Innovative Marketing Strategies for Setting Your Home Care Agency Apart
How to level-up your home care marketing plans
As the new year gets rolling, it’s a good time to pause and evaluate your home care marketing strategy. When was the last time you considered your agency’s position in the market, what your agency does best, and how you present your business to potential clients?
Home care is a changing field. An aging population, developments in healthcare and therapies, the popularity of remote care, and an increasing desire to age in place means that home care agencies have greater opportunities to provide much-needed services. It also means they will have to compete not only with other home care agencies, but also with traditional healthcare providers and senior services support systems.
To remain competitive, agency leaders must consistently consider their position in the market—and where they can outperform the competition.
Here’s how to take your home health care marketing to the next level and build a strategy that helps you land more clients.
What is a marketing strategy?
Marketing strategy is your home care agency’s plan to promote its services. It’s the plan you’ll use to reach business goals, grow your client list, and retain existing clients for longer.
A marketing campaign is not the same as a marketing strategy. A campaign is a discrete program executed to reach a specific goal—a part of your overall marketing strategy. Think of strategy as a long-term and sustainable plan for growing your business, marketing campaigns are what get you there.
Basics of building your marketing strategy
A marketing strategy will be the foundation of every campaign you run. Here’s how to lay that groundwork.
- Identify your place in the market: Conduct competitive research. Who is your local home care competition? What do they do well? Where can you outperform them? How do they talk to potential clients?
- Draft your value proposition: What do you offer your clients? Maybe your value proposition is highly qualified medical care, or perhaps concerned with empathetic companionship. Your value proposition will inform campaign messaging.
- Identify your goals: Identifying goals to achieve your marketing strategy begins with your business plans. How do you hope to grow revenue? Where do you plan to hire more caregivers? What services do you want to promote?
- Identify your target audience: Even if you haven’t designed a full marketing strategy yet, you already know a great deal about your ideal clients. Simply go to your current client list and identify common characteristics. For instance, you may find that your clients are overwhelmingly: Adults aged 45–65 who care for their aging parents and live in your service area. Understanding who your audience is can help you target your marketing activities.
How to design a home health care marketing campaign that gets results
Identify your campaign goals
Always begin by defining your goals. This will keep your campaigns on track—and tell you whether your marketing activities are successful.
You might want to:
- Increase brand awareness of your home care agency
- Schedule more evaluations for a specific service
- Add new leads for a specific service to your sales funnel
- Get current clients to sign up for more services
Segment your audience and develop client personas
It can help to create “personas” of your ideal clients. These are short narratives that describe a client type. When identifying goals, picking campaign platforms, and drafting messages, having personas can help you speak more directly to your target audience.
Here’s an example of a client persona:
Alicia is a 45-year-old single mom of three who works full-time and makes a six-figure salary. She’s the primary caregiver to her aging parents, but her schedule is booked solid, so she needs help caring for them during business hours. Her biggest worry is that if one of her parents falls at home, or otherwise needs help, the other won’t be able to assist. Though she’s cost-conscious, Alicia is most concerned about time.
You may have more than one ideal client. In addition to Alicia, you might also identify a second persona:
Richard is an 80-year-old retired professional who lives alone and is largely independent. But because of his poor eyesight, he’s no longer able to drive. Richard worries that he’ll lose his once highly active social life, so he wants company at home and a reason to get out in the community. Living on a fixed income, Richard is highly cost-conscious.
Select your campaign type(s) and platform(s)
There are many types of digital marketing campaigns, and not all of them will be right for your marketing goals or client segments. A home healthcare marketing expert can help you match campaign types to your goals. The most common digital ad campaign types are:
- Display ad campaigns
- Paid search campaigns
- SEO content
Now that you know who you’re targeting with your marketing campaigns, you can go find them on the platforms and websites they most visit often. For instance, to reach Richard, you can safely eliminate TikTok as a platform, but you may have more success on Facebook.
Draft messaging
What do you want to say to your target customers? How can you communicate your value proposition while also supporting your campaign goals?
To make a more meaningful connection with your audience, craft ad copy and landing page copy with one of your client personas in mind.
Automate your marketing campaigns
One benefit of digital marketing is that campaigns can be automated. That is, designed to run through digital platforms that execute activities and track results automatically, freeing up your staff for meaningful client interactions.
5 advanced marketing strategies to set your agency apart
Now, let’s fire up the turbo on your marketing campaigns. When you’re ready to step up your competitive advantage...
1. Map the customer journey
The customer journey is the path from first contact to client signature, and as a marketer, you can design this path in a way that efficiently moves leads through your sales funnel and increases the likelihood that they will convert from a qualified lead to a paying client.
2. A/B test your messaging
The first marketing messages you write might not be the ones that land you the most sales. As you run campaigns, test your ad copy, landing page copy, form fields, colors, button location, and calls to action to identify the combination that yields the most client leads.
3. Optimize your campaigns in-flight
As you run your marketing campaigns, you may discover that some messages or audience segments are getting better results than others. By optimizing your campaigns as they run, you can increase efficiency and drive more conversions.
4. Test call scripts
When you follow up with new client leads, you should be using a sales script. Test different options to see which one yields the most home care evaluations booked.
5. Test advanced technologies and campaign types
Don’t stop at display ads and social media campaigns. Experiment with new formats to find new ways to connect with your potential clients. You might try:
- Email drip campaigns
- Text messaging
- Web chat
- Client referral campaigns
- Lead nurturing campaigns
Ready to run better marketing campaigns?
The home health care marketing experts at Home Care Marketing Pros can partner with you to design and execute campaigns for any number of strategy goals, from brand awareness to client retention. Book a consultation to learn more about how we can help.
