It's time to take the plunge in 2012 and do what the smart home care business owners are doing!
What's that you ask?
1. Getting rid of home care marketing strategies that aren't generating clients. That includes yellow pages, print, radio, tv, and websites! (Did I say that? Did Valerie say WEBSITES? WOW!)
2. What I really mean is that smart home care agency owners are having a HOME CARE LEAD GENERATION website created for them. Small investment, huge return. There are some very specific factors that go into a TRUE LEAD GENERATING website. Call to action, special secret codes, Google happy content, less junk, more direction, keyword optimized with only the BEST keywords that consumers type in to find your services.
3. Have an Exclusive Home Care Lead Generation Program designed and implemented just for your office. Gone are (or should be) the days of relying on leads that are parsed out to 3-4 other providers- hacking off the consumer, and making the lead almost worthless.
4. Get rid of the old thinking about Pay-Per-Click Home Care Leads (assuming you've ever tried it) and take a fresh look at what WORKS and what WASTES your money.
5. Consider having your home care lead generation website "optimized" for mobile as opposed to being just "mobile friendly" - there is a big difference! A mobile friendly site will show up on a smart phone (the whole site, really small). A mobile "optimized site" gives the viewer on the mobile phone EXACTLY what they want so that they can reach you fast!
6. Closing home care leads- Have you listened to what an incoming call sounds like in your office? Really? We have, and guess what, we all have a lot to learn! Your phone answering person is the first line of marketing in your office. Talking too fast, too slow, putting people on perpetual hold, sounding irritated or uninterested is DEATH to any service provider. You have a lot of competition out there, don't drive them away by how the phone is being answered. Lead programs should be recording calls so that you can not only listen to the playback, but you can help your staff learn more about phone answering techniques.
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Melanie Stover from HomeCareSales.com and The Home Care Sales and Marketing Society gives us this advice on closing more leads by paying attention to how the phone is answered:
"Home care agencies would do a great service to themselves and their potential clients if they started at the beginning with a uniform effective live greeting. This means dump the phone trees. Have a live person answer with the name of the agency, their own name and a question.
Example: "ABCD Home Care, this is Melanie, how may i help you?" (Slow, pleasant, cheerful, sincere voice)
Most agency owners think this is getting done but it is not. This sounds simple but we listen to 100s of recorded calls a year where the caller is not sure they called the right place by the way the phone was answered.
Next the caller needs a great opened ended question.
Example: Hi Mary, what prompted your call today?
Let the caller talk.
Most of the time we can fill out an entire inquiry form with that one question, and a few follow up questions.
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Then we have "LEAD CARE for HOME CARE AGENCIES". "Lead Care" is an entire follow up system designed to send specific messages out to your leads on a regular basis, including a monthly e-newsletter. Follow-up failure is not an option in this economic environment. Therefore, "LEAD CARE" eliminates the problem and increases your bottom line.
Aligning yourself with the right home care marketing agencies and following the lead of other successful home care business owners will make 2012 one of the best yet!
Talk to us and let us know what kind of questions you have. We have answers! (and lead programs :))
Valerie VanBooven RN BSN
George Novoson
See our client samples: http://MySeniorService.com
Register for our webinars and marketing videos: http://LTCSocialMark.com
Posted via email from Marketing Elder Care and Marketing Senior Services
