Home Care Marketing – How to Advertise My Home Care Business

Understanding Home Care Marketing

Home care marketing, which may also be referred to as domiciliary care marketing, is the process of promoting a service that provides care and support to individuals in their own homes. This approach offers a personalised and convenient alternative to care homes as it keeps people in familiar surroundings and allows them to maintain their independence. To succeed in marketing home care services, agencies need to understand the needs, preferences and priorities of their target audience. Adapting the service you provide and highlighting how you meet these needs will help you stand out from the rest.

Home Care Marketing Plan

Setting up a home care marketing plan is essential for services aiming to build a strong brand presence and attract new clients. We’ve covered 7 things you should do to build and how to successfully execute your very own home care marketing plan.

1.      Carry Out Market Analysis

Conduct thorough research on the home care market in your area. This will help you to understand your competitors, highlight their strengths and weaknesses, and identify gaps in the market that your agency can fill so you can stand out from the rest.

2.      Define Goals and Objectives

Set clear and achievable goals when marketing your service. This can consist of increasing inquiries, expanding your services or enhancing brand awareness. Well-defined objectives can be used to guide your home care marketing strategies (we will cover these in more detail).

3.      Know Your Target Audience

Take time to identify your target audience, demographics and their needs and preferences. Targeting the recipients of care is essential, but don’t forget to keep loved ones and caregivers in mind when making decisions for your business.  

4.      Outline Your Marketing Strategies

Make sure you define the strategy you plan to use to achieve your goals. This may consist of digital marketing for home care, social media, offline networking, content marketing for home care, and more. Outlining your strategies will make it easier to implement them. 

5.      Understand Your Tactics

You should break down each strategy into specific tactics. For example, if you plan to use social media marketing for home care services, tactics could include creating engaging content, running targeted ads and using methods to engage with your followers. Doing so will help you get the most out of each marketing strategy.

6.      Allocate Your Budget

Knowing your budget will allow you to streamline your strategies and tactics, as you will know how much you have to spend on each one. This ensures that you’re investing your resources wisely and getting the best possible return on your investment.

7.      Create a timeline

Putting a timeline in place outlining when you plan to execute each strategy and tactic will help you keep your marketing plan on track while improving your consistency, which will increase your chances of success in the long run.

Home Care Marketing Strategies

We have briefly covered the importance of home care marketing strategies, but what are they? Here are some examples of marketing strategies for home care services that you can consider:

• Build a professional website – Having an informative, well-designed and user-friendly online presence is crucial to success. Your website should include information about your services, the team, testimonials and contact information. Make sure it’s optimised for mobile devices and search engines.
• Use local SEO – Use local search terms throughout your website. This includes scattering keywords that potential service users in your area are likely to search for throughout your copy.
• Get into networking – Establishing relationships with healthcare professionals, hospitals and senior charities could lead to future referrals and partnerships. It will also show potential clients that you are passionate about health and social care.
• Offer free workshops – Host workshops or webinars on relevant topics such as senior care, medication management and fall prevention. This will showcase your agency as knowledgeable, informative and caring.
• Start using social media – One of the most obvious ways to begin self-promoting is through social media. It can vary in costs, but either way, it’s a great tool for any home care business/ You can add links to your website and articles written by yourself or professionals.
• Create a blog – Starting a blog is great for social media and it will boost your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), which is your visibility on a Google search. Blogs are a great way to build both credibility and professionalism in your home care business and share some of the great work your team is doing.
• Send out a monthly newsletter – This is a cost-effective way to communicate with your client base and all key stakeholders. A newsletter provides people with the opportunity to easily and immediately interact with your service, enhances your reputation and keeps you interesting.
• Make and post videos – Get creative and start making videos for your home care service. These help viewers engage with the business and if done correctly, will provide a personal touch to the digital content that those within the care sector are producing.
• A form submission box on the homepage – This can improve your Google ranking while ensuring vital information on potential clients and visitors to your website is gained and actioned at a later date once enough information has been collected.
• Be open to self-promotion – This includes showing off awards the service has received, writing articles about achievements, sharing good reviews from service users and their loved ones, and/or posting a high rating from your independent regulator for health and social care.

