland oregon or at home senior care. Your marketing strategy should include plans to rank for your 3–5 most important keywords at a minimum.
- Are your site navigation and URLs optimized for your ideal keywords? Google loves optimized site construction.
- Does your site’s content comply with Google’s Helpful Content update? If not, you may be losing valuable rankings and traffic.
4. Create client personas
Answer this question: Who is your ideal client?
If this person is hard to describe, or your idea of them is very general (as in, “people with aging parents”), zoom in just like you did when identifying marketing goals. Your home health agency marketing may not be working because you’re not employing smart empathy. Your clients may share many things in common, but your base isn’t a monolith, and your marketing should take that into consideration.
Your home health care agency may have more than one ideal client, perhaps a woman in her forties caring for both teenagers and parents and who doesn’t have enough hours in the day, or a couple in their seventies on a fixed income who value their independence and need a little help around the house.
5. A/B test
One reason your digital marketing efforts may not be working is because you’re not testing your strategies.
The beauty of digital marketing is that you can test and optimize different bits of your strategy in-flight, and retire the parts that aren’t working. Let’s say you’re running a digital ad campaign promoting in-home pediatric care for children on the autism spectrum. You can write two to three (or more) messages and test each one to see which leads to the most click-throughs, the most email signups, inquiries, etc., and then optimize your campaign around the winning message.
6. Take inventory of your marketing tools
There are hundreds of tools you can use to run home care agency campaigns: digital ad platforms, CRO tools, email newsletter builders, CRM software, social media planners, project management tools, Kanban-style to-do lists, ad design tools, etc.
It’s easy to collect these tools as your business grows, but it’s a good practice to periodically take inventory. You may find that some apps and platforms don’t communicate, and your marketing strategy is weakest at these points. Perhaps data about your audience segments lives in one place but your email newsletter engagement metrics live in another, making it impossible to optimize your email campaigns.
Consolidating the number of marketing tools and choosing ones with friendly integrations can streamline your marketing budget and help you streamline your marketing strategy.
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