Nowadays, without a proper marketing plan, every business will suffer. Especially, if you have a senior care agency. Your clients are a specific group and reaching and gaining their trust can be challenging. Therefore, you must write a proper senior care marketing plan to grow your business.
In this article, we would like to discuss just that.
Before You Start: How to Write a Senior Care Marketing Plan?
To write a complete senior care marketing you need to spend a lot of time and decide how are you going to approach it, which tactics you should add to the plan and which ones should be skipped. Whether you are operating a senior care community or hospice care, you shouldn’t delay or forget about the content marketing aspect of the organization.
Any company needs a marketing plan as much as it needs a business plan. Here are 5 sections you need to include in your marketing plan.
Summary
This is counted as the introduction of your marketing plan. In this section, you have to write an overview of your business. This is a good starting point to compare the business from the moment you write this plan to the coming months.
Simply write a short description of any products and services you are currently offering, the challenges your business is facing and even threats caused by your competitors.
Describe anything that affects your business in the coming months or years. For example, office renovation, changes in law, etc.
Target Your Market
This is by far the simplest section in the senior care marketing plan. Simply, write a bulleted description of your target market. Then, write a profile based on the demographics of the targeted audience. For example, their gender, age and other important information that may come handy in the future.
Achievement
It’s very important to define a goal for this marketing plan. This goal must be realistic and measurable so that you can see how well your business has done in the last year. When you have defined a goal, you will have a better understanding of the marketing progress and how it should be achieved.
Tactics
This section could be the longest and bulkiest section of your marketing plan and you should spend as much time as possible on the making of this section. You need to write an overview of your strategies and come up with at least one tactic for each of them.
Budget
The final section must be a breakdown of the costs of your business and each of the tactics you have written down in the step above. By doing so, you can prepare yourself for each of the tactics.
1. Senior Care Content Marketing: Start a website and attract visitors
Most people tend to research online before finalizing their decision, whether it’s about purchasing an item, reading a review about a restaurant or even looking up for a nearby senior care agency. Most people look for a senior care agency they can trust loved ones with.
To promote your senior care agency, especially in the digital world, you need to start a website where you can showcase your services and even testimonials of your clients. There are 3 main points you need to consider when it comes to senior care content marketing.
If you don’t already have a website, we recommend creating one with the WordPress platform since it’s flexible, SEO-friendly, easy to work with and most importantly free.
So, what are the 3 main points you need for content marketing?
Blogging for a senior care marketing plan
The whole idea of blogging is to drive more traffic to your website through organic search. However, it can also help you grow traffic from social media and email.
Ultimately, this helps your business get discovered by those who haven’t noticed your senior care community yet. Besides, by publishing informative articles your visitors who enjoy what you are posting could potentially become clients soon.
Local SEO
Local SEO is very important in getting your senior care agency noticed. In another article, we have explained what is local SEO and how to optimize it. One of the main reasons to invest time and money in local SEO is to simply reach out to more people. Local SEO works in multiple ways to highlight your physical location.
If you have invested enough time on your local SEO, whenever someone searches for a ‘nearby senior care agency’ in Google, they may be able to find you. If you haven’t started optimizing your local SEO and don’t know where to start, follow the steps below.
PinPoint Your Location on Google My Business
Google My Business is a free tool and comes with a lot of benefits for your business. Simply, Google your business and click on “claim this business”. Then, Google will begin the process to verify your identity. Once this is done, you can finish your profile with location, business working hours, photos, reviews, etc.
Add Photos
People always interact better with pictures than with words. Having a few pictures can probably say more about your business than hundreds of words. Having high-quality pictures of your location invites residents and their family members to visit you.
Ask for Ratings and Reviews
There are millions of reviews posted online about different products and businesses and you may think that consumers don’t pay that much attention to those reviews.
Well, they do. Reviews are often considered as a personal recommendation. According to statistics, more than 80% of potential customers read and trust reviews before making any decision.
Use Social Media
Social media cannot be ignored. In today’s day and age, most businesses consider social media as the backbone of their business. It may be slow at first, much like anything else you start from scratch. However, when you get the hang of it, posting on social media gets easier and easier.
Sure, you can hire a social media manager but that would increase your initial budget. Start by posting pictures of your agency, customers, and services.
But which social media is considered the best for business?
As part of your senior care marketing plan, you need to reach out to your audience wherever they are on social media.
According to statistics, there are billions of people using Facebook and its apps such as Instagram. So, we can conclude that Facebook is the biggest social media platform where you can find potential customers.
Most senior care agencies have personas that include adult children of the elderly who may be thinking about future care for their parents.
Much like Yelp Reviews and Google Reviews, Facebook comes with the ability to publish reviews (Facebook Reviews). Thus, having an active presence on these websites and interacting with your audience can greatly help your marketing efforts.
3. Social Care Email Marketing: Generate leads and use them to your advantage
Email marketing is part of any good sales funnel. These emails will be sent out automatically to your users after they have subscribed to your newsletter. This tactic should be used to build a relationship with your subscribers.
Use email responses and clicks to segment your list. For example, whenever someone clicks on a link, they are clearly interested in that link. Tag that person and market similar services to them.
But how can email marketing generate leads?
Offer Something Special
Would you open an email that gives you the same information you can find anywhere else? You will either delete it or keep it for later.
However, whenever you receive a special offer in the email, you open it immediately. In senior care email marketing, you need to offer something special. This can be an exclusive offer, a freebie or anything related to your senior care agency.
Send Personalized Emails
Personalizing emails are very important. The most common way to do so is to address your audience by their names. However, this is not the best way. Many experts believe, too much familiarity too soon sounds fake and awkward. Send emails with content tailored to their needs and interests.
Create Newsletter
Sending out a weekly or monthly newsletter is proven to get you the results that you need. You can simply send out a newsletter to your subscribers with tips and articles related to your senior care agency. When you send high-quality information, it will boost the trust between you and your audience.
Make it Responsive
Nowadays, more than 60% of emails are opened and read on mobile devices. Most people receive a new email notification on their smartphones and tend to open it straight away.
So, you need to make sure the emails you send out regularly are optimized for a small screen. Otherwise, the subscribers will definitely delete the email or keep it for later which will be forgotten in most cases.
4. Senior Care Advertisement Strategy: Use print and online opportunities
Whether you are running a physical store or an online store, you need to advertise your business. Advertising should be affordable and targeted at a local audience. Where can you run affordable and beneficial ads?
Create Accounts on Local Business Directories
Yelp and Yahoo are both great business directories that you can use to find people and run inexpensive advertisements. Besides, people tend to post reviews on both Yelp and Yahoo. So, you can count on word-of-mouth marketing from happy clients.
Flyers
Post flyers about your business on message boards of your local libraries and community centers.
Use retargeting with Facebook ads
There 2 billion active users on Facebook, chances are some of your website visitors are amongst them, which gives you the chance to use Facebook ads and retarget them and convert them into potential customers.