Today we’re happy to share a guest blog post by Debbie Miller, co-founder and President of Marketing at 52 Weeks Marketing LLC, whose referrer engagement toolkit is designed to serve the home care industry. In addition to this blog post, Miller also joined us for a special webinar presentation on March 27 to share more information about how the changing landscape of home care will affect your marketing efforts and how their system will keep you prepared.
There’s plenty of business out there, but how do you best get it?
Caregivers are harder to hire and retain, and there are more and more home care providers coming into the market every day. The aging population is growing, and more people are needing home care services, shopping for the best price “provider” in their local community.
The demand for home care services in your community is definitely there. In a community of 300,00 people, 45,000 are aged over 65 years, and 2 in 3 have two or more chronic conditions. One in ten in this age group suffers from Dementia, and the number grows to three in ten for those aged over 80 years.
So, the business is there, but why is it so hard to get regular referrals and leads from local area marketing campaigns? The reality is that, whilst company or corporate advertising is great for building the brand, it rarely helps when trying to get “the business”, competing with a multitude of other agencies in the local marketplace. The bottom line is that, without any point of difference to your competitors, and having a rigorous method of reaching health care referrers when they are dealing with families in crisis when the patient needs home care services, you end up doing what everyone else does. And what does everyone else do?
Rely too much on digital marketing, SEO, and the internet, and bemoan why your marketer is not producing the referrals that you expect and need to grow your business.
What many agencies don’t realize, is that 80% of the home care revenue comes from health care industry referrals, and only 20% from friends and family members shopping on the internet for services. When a person is shopping for services, they are quite often unaware of the care the family member needs and what it will cost, and many are not ready to start anyway. Most agencies and their marketers are only fishing in the online pond, without a system or method to reach into the referrer pond where very few people are fishing.
So how do you reach the health care referrers, at that patient point of need, with a business reason to be there…pretty much every week??
It makes sense to gear your business up to be able to capitalize on the opportunities that are all around in your local community every day of the week.
- About a marketing system, with sales management software included, that will help you motivate, manage, and hold your marketers accountable
- How the changing healthcare landscape will impact home care providers
- What it takes to compete today and in-the-future
- How to position your company within the care continuum and capitalize on opportunities to grow your business
- How to move your community relationships to partnerships
Register for this valuable marketing webinar by clicking here now!