Business development
and their families are looking, above all, for a care home they can completely trust, and your marketing activity must begin to generate this trust. As in almost any market, without trust your prospecting efforts will flounder and cost you dear. The families of prospective care home residents and the residents themselves may only go through the process of choosing a home once in their lives and the selection process may take just a few, short weeks. This window of opportunity is extremely limited so your messaging has to be clear, relevant, consistent, responsive and of course, frequent. Frequency of your brand being seen is vital in care homes to build up your homes’ brand and ensure it is top-of- mind when families become prospective customers.
Step 5 - What do you want them to do?
As with companies in many sectors, your sales process will be made up of several stages. From reading a social media post or visiting your website through to attending a viewing and signing a contract, all prospects will have several points of contact with you as they go through their decision-making process. It is imperative you avoid losing prospects at any stage in this process and so you must make it clear at each point in the sales journey what you would like the prospect to do next and how to do it. Even without a sophisticated customer relationship management (CRM) system to manage your prospecting, you can take some simple steps to ensure that you help your prospects move through the sales process to the ultimate goal of converting a prospect to a resident. Make sure all your marketing features clear and frequent calls-to-action. Leave your prospects in no doubt that you want to hear from them. Tell them not to delay and to get in touch ‘right now’ and give them as many ways as possible to respond to your marketing activity – email, telephone, via your website. It never ceases to amaze me how many businesses do not give their prospects clear opportunities or encouragement to respond to them.
When prospects respond to any of your marketing activity, acknowledge receipt of their response as quickly as possible, clarify the next step in the process and when that will happen, e.g. a reply to a prospect’s initial email correspondence, such as: ‘Thanks for getting in touch with regards to your Mum, we’ll send a brochure out to you in tonight’s post’. Show the prospect that you care about them and begin to build that all important trust.
Ensure the prospect understands what you want them to do next in the process and when you would like that to happen. This could be sending a covering letter with your care home brochure that encourages the prospect to give you a call to arrange a viewing, and that you have some availability next week if that suits.
Never leave it up to the prospect to get back to you. Follow up every prospect communication with a gentle prompt via email, text or even telephone to politely remind them that you are awaiting a response from them. Do not make the prospect feel pestered yet equally do not let a prospect ‘go cold’ for want of an email. Keep a careful track of all customer contacts and ensure they continue down the sales ‘funnel’. Inevitably, despite your best efforts, you will not convert all your prospects and they will drop out of your sales process at different stages for different reasons. When this occurs, try to find out the reasons why you were not chosen by the prospect and where they chose to go
Never leave it up to the prospect to get back to you. Follow up every prospect communication with a gentle prompt
November 2020 •
www.thecarehomeenvironment.com
instead. With enough of this data, you may be able to recognise a trend in why potential residents were choosing a competitor home and then take steps to overcome their perceived advantages. Of course, there is a lot more to successfully marketing your homes than simply following a few basic pointers. Yet if you follow any of these five marketing steps, you can be confident that you will cut down on marketing budget wastage and start to make your marketing pound work harder for you. Now, more than ever, that is vital for us all.
TCHE
Wilf Geldart
Wilf Geldart is director of national marketing agency Wish, which is based in Wetherby in West Yorkshire. Wilf founded Wish 17 years ago after a career in marketing spanning the UK, Europe and the US. Having worked on both the client as well as the agency side, Wilf understands the marketing challenges faced by companies managing limited budgets. Wish is a sales-focused marketing agency specialising in the residential care market from elderly care companies to those caring for people with physical or neurological challenges.
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