How to Get the Best Home Care Leads for Your Agency
Tips for filling your sales funnel with qualified potential home care clients
How do you bring in new leads to your home care agency? And when was the last time you considered how you’ll turn those leads into clients?
Do you rely on a single channel, like client referrals, or does your strategy include digital efforts as well as networking? How diverse are your referral sources?
Lead generation is crucial to long-term business strategy. We’ll explore six ways to get the best home care leads for your agency.
What is a lead?
A lead is simply a potential client. The best leads are both interested in your home care services and have the resources to afford them, often through a combination of capital, health insurance, and/or Medicare/Medicaid.
Home care agencies also have to consider whether you provide the specific services these leads need and whether they’re located within your regional scope.
Do you need a lead generation strategy?
Yes! All home care agencies need a strategy for generating new client leads. Not only is lead gen proactive work, but it also requires careful targeting too. It does an agency no good to fill its funnel with leads that are unlikely or unable to use home care services or ones located beyond their reach.
Poor lead generation can mean wasted money, but the more qualified the lead, the further your money will go.
6 top strategies for generating inbound the best home care leads
Lead generation strategy requires the use of multiple channels, both digital and otherwise, and benefits from regular optimization and retargeting.
1. Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the foundation of a strong digital lead generation plan. Smart SEO ensures that your pages and content show up on the search engine results pages (SERPs) of engines like Google and Bing.
For lead generation purposes, SEO includes optimizing your Google Business Profile and your home care website, as well as creating content designed to meet users’ needs first and rank on SERPs second.
2. Dynamic digital ad campaigns
Digital ad campaigns are one of the most valuable lead generation tools for learning more about your ideal audience.
The beauty of digital ads is that they return critical information about who engages, or doesn’t engage, with your campaign. You can use this information to retarget users for the same campaign and refine future messages and targeting.
Digital ad campaigns are typically very cost-efficient, as many are pay-per-click, or PPC, which means you pay only when a user engages with your ad. Both display and paid search campaigns (i.e., Google ads or Bing ads) can drive interested traffic to a landing page with a lead capture form.
3. Provide resources
One of the best ways to generate leads is to be helpful. Needing home care is often the result of a major life change, and potential clients may be new to the process, overwhelmed, or generally unsure about what’s available to them and how to afford it.
Home care agencies are wise to create digital resources that answer basic client questions and concerns. You might make this freely available to leads or gate then content with a form that captures a lead’s basic contact information.
4. Active social media
Care agencies can also generate more leads by keeping their social media channels active. Thoughtful and strategic use of tagging, hashtags, and captions helps potential clients easily find you. Social media is also an important part of lead nurturing, which we’ll talk about later.
5. Client referral programs
Word-of-mouth is a powerful marketing tool. Ninety percent of consumers are more likely to trust a brand recommended by another person, even if that person is a stranger. Plus, word-of-mouth is even more effective than paid ads.
To generate recommendations of your own, incentivize your current clients to refer their contacts. Tell clients what makes an ideal referral and offer them credits, discounts, or service trials in return. Don’t forget to follow up with your new referrals quickly and personally.
6. Hospital discharge referrals
Form a relationship with local healthcare facilities, like hospitals and surgical centers. Their discharge coordinators can provide powerful and effective referrals to patients who need home care.
Moving from lead generation to lead nurturing
Marketing automation platforms can take the grunt work out of designing and executing lead generation campaigns, then help you manage those contacts once they’re in your agency’s funnel. Smart analytics can help you find leaks in your funnel and fix them quickly.
Once you have a lead’s contact information, the work is only beginning. Your next job is to nurture those leads into happy clients.
Ready to start getting the best home care leads?
From SEO to social media to marketing automation, Home Care Marketing Pros is here with a variety of digital marketing solutions to help your agency generate and manage the leads you need! Book a call to get started!
