The primary focus of any home care business is to provide the best possible care to their clients. However, effective marketing is a key component that brings awareness to your brand and lets your community know just how great your services are.
This guide will provide you with the latest home care marketing tactics to boost client acquisition and retention, so let’s get started!
Understand The Target For Home Care Services
Any successful marketing campaign needs to first have a complete understanding of its target audience before deploying the best methods to reach them.
For home care services, the target audience is composed of seniors 65 and older suffering from disabilities, recovering from illness, or any sort of age-related health decline.
While targeting the consumers of home care service is important, those 65 and older often aren’t the ones making the important healthcare decisions– it’s their children. That’s why it’s also important for your marketing material to appeal to adult children between the ages of 40 and 60.
Home Care Marketing Strategies
There are a variety of advertising mediums, both digital and non-digital, that home care marketers can use to great effect. So, let’s dive into some of the best channels to utilize.
Search Engine Optimization
In our increasingly digital landscape, it’s crucial for any business to understand how to drive organic traffic to their online presence.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the use of specific keywords and phrases throughout your business website to result in higher rankings in search platform listings.
To do this, you’ll need to conduct keyword research on what consumers are most likely to type in when searching for home care services. These keywords could include things like “elderly home care”, “senior care at home” or “in-home nursing care”.
With your list of keywords and phrases, the next step is to place them throughout your website’s meta tags, titles, headings, and content. It’s a good idea to include additional sections on your website to maximize the content available to optimize. These sections could be things like FAQ pages, or a dedicated page entitled “Comprehensive Home Health Care Services”.
Local SEO
A stunning 86% of consumers use Google Maps when looking for local goods and services, which makes it an essential tool for home care businesses.
The first step to optimizing your home care service for Google Maps is to set up your Google My Business profile and claim your listing. Search engines rank businesses with up-to-date profiles higher, so be sure to provide information such as your company number, address, and operating hours.
Google also favors businesses with the most 4- and 5-star reviews online, so be sure to solicit your existing client base to leave you a positive review.
Online Paid Advertisement
While SEO can certainly drive online traffic to your home care brand, it can be difficult and take a lot of work to appear in the top search listings. Luckily, there are paid advertising mediums that can be just as effective.
Google Pay-Per-Click Ads
Google pay-per-click ads work as the name would suggest: it places your practice in the top three search listings for keywords of your choosing, and you only pay when users click through to your website.
These ads can use precise targeting, letting you reach users in your area that search for things like “home health care providers” or “New York caregiver agency”.
On these sponsored search listings, you’ll be able to include a few sentences of ad copy below the link to your website. It’s crucial to use this space to the fullest extent and highlight your unique selling points (USPs), such as 24/7 availability, highly trained staff, or personalized care plans.
You should also add extensions to the ad with your business number and location. These sponsored ads can direct consumers back to your website landing page or even to a custom landing page that emphasizes your USPs.
Social Media Ads
User data on things like age, location, interests, and search history is constantly being collected by social media companies. Many view this as a breach of privacy, but it does allow advertisers to precisely target their primary audience.
For example, your home care business could run a Facebook advertising campaign that appears in the feeds of seniors and their children within your service area. Your advertisements could be even more specified, allowing you to reach those who’ve recently searched terms like “home care services” or “elderly care”.
Traditional Marketing
Online advertising has certainly revolutionized the marketing industry, but traditional mediums can still have an advantage in terms of boosting brand awareness and connecting with your local community.
Wellness boards
Wellness boards dispense sanitizing wipes from below a prominently featured advertisement and can be placed at retail storefronts as well as pharmacy wait areas.
What’s great about this out-of-home (OOH) advertising medium is that it drives impressive levels of engagement because it encourages consumers to stop for a moment, take a wipe, and view the sponsored business.
Terraboost is an innovator in this advertising medium and independent studies have shown that 80% of shoppers take a wipe from their sanitizing kiosks and that 50% would take a coupon or brochure to learn more about the featured business.
In addition to the engaging nature of this marketing medium, Terraboost can equip its sanitizing kiosks with retargeting and geofencing capabilities. These are digital tools that trace shoppers’ anonymized mobile data to track the number of impressions and even send them online advertisements at a later date.
Home care services are one of the best types of businesses to use this advertising medium as it allows you to feature your brand at the most prominent supermarkets, malls, and pharmacy wait areas within your area– ensuring that your target audience will engage with your ad material.
