I sat in on a very informative webinar this morning sponsored by Corecubed, a marketing agency that helps owners of home care (private duty) companies with their marketing.
Our company SeniorCareMarketer.com and Corecubed have a lot in common in that we believe in leveraging "content" with a combination of traditional and Web 2.0 marketing/PR tactics to build visibility of your company and drive leads.
The speaker on the webinar, Merili Orsini, spoke a lot about the "spectrum of care options" for in-home care and the marketing strategy of marketing to "referral targets". Good stuff. Merili gave an excellent presentation - she knows what she is talking about.
The webinar got me thinking about in-home care and marketing. The growth of in-home care agencies is staggering. Several prominent business publications have identified home care as one of the top franchising opportunity at the moment. Generally speaking, there are two types of in-home care companies - franchises and locally owned independent agencies. Some well known providers include:
- Aegin Place
- Always Best Care
- Caring Hearts
- Comforcare
- Comfort Keepers
- Home Care Assistance
- Home Health Mates
- Home helpers
- Home Instead
- Homewatch CareGivers
- LivHOME
- Right at Home
- Seniors Helping Seniors
- Synergy HomeCare
- Visiting Angels
As the primary caregiver for my mom I've had some experience (as a buyer of home care services) with in-home care - from hourly to full time live-ins. In fact, while researching potential agencies for my mom, I've spoken with most of the companies listed above as well as a handful of independently owned firms. I've had great experiences and I've had some horrible experiences (where what was promised was not even close to being delivered).
There are a lot of ways to effectively brand and market your home care agency which I'm not going to get into in this blog posting. But I do want to make two very important points that many home care agencies are not aware of or at least their marketing does not reflect it.
Point #1 - You May Be a Local Agency But Many of Your Customers (Buyers) Are Not
You are probably having great success with your local marketing activities from advertising (print/Yellow Pages, cable TV, radio, display), sponsorships, trades show exhibiting, direct marketing, etc.) but these campaigns are just that - local. Many of your buyers (e.g., caregivers) are long-distance (e.g., live greater than 50 miles from the personal they are caring for) and they may not be seeing your campaigns. Consider these long distance caregiving facts:
- The number of long-distance caregivers in the U.S. who are caring for an older relative range are between 5 million and 7 million. Long-distance caregivers are generally defined as living more than one hour from the older adult needing assistance. - Source: National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP.
- Caregivers live an average of 480 miles from the people for which they care. - Source: Long Distance Caregiver Project - Alzheimer's Association LA & Riverside, Los Angeles, CA.
As a result, regardless of the size of your business, you should be easily found online and dedicate a significant amount of resources to SEO, online marketing and of course make sure you have a great web site. This is also why Corecubed's markeitng strategy of targeting referral targets is so important. And why our product, SeniorCareMarketer is so valuable.
Point #2 - The Most Valuable Service You Can Provide During the Buying Process is Information, Guidance and Support - FOR FREE!
Think of this as sampling or a loss leader in marketing lingo. Most buyers of in home care services are not the actual people who need the service. The buyers are the children or other family members of the person needing in home care. And most of these people have no experience with elder care. Unlike child care where parents have plenty of time to prepare for their child's care needs (e.g., throughout pregnancy) elder care needs typically arise with no advanced notice. So the most valuable service you can provide these buyers is information, guidance and support. Yet, call any in-home care agency and most will connect you to a sales rep who lead right into a sales pitch about their firm. As competition heats up in this field, I would advise in-home care companies to hire or contract with geriatric case managers who can spend one or two hours providing free consultation with the prospect. Sure, this will increase your selling/operational costs and you may even talk some people out of in-home care (if it is the right decision) but my hunch is your buyers will be grateful for the service and this in turn will reward you with increased business. And it makes for some great branding and marketing campaigns. And who knows, you may even be able to turn the new offering into a profitable consulting or resource and referral service.
Very good advice. SOE is a very important aspect of doing homecare business. Based out of Toronto, Canada, it's not uncommon for us to recieve calls from adult-children caregivers on the west coast on behalf of their parents here in Toronto.
I hope you will go further into the "ways to effectively brand and market your home care agency which [you're] not going to get into" in an upcoming post.
Posted by: James Watson - Premier Homecare Services | March 12, 2009 at 01:28 PM