Home care marketing is often copied from care home marketing, and it fits badly. A care home has rooms, a building and a visit that does most of the persuading. A home care agency has a patch, a rota and carers who are already driving between calls. What you can sell depends on where those carers are this month, and the family deciding has nothing to walk round.
Start with capacity
Before you spend a pound on reaching new clients, look at the rota. Which towns and postcodes could take another package of care next week without a carer driving forty minutes between calls? Which times of day are full? Morning calls are usually the hardest to staff. Lunch and tea calls are easier.
Market those patches and those hours, and nothing else. An advert that brings in a family from a village you cannot staff does worse than waste the click. It raises a family's hopes at a hard moment and then turns them down, and some of them say so in a review.
When the rota fills, pause the advertising for that area. When you recruit in a new town, start advertising there. Your marketing budget should follow your carers.
Two people are searching for home care in your town
Type "home care" and the name of your town into Google, and two kinds of people are doing the same. One is a daughter looking for help for her mother. The other is someone looking for work as a carer. Unless you tell Google otherwise, your search ads are shown to both, and you pay for every job seeker who clicks.
Add the words job seekers use as negative keywords: jobs, vacancies, careers, hiring, salary, pay, training, apply. Check the search terms report every week for the first month and keep adding to the list. If you also advertise for carers, which most agencies must, run it as a separate campaign with its own budget and its own page, so neither eats the other.
What a family needs to read
A family looking for home care usually needs it soon, often after a fall or a hospital stay. The page your adverts and your listing point to should answer, on a phone, within a minute:
- which towns and postcodes you cover
- how soon you could start, honestly
- what care you provide: personal care, dementia care, overnight or live-in care, help with medication
- how your charges work, with an hourly guide or a range, and the shortest visit you offer
- your rating from the CQC, with a link to the report
- a phone number answered by a person, and a short form for a callback
A page that hides the price behind "contact us for a quote" loses the families who are comparing three agencies that evening. You do not need to publish a full price list. A range, and an honest sentence about what changes it, is enough.
Reviews do the job of a visit
A family choosing a care home can walk round it. A family choosing a home care agency cannot, so they read what other families say. Google reviews matter most, followed by homecare.co.uk and the NHS website. A handful of recent reviews from real clients, each with a reply from you, tells a family more than any amount of copy about compassionate, person-centred care.
Ask for reviews at natural moments: after the first review meeting, when a family thanks a carer, when a package ends well. Make it easy with a direct link. Reply to every review, good and bad, with a name and a sentence that shows you read it. If a negative review arrives, there is a guide to replying to a negative review that applies just as much to an agency as to a home.
A Google listing for an office nobody visits
Your Google Business Profile is often the first thing a family sees, above your website. Google lets a business that serves clients at their own address set a service area and hide the office address. Set the service area to the towns you actually cover. Add photographs of your team (with their agreement) and of the office, keep the opening hours right, and answer the questions people post there.
The referrals that never search
Not every client finds you on Google. Many local authorities buy home care through an approved list or a framework, and offer packages to the agencies on it, often through a brokerage team. Hospital discharge teams, district nurses, GPs and social workers recommend agencies they trust. Continuing healthcare teams place people too.
This market rewards the same things as the private one, delivered faster. Find out how your council buys home care and when its list reopens. When a package is offered, reply quickly, yes or no. Keep the discharge team and the district nurses told about which areas you can start in this week. Decide, too, how much council-funded work you want, because the rates are usually set by the council and may not cover your costs in every area.
Paid advertising, in a small radius
Once the page and the listing are in order, advertising works. Google search ads catch families searching now. Name the town in the advert and, if it is true, how soon you can start. Keep the radius tight around the patches with capacity. Meta adverts reach the sons and daughters in your area who are worrying about a parent but have not started searching yet. Show them a real carer and a real sentence from a family, not a stock photograph of a smiling pensioner.
Judge both by what they cost per enquiry, and then per new client. A campaign that brings in cheap enquiries from places you cannot staff is a bad campaign.
Local news is cheaper than either
A carer who has worked for you for ten years. A client's hundredth birthday, with the family's blessing. A new office, a training award, a fundraiser. Local papers and radio print and broadcast stories like these, and a family who read about your agency in the paper rings you already trusting you a little. The press release guide covers the shape an editor wants.