Millennials tend not to respond to mail advertisements, but seniors and their adult children do at impressive rates– 78% of those over the age of 55 read direct mail the same day it is delivered and bring it inside their residence!
Direct mail advertisements can be a great way to form a connection with your existing clientele and send personalized messages to prospective ones. Here are just a few ideas to get you started:
- Personalized postcards for seniors: These postcards can highlight the companionship that your services provide and be accompanied by warm imagery and a caring message.
- Informative brochures for family caregivers: It is often the family members taking care of their loved ones that make the ultimate decision to seek professional help. So, direct mail that speaks to how you can alleviate their burdens can be extremely convincing.
- Supportive letters to recent hospital discharges: These supportive letters can address the importance of proper aftercare and outline the benefits of your specialized in-home medical attention.
Print Media
Only 26% of the overall population read newspapers. However, 46% of seniors and over a third of those aged 55 to 64 read newspapers on a daily basis. As such, featuring your services in a local newspaper and accompanying it with caring imagery can provide a big boost in client conversions.
Other print mediums to utilize are magazines, brochures, and event pamphlets. What’s great about brochures and pamphlets is that they are relatively low cost and can be placed in areas and businesses that your target audience is most likely to frequent.
Reviews And Testimonials
Reviews and testimonials are one of the best ways to encourage prospective clients to place trust in your services.
Your website landing page is ideal real estate to feature the most notable reviews of your home care practice. This ensures that it will be the first thing online users see when they visit your site and will certainly leave an impression on them.
In addition to reviews, video testimonials of former and current clients or their family members can be even more effective in converting new consumers. Social media posts are a fitting medium to feature these testimonials as it’s easy for users to engage, share, and comment on them.
Content Marketing
We’ve discussed quite a few ways to drive organic online traffic to your practice, but content marketing is an additional tactic that can compound your SEO efforts.
Home care practices can conduct content marketing by publishing informative articles and blogs relevant to their areas of expertise. Topics could include things like “Caring for Elderly Loved Ones at Home” or “Benefits of In-Home Physical Therapy”.
Throughout these articles and blogs, include those keywords and phrases from your SEO research.
It’s important to note that these articles and blogs can boost organic traffic in another way too. One important search engine criterion is Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T). By publishing high-quality, informative blogs and articles, search engines will recognize your practice as a trusted community educator and rank you higher in the search listings as a result.
Social Media Marketing
Paid social media advertising can be a great medium for home care marketers to use, but actively posting on various social media platforms can be a unique way to connect with your target audience– half of seniors and 73% of those between the ages of 50 and 64 use Facebook.
Your social media posts can put a friendly face on your practice and allow you to share special events, testimonials, or informational posts on elderly care.
Referral Programs
With all the digital and non-digital advertising mediums available to marketers, it’s easy to forget the power of word-of-mouth marketing.
Referral programs are a crucial asset for healthcare service providers to use considering that these businesses are built on interpersonal relationships and trust; and nothing encourages consumers to trust a brand more than a recommendation from a friend or family member.
Consider using incentives like discounted services or gift card giveaways to recruit your patients and their family members into your referral program.
Build A Strong Network
Since home care providers are in the relationship-building business, forging a strong connection with local businesses and groups will greatly increase your brand awareness and solidify your practice as an active community member.
One way to do this is to connect with other healthcare providers, pharmacies, and other businesses to create local partnerships. Many businesses are more than happy to partner with homecare service providers because it can drive a substantial number of mutual referrals.
Aside from partnering with local businesses, here are some ideas on how to connect with your community members:
- Educational workshops: You can position your practice as a knowledgeable resource by hosting workshops that cover topics like senior health, caregiving tips, and home safety.
- Health fairs: Booths at health fairs are a great way to meet prospective clients face to face and distribute brochures and pamphlets.
- Offer support groups: Organizing support groups in which family caregivers get to share their experiences, challenges, and strategies will showcase your brand as a caring community member and let you promote how your services can alleviate their stress.
Deploying a successive home care marketing campaign can be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. We at Terraboost have worked with countless healthcare brands and can provide you with key industry insights and a free personalized quote.
Your home care practice could soon be featured on our network of 120,000+ wellness boards that are displayed at the storefronts of supermarkets like Harris Teeter and Giant as well as the pharmacy wait areas of Walgreens, Rite Aid, and CVS.
