Important Considerations To Make When Starting a Home Care Agency: Part 1 – Creating your Marketing Brand
Published on November 12, 2020 by Scott Zielski
Marketing your new home care agency brand
Marketing is the cornerstone of any successful business. This is especially true for creating a successful home care agency.
Good marketing builds brand awareness and authority; it lets potential caregivers and clients know you’re out there; it influences customer retention and customer experience; and most importantly, good marketing will drive business growth.
For new Home Care agencies that are starting out, marketing your services can appear challenging. Perhaps you lack the know-how to build an end-to-end marketing strategy, or maybe you’re just short on resources and are struggling to make an impact.
Whatever it is, there are some fundamentals to marketing strategies for your new home care agency that you can’t ignore or overlook.
In this article, we’ll walk you through a few of the most important marketing considerations to make when starting a Home Care agency.
1 – Understand (and utilize) your channels
A good marketing strategy will showcase your home care agency and invite new clients or caregivers prospects in through multiple channels.
The saying is that when you fish, cast a wide net, and this analogy holds true for marketing your agency. Not only does this include inbound channels like social, website and paid ads, but it also includes outbound channels like cold calling, emailing and attending events.
By diversifying the ways someone can find and learn about you, you can begin to increase your presence and exposure as a home care agency and reduce your risk of leads drying up.
This means that, no matter what, clients, families of ageng loved ones, social workers, case managers, managed care organizations and long-term care providers will find out about your agency one way or another, and your business will ultimately begin to grow.
A few inbound channels to consider include:
A few outbound channels to consider include:
Of course, targeting all of these channels when you’re just starting out is a labor-intensive thing to do, and it can be expensive.
You’ll likely lean on one or two channels for new business (like referrals and community events) for a while to come. But, over time and as you begin to develop efficient and effective strategies across all of these channels, they’ll begin to pay dividends.
The key? Stay organized and keep it consistent.
After all, slow and steady building on your messaging and channels will be what wins the competitive race.
Key takeaway – A strategy with defined processes is 466 percent more likely to deliver success.
Use your home care software to help you manage these channels and track where you are receiving your leads. All-inclusive home care software platforms can automate your lead tracking and give you insights into which channels are producing your best leads.
2 – Know your clients
Successful marketers are 242 percent more likely to perform audience research once per quarter. 56 percent of the best marketers conduct this research every month.
There is no end to the amount of work you can do researching the types of clients you want to attract to your agency. Sure, you might know right away that you’re targeting private-duty care clients, but you can get even more specific within home care as to whom trying to reach?
This can be geographic, like an area of the city you prefer; it could be individuals with special service needs where you provide specialized services like clients with memory care needs; it could be types of payers you prefer, private pay, long-term care insurance, VA for example.
More importantly, what are the characteristics of your ideal client, where do they go for information, and how do they digest new information?
Understanding who you are trying to target will increase the quality of leads you get through the door, giving you the best chance possible of converting client prospects into customers.
It will also help you prioritize the types of marketing materials you ought to focus on.
If clients or their families don’t use print media often, you know that your print strategy isn’t as important as, say, your website strategy.
Key takeaway – 82 percent of customers engage with multiple pieces of content from their provider before deciding to request their services.
Tracking potential clients through your sales pipeline and understanding the referral sources that brought them to you is incredibly valuable for adjusting your marketing strategy, optimizing and not wasting your precious marketing dollars.
Here again, make sure your home care software platform can help you make better marketing decisions with automation and tracking.
All in one home care platforms like Smartcare have advanced lead tracking and analytics to help you make the right marketing decisions without spending money on other third-party tools or not doing it at all.
3 – Invest in a good CRM platform
A holistic customer relationship management (CRM) platform is your key to landing and retaining business. While not as essential when marketing your business to new leads, a Home Care-specific CRM solution is the perfect marketing tool when it comes to contract renewals, upselling techniques and cross-selling strategies.
With a robust platform in place, your Home Care agency can begin to provide tailored and comprehensive care to patients, without breaking the bank or depleting resources.
It allows you to streamline things like caregiver management, family involvement and billing from under one roof, as well as manage internal processes like employee payroll and shift scheduling.
When it comes to providing an excellent service to clients/patients and improving retention rates, a CRM platform is your canary in the coal mine.
Ultimately, this platform should tie your entire business together and work to improve operational efficiencies across your agency.
Key takeaways – Agencies that track every inquiry for their home care services 40% more according to home care industry benchmarking studies.
Build your Marketing Strategy
How you are going to market your home care agency? the strategy and channels you are going to use are all important early things to consider as you are starting your agency.
Marketing will tell your prospects who you are, how you will help them, and how they can reach you to learn more.
Spending time early on to map out your strategy will help you launch more successfully and grow faster.
There’s an abundance of technologies out there for supporting your marketing your Home Care agency in today’s world. But almost none designed with home care in mind and come with high additional costs that are beyond the means of an entrepreneur starting a home care agency.
Most home care software systems have overlooked this critical component offering in their systems. That’s where Smartcare comes in.
With our fully-serviced marketing and CRM platform designed exclusively for home care that is built right into the Smartcare platform. Using Smartcare, home care agencies around the world are successfully building their go-to-market strategies that attract the right prospects and utilize all the tools needed to manage an agency effectively.
As a complete platform, the all-in-one Smartcare solution provides a complete platform for growing your business and giving you a competitive edge.