Business development
There’s no business like new business
The social care sector is going through a difficult period in turbulent economic times. Here, Wish marketing agency director Wilf Geldart outlines five essential steps for how care home owners can market their business
While a care home’s priority is always to keep residents and staff safe, we must never lose sight of protecting the business itself, which at the moment means rebuilding pipelines of prospective residents and maximising occupancy rates.
In an industry that has gone through a trauma like no other, uncertainty is high and budgets remain tight. Now, more than ever, we need to ensure our prospect marketing and lead generation activity minimises waste and maximises effectiveness.
If you, like many in the social care sector, are beginning to turn your thoughts to increasing new business enquiries but you are not sure how best to plan your marketing activity and make best use of limited budgets, rest assured, you are not alone.
Having worked with some of the best UK residential care organisations for many years, here are some basic steps to help ensure your marketing activity makes every marketing pound work as hard as possible for you.
Step 1 - Start at the end No matter what industry you are in, effective marketing always starts with
defining clear objectives and the best marketing objectives are driven by business needs. So, in deciding what both your marketing objectives and budget should be, think carefully about the financial goals the business overall is aiming for.
l What bed occupancy rate does the business need to achieve its financial targets?
l How many new residents will you require to fulfil that need?
l To achieve that target of new residents, how many enquiries do you require? Look back at previous marketing activity, what is your enquiry to resident conversion rate?
l What is the ‘lifetime value’ of those new residents and how much of that value are you willing to invest in recruiting them?
No matter which target audience you are talking to in the care home market, they are all looking for one thing above all else – trust
November 2020 •
www.thecarehomeenvironment.com
There is no right or wrong answers to the above questions, it all depends on what targets your annual business plan has set for the business and what you feel comfortable with investing in marketing as a percentage of your revenue or profit. The answers to these questions will give you two vital pieces of information: how many new enquiries you need to generate, and how much you are willing to spend to achieve those enquiry levels. So, now you have your marketing objective in terms of new enquiries and an overall marketing budget with which to achieve this objective.
Step 2 – To who am I speaking? There is nothing in marketing that is so wasteful than talking to the wrong audience. I recently received an email from a very large high street retailer with the subject line, ‘It’s about time you found your perfect bra’. As a gentleman of a certain age, I found this highly amusing, but from a marketing point of view it was very disappointing. Here was a company with whom I have had a long relationship and hold enough data on me to be able to avoid offending me, i.e. they know I am male. Instead, what they did was waste money targeting
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