How to Choose the Right Marketing Automation Platform for Your Home Care Agency
See what a marketing automation platform can do for your home care agency and how to ensure you’re getting the right one for you.
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What is a marketing automation platform?
A marketing automation platform is software that makes it easy for you to build, run, and monitor marketing campaigns, collect lead information, shepherd those leads through your marketing funnel, and ultimately, make more sales and retain more customers.
An automation platform is a single tool your home care agency can use to build your client base and even build your pool of qualified caregiver candidates. We'll discuss what these solutions do, common marketing automation features, and how to choose a marketing automation platform.
What does marketing automation do?
Marketing automation makes it easier to run campaigns and generate leads by:
- Saving information about your audience and existing clients plus the results of past marketing campaigns in a single location, which means that data can be integrated and mined for insights about your audience’s behaviors and needs
- Automating the repetitive tasks, like building emails, sizing digital ads, and even lead scoring
- Using results from past campaigns to improve your marketing strategy and target future campaigns
- Making it possible to A/B test ads, email subject lines, images, and messaging
- Making it easier to personalize the experience for potential clients based on their needs, location, and their position in the sales funnel
Most automation platforms can also be used for caregiver recruiting. Home care agencies can use data and insights about their candidate pools and recruitment marketing campaigns to:
- Identify characteristics of ideal caregiver candidates
- Use insights from past recruitment marketing efforts to better design and target future campaigns
- Sort job candidates into funnel categories and target active and passive job seekers accordingly
- Building automated workflows to help your recruiting team save time
- Target job postings, email campaigns, and ads during major hiring pushes
- Quickly stand up hiring campaigns when you need new staff quickly
- Use data and learnings from past recruitment campaigns and caregiver leads in your funnel to design an employer brand that appeals to your ideal candidates
Examples of marketing automation
Marketing automation can:
- Help users plan, build, carry out, and monitor digital ad campaigns
- Help users plan, build, carry out, and monitor email marketing campaigns
- Help users plan, build, carry out, and monitor social media marketing
- Help users manage and track engagement with existing contacts and leads
- Automate workflows and lead generation
- Reduce the number of marketing tools your agency has to manage
- Trigger email campaigns when leads take specific actions
- Improve marketing messages over time
- Identify leads that are losing interest or have atrophied
Do you need marketing automation?
So, is marketing automation software worth it?
Marketing automation is always a good idea, whether you do just a handful of campaigns a year or a new one every month. Even agencies with large marketing departments use marketing automation platforms, but they’re especially valuable to companies that have only one marketing professional, or none at all.
Marketing automation saves your sales team time and makes each subsequent campaign more powerful by using the data and learnings from previous campaigns.
What to consider when choosing an automation platform
If you’re new to marketing automation or are rethinking your strategy, here are the factors you should consider when choosing a software partner.
Cost
It’s not about choosing the cheapest automation platform. A tool like this is an investment, so choose a marketing platform best suited to meet your agency’s needs.
Customer service
The point of having a marketing automation platform is that you can work pretty autonomously, but that doesn’t mean you won’t need some help getting started or have questions about functions and tools and even campaigns analysis and design as you go.
A platform that offers solid customer service with actual human beings is a valuable asset. You don’t want to find yourself halfway through a campaign, pulling your hair out over a small hiccup.
Integrations
The marketing automation platform you choose should integrate with the digital tools you already use, like your CRM, content management system, Google Workspace, Slack, etc.
Your tech savviness
Taking care of the tech aspects of digital marketing and recruitment campaigns is one of the primary roles of a good automation platform, but some require a little more tech know-how than others. As you shop around for marketing automation solutions, ask for product demos and trial subscriptions so you can try your hand at using the tools and features.
The types of campaigns you want to run
Some automation platforms specialize in email marketing but don’t do ad campaigns. Others excel at digital ads but aren’t as good at lead management. Before you shop around, stack-rank the types of campaigns you want to run and the types of data you want to gain.
Your marketing resources
When choosing a marketing automation platform for your home care agency, you’ll have to consider your financial resources, of course, but also how many people you have to manage the campaigns and how much time they can dedicate to the work.
Some platforms will require more input from the users while others can run on autopilot quite smoothly.
You don't have to go it alone
If getting started with marketing automation seems overwhelming, let the experts at Home Care Marketing Pros help! Get started with us today to see how we can help you get more clients and caregivers for your home care agency!
