"How do I get results from marketing?"
or something along those lines is quite the common question asked by small business owners – home care owners not excluded.
Shortcomings in efforts to generate leads for your home care agency can be quite exhausting. And, when marketing becomes a cost – instead of an investment, it can evolve from being something to leverage growth and become inhibiting to your ability to maintain (let alone grow) your agency.
Rather than focus on a list of “what” to do to generate leads for your agency, I’m going to focus more on WHY-based modifications to consider infusing into your efforts to connect with prospective clients and caregivers.
STrategic Marketing
v.s. doing marketing for the sake of marketing
Before engaging in any form of marketing, it’s critical to determine what the End-Result will be. This goes beyond the simplest statements of “more clients” or “more revenue” or “more caregivers/office staff”. Take a moment to set specific (realistic) goals and steps within those goals that you aim to accomplish through a marketing campaign.
Let’s take the “need more clients” broad statement and illustrate how you can be more specific with a goal. Below are some questions you can ask yourself regarding adding clients before starting efforts to reach prospective clients:
- “How many additional clients (or – more specifically – client hours) will we need to consider our marketing efforts successful?”
- “How many hours on average would those clients need to schedule with us and how long should those clients stay with us to turn the marketing investment into a positive return?” (NOTE: Plan on revenue coming from clients under your care reflecting at the very least 3-5 times the cost to acquire them as a client. Otherwise, you are going to be in a loss position to get those clients.)
- “Based on our current rate of converting leads into assessments and assessments into onboarded clients, how many leads will we need to generate through our efforts? And, how many qualified assessments are needed to accomplish our goals?”
Setting realistic goals isn't settling. It's setting yourself up for quick wins that will fuel future goals.
Digital marketing – far more than traditional forms of marketing – provides a means to track results at several points in the journey from lead to onboarded client. Following this steps will help you focus on the correct metrics to hold yourself and any marketing agency you work with accountable to results that are required to consider lead generation activities successful.