Home Care Marketing Ideas

There are some innovative home care marketing ideas you may want to consider. Firstly, there are virtual reality tours, which provide potential clients with an immersive experience of your service. Another idea is to collaborate with local influencers, bloggers or healthcare professionals to help you reach a wider audience. Finally, you could participate in local events, health fairs and workshops to connect with the community and showcase the expertise of your service.

Social Media Marketing for Home Care

Using social media marketing for home care is a marketing strategy you should take advantage of when trying to enhance your domiciliary care marketing. Social media marketing for home care consists of the following; creating engaging content, sharing client testimonials and posting visual content.

Home care content can consist of a variety of things, including informative articles, success stories and tips. As well as selling your service, sharing informative and engaging content related to home care, senior health and well-being will boost engagement and retention, build brand awareness and increase loyalty. When it comes to client testimonials, showcasing positive feedback and success stories from satisfied clients will build credibility and trust amongst potential clients. Finally, visual content in the form of images and videos allows you to introduce your team, offer a behind-the-scenes look at your care service and allows you to share educational content.

Digital Marketing for Home Care

Digital marketing for home care is another important marketing strategy, not only for your service but for your target audience. Potential service users and their loved ones will heavily rely on your online presence to find out more about what your home care service has to offer, client reviews and ratings. It allows you to get creative and stand out from your competition in congested markets and cost-effectively reach more people.

We’ve already covered the importance of social media, which falls into digital marketing. So, here are some more digital marketing techniques for your home care service to consider.

• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising – Running targeted PPC ads on platforms like Google Ads will help your care service appear at the top of search engine results for relevant keywords.
• SEO – As mentioned previously, good SEO can improve your ranking on search engine results. You can boost SEO by optimising your website’s content, meta tags and technical elements.
• Email marketing – Send out regular emails to subscribers, and share valuable content, updates and promotions related to domiciliary care services to keep people informed and engaged.
• Content marketing for home care – Consists of educational blog posts, Ebooks, guides and video content that offer practical advice on useful topics.

Be targeted – Whether with PPC advertising, SEO or email marketing you want to target people that your services are relevant to. For home care services this often means having a focus on your local area and/or targeting different localities separately.

Being targeted should give you a greater return on investment for any advertisement spend, or time taken in your SEO efforts for a few different reasons.

Firstly, being targeted means you are more likely to attract the people who will actually pay for your services because they are relevant to them. Secondly, both SEO and PPC are competitive games. It is going to be very difficult to ‘rank’ in a top position in Google searches for ‘home care services for the elderly’ because the target audience is so broad. Instead, targeting ‘home care services in Shrewsbury’ or ‘care at home in Swindon’ is going to have less overall competition.

The same applies to Google Ads, the more searches the higher the cost to ‘bid’ on those searches. But if you are advertising a webpage that contains lots of information that is relevant to the advert itself, for example, your page on your domiciliary care services in Leicestershire, then your ‘quality score’ will be higher and the price of bidding for clicks will be less than a competitor who is linking to a less relevant page.

How to Market Home Care Services

Effective home care marketing requires a strategic approach and planning that combines both traditional and digital marketing strategies. Crafting a well-defined marketing plan, doing your research and using a variety of home care marketing strategies will help you promote your home care business and help you stand out from the crowd. Whether you are a well-established home care business or are just starting your domiciliary care business there are so many ways to make your message out there and showcase the great care you and your team provide.

To help you maintain a flawless reputation, boost your CQC rating (or relevant independent regulator rating) and improve the management, culture and job satisfaction of your colleagues, we at Access highly recommend digitising your care business. We have a fantastic range of award-winning home care management software that can help you deliver outstanding joined-up care and manage your resources effectively. In return, the right software will give you more time to dedicate to delivering quality care.

If you are setting up a new care business you should take a look at our home care business startup package Access Care Foundations, which gives you the best software to set up, manage and grow your agency with exclusive discounts for new and small home care providers.

We at The Access Group have been digitising various care services across the world for over 30 years, so we know what you need to succeed. Get in touch today to book a demo or speak to one of our experts, they will help you learn more about what our care management solutions can do for you.