Driving new client or resident leads for your care business

Balancing the demand for new clients with staffing levels is vital for the successful running and growth of your care business.

A steady supply of new, quality enquiries is essential to keep occupancy rates and home care services high. To ensure your inbox stays full and your phone keeps ringing, you can implement a range of tactics to drive new leads and increase interest in your care home by following these established and result-proven tactics:

Local SEO

Ensure your Google My Business account is fully optimised and populated. Posting to the platform via Google My Business posts as frequently as you can will massively increase your chances of ranking for localised search terms, such as ‘care home + location’. Encouraging reviews will also increase your prominence so encourage happy customers to leave them at all opportunities.

Google Ads

Google Ads give you fantastic control on where and how you appear in Google searches and you can quickly flex adverts to react to your needs to increase capacity at your care home. So if you are at full occupancy, you can scale back spend. Or if you have multiple care homes, you can flex the spend and needs to cater for your multiple locations needs.

We advise having two distinct campaign types:

– Local

Local targets generic terms e.g. ‘luxury care home’ which is limited to within a 5/10 mile radius of your care home. This will ensure you capture those who are closest to you and who are likely to be more engaged

– National

A national campaign targets the whole of the UK but only bids on localised terms e.g. ‘luxury care home in St Albans’. This will ensure you are visible to people who are researching care options for friends and relatives that live in a different part of the country to where the care home or services are required.

Content strategy

A great way to stand out in a highly competitive marketplace is by delivering thought leadership pieces to your target audiences. This will also improve your website’s trust signals with Google and have a positive impact on your organic visibility.

You have extremely knowledgeable staff, so tap into this knowledge and encourage them to share their expertise in the form of blog content. This will increase your visibility within Google and also improve conversion rates from visitors that reach the site. Content created using your residents input, whether its a Q&A or an activity-related piece, will also improve conversion rates. This has the added value of building trust with your prospective customers and their families, as well as with your existing residents and their relatives.

Reviews and Testimonials

Choosing a care home is a difficult and emotional decision. Reviews and testimonials are therefore extremely valuable. Both help to reassure prospective clients that they are making the right decision and that their loved ones will be well cared for.

We recommend using Google My Business to start building reviews as these are highly visible with Google search results and they can also be added to your site in the form of testimonials. This post covers the topic in more detail.

Awards and Accreditations

In addition to reviews and testimonials, Awards and accreditations are another great way to build trust with your audience. Ensure any badges or award logos are displayed prominently on your website. Also include them within the email signature of all team members who have customer facing roles in your business.

Summary

By implementing and maintaining a combination of these tactics, you will ensure your care services are found by the people who need them, at the time they are looking for them. Some can be actioned quickly and easily, others may require some additional planning and upkeep, but you will find this tactical activity worthwhile to help you drive new, quality leads into your business.