Modern Home Care Marketing: 17 Super-Specific Tips to Get More Home Care Clients in 2022
Home care marketing isn’t easy; however, there’s so much demand for home-based care that with the right strategy and processes, you can get a business off the ground fairly quickly.
I grew a service business 7 figures in 3 years. Then I taught at a university, led agency education and marketing at Home Care Pulse, and managed the Home Care Benchmarking Study for a few years. Now I work at Careswitch — but more on that later.
Based on my experience, here are 17 things I suggest doing to get more clients and grow your home care agency.
1. Launch a client referral program as soon as possible.
Every home care agency wants new client referrals, but too many rely passively on word of mouth rather than putting a system in place to incentivize their clients.
I recommend setting a specific incentive (example, 20% off a week of services) if someone they refer starts services with your agency. Then plan on how to communicate this across various channels, consistently over time so that everybody knows about it.
Personally thank clients for every referral they send you.
2. Use community Facebook groups for market research.
These are a massive underrated source of market research (and even marketing). Find groups in your area, then search them for mentions of home care, senior care, etc.
It’s a good way to see if there are needs that aren’t being met, common complaints with the home care agencies in your area, or talking points that will hit home while you’re in assessments or writing ads.
3. Experiment with Nextdoor — especially if you’re looking for your first 2–3 clients.
Nextdoor is an underrated social media platform you may or not be using — it requires you to verify your physical address, so that the people in your network are the people in your neighborhood/community.
What I’ve noticed is that local businesses, especially service businesses, tend to have a lot of success on Nextdoor. My theory is that the guaranteed local-ness and human-to-human nature of it breeds a degree of trust.
All you really need to do is post to your community letting people know about your home care services, maybe include a picture of yourself and your team, and mention what makes you unique. Occasionally just share a post expressing gratitude for the community or giving a tip on how to help the seniors in the community. Rinse and repeat every so often.
4. Use your expertise to make some kind of easy-to-digest guide (can even be a video) that you can use to educate referral source on in-home care.
You very likely have knowledge about your sphere of care they don’t. Figure out what would help them succeed in their jobs and make content about it. Nothing will build your reputation as a good referral source faster.
5. Hold Lunch and Learns with referral sources.
This piggybacks off the last source, but done properly it’s even more effective because it’s a stronger relationship-builder.
For a partner you know has the capacity to be a strong referral pipeline, arrange lunch for their staff and turn the content you’ve created into an informative, hopefully even entertaining 20–30 minute presentation.
Make it engaging and be sure to have Q+A.
6. Get as many Google Reviews as possible — even if there’s an occasional negative review.
Aside from having an accurate, up-to-date Google listing for your business, volume of reviews is the #1 factor that determines whether you appear at the top of local Google listings.
7. Respond to every review within a few days of posting.
***Whether the review is positive or negative!***
This sends a strong message that you’re engaged, listening, and communicated to improving no matter how good your agency already is.
If it’s positive, thank the client for their review.
If it’s negative, invite them to reach out to you personally to talk about the experience and provide your email or phone number.
Quick shameless plug: I hope this is helpful. By the way, I work for Careswitch — a new home care software built for growing home care agencies. It’s built by a team of crazy talented designers and engineers with initials like MIT, IBM, and PhD on their resumes, and customers are loving the simplicity and ease of use. We even have dedicated engineers who take your feedback and use it to add the features that are most important to you. If you want to try it out for free without talking to a sales person, you can get started here.
8. Plan to work with referral sources for several months before you start to see results.
Relationships of any kind take time. The number I’ve typically heard is that you should plan to visit the typical referral source 8–12 times before getting referrals.
9. Don’t overlook non-healthcare referral partners.
This is a huge one. Sources like skilled nursing facilities and home health agencies are prime ways that most home care agencies get new clients, but it can be easy to overlook other types of professionals — especially for newer agencies.
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Some often-overlooked types of non-healthcare referral partners include financial planners, CPAs, insurance brokers, banks, and social workers.
10. Read this post and draw inspiration from it. :)
Jessica is a wise home care consultant and good friend of mine. I’ll drop the link to this group in the next tip.
11. Join Facebook communities and learn from other agency owners in them.
Here are a few I recommend:
- Home Care Operators Community (tell them Connor sent you)
- Home Care Breakthrough Scaling Systems For Agency Owners
- Home Health Care Agency Professionals Network
12. Look into internet lead sites like A Place For Mom and Caring.com.
You may already be using this, but it’s worth a mention. The trick is that they typically sell leads to multiple home care agencies — so be ready to jump on them quickly when the leads come in.
13. Don’t seek new clients referrals from partners unless you’re prepared to staff them.
One of the worst things you can do for your referral partnerships it consistently be unable to staff them. With hiring caregivers as one of the greatest challenges for most home care agencies right now, make sure the effort you’re putting into referral relationships is balanced against your ability to staff.
14. Be prepared to spend twice as much time recruiting as you do marketing and selling.
This is a general rule of thumb for many agencies right now. As of last year, several sources reported that around 90% of agencies were occasionally or consistently turning down clients due to a lack of caregivers.
Always be recruiting, and treat recruiting the way you would marketing.
Here’s a great guide to caregiver recruitment.
15. Plan to hire your first marketer at around 1k weekly billable hours or $1M in annual revenue, whichever comes first.
This will obviously depend on the needs of your individual home care agency, but it’s a good general rule of thumb.
16. If you’re launching Facebook Ads, uncheck the box for Audience Expansion.
Audience Expansion is basically a way to make sure your Facebook ads reach a much wider group of people; however, it usually means that rather than using specific targeting to reach whatever type of person you’ve identified as being the most likely to apply for your job (for example, those who have liked caregiving pages on Facebook and live within your geographic area), your ads are hitting a larger and less relevant group of people.
In other words, you’re likely to end up paying more money for the same — or less — results.
If it’s often so unhelpful, why does it exist?
Audience Expansion helps Facebook make more revenue, so it’s good for Facebook but often not ideal for advertisers.
When you’re creating Facebook ads, the Audience Expansion button is near the bottom of this screen.
17. Plan to touch base with at least 20 referral sources per week.
“Touching base” can include anything like:
- An in-person meeting at their location of for coffee or lunch
- An event where you run into a referral partner and have time to talk
- A phone conversation
- An email where you get a response
- A Zoom meeting or educational event
Here’s a quick piece that Tim Murray, who build a $5M home care agency in only a few years, wrote about it.
One highly underrated form of touching bases with referral sources is to send a customized video message to their email through a software like BombBomb.
A Few More Resources About Home Care Marketing And Sales
Here’s a gigantic fairly all-encompassing guide to home care marketing I write awhile ago.
Here’s something called the Frequently Asked Questions of Home Care, where experts (generally super-successful agency owners) answer the hyper-specific questions that every home care owner asks at some point.
And here’s a link to what I’m fairly sure is the only free(mium) home care software, Careswitch. It’s extremely intuitive, has all the features you need, and is the only home care agency management software that you can use for free without talking to a salesperson.
(In case you missed it before: yes, I work there. But I wouldn’t be recommending it unless I were also danged proud of it.)
Now go get some more home care clients.
Here’s to your marketing success!
