A “lead” is a sales term for a potential client. Businesses of all kinds need leads to survive, but not all prospects are created equal. Some potential clients are far more primed to buy than others, and the quality of a given lead can depend on where it comes from.
Plenty of people may land on your website or hear about your agency in a given month, but how many of them are actually ready to retain your services? How many are simply browsing around instead of looking seriously? And in the end, how many of them will convert?
This piece will serve as a crash course for agencies who are looking to attract and retain home care clients with a lead generation strategy, sending high-quality prospects straight to their sales funnel.
What Is the Importance of a Lead Generation Strategy?
It’s not enough to wait for clients to discover your agency and determine whether it’s right for them. Lead generation is proactive; you’ll need to intentionally define your target audience and use the right channels to reach them. Otherwise, you’ll have to sift through leads that are too far away, unable to afford your services or have other barriers to compatibility.
A well-thought-out strategy will maximize every dollar spent on marketing and every hour spent on sales team engagement with prospective customers.
Understanding Your Target Audience
Through audience analysis, agencies can identify their potential customers’ specific needs, preferences, and behaviors. This knowledge can then be used to craft relevant and resonant marketing strategies that spotlight solutions to their personal challenges.
Identifying Demographics & Psychographics
Demographic and psychographic data provide insights into age, gender, income, lifestyle, and values. These data points can help agencies segment different target groups and tailor their marketing messaging to attract customers who are perfectly suited to their offering. For example, businesses that work predominantly with private pay clients will filter for income brackets different from those whose customers rely on Medicaid.
Building Customer Personas
Customer personas are fictionalized profiles of your ideal clients based on real data and research. They provide a framework for easily understanding who you should be talking to, including their motivations, concerns, must-haves, and general lifestyles. They can then be used to shape marketing language and segmentation efforts.
For example, agencies may choose to create a persona for an elderly individual, a post-surgery patient seeking a rehab facility, and a family member involved in the decision-making process.
Digital Lead Generation Strategies for Home Care
These days, a huge quantity of lead generation happens online. Instead of bulletin boards, we have digital ads and content; these modern techniques are essential for reaching and engaging potential clients.
Content Marketing:
Content marketing is a longer-term strategy that establishes an agency as a leader in its field. By posting educational articles and similar content online, agencies can attract and engage potential clients with valuable and relevant information. Building a solid library of quality content demonstrates expertise and credibility, winning prospects over without feeling like overt “marketing.”
What’s more, cross-pollinating these content pieces across various channels is a great way to amplify your reach without having to create new material from scratch. Which brings us to our next tip.
Social Media Marketing:
Even older adults, not to mention their children and grandchildren, are on social media now. Reaching your target audience where they’re at is a non-negotiable pillar of any lead generation strategy. Agencies can gain prospects’ trust by posting facility tours, caregiver spotlights, service summaries, and more.
Beyond sharing content on their own pages, agencies should also become members of relevant pages, like neighborhood Facebook groups and industry groups. This is a great way to keep tabs on what’s going on with your target demographics and even post relevant content from time to time.
Traditional Lead Generation Strategies for Home Care
While plenty of opportunities can be found in the digital world, traditional lead gen strategies are an essential complement to more modern methods.
Direct Mail Campaigns
In our increasingly cluttered online world, direct mail offers the unique benefit of landing directly – per its name – in potential clients’ hands. Home care agencies can use this channel to target specific local communities all the way down to individual zip codes. The one drawback is the cost of running a direct mail campaign, which tends to be higher than digital formats.
Building a Referral Network
A referral network is simply a collection of local businesses, organizations, and individuals who can refer people to your services. Word of mouth is one of the most compelling types of marketing out there, and community members will be inclined to listen to sources they already trust. It is therefore essential for agencies to maintain strategic ties “on the ground.”
Community Engagement & Local Events
By participating in local events, health fairs, and volunteer activities, agencies can establish a positive presence and demonstrate their commitment to the community. These activities create opportunities for direct engagement with potential clients and their families, allowing them to ask questions, build trust, and get to know your agency on a personal level.
Measuring & Analyzing Lead Generation Efforts
Once these efforts are in place, you’ll need to close the loop by tracking your success. Lead generation is an iterative process that will evolve over time: as analytics roll in, agencies can optimize their strategies for peak performance.
Key Metrics To Track
Certain metrics will easily demonstrate whether your lead generation program has been successful, including conversion rates, referrals per source, new applicants, and active clients. Business intelligence tools can track all of these KPIs and more, so you can understand which pillars of your strategy are worth the effort and which ones should be scaled down or removed.
Tools For Analytics
Beyond BI tools, home care marketing software is particularly useful for helping sales teams track their progress. It neatly organizes information like prospects in the pipeline, referral source tracking, and revenue by referral source while providing tools to perform assessments and sign company contracts within the platform itself.
Explore How AxisCare Can Help You Acquire & Retain Potential Clients
AxisCare helps agencies generate, nurture, and retain leads by organizing their efforts in a single hub. Your prospecting strategy will only be as effective as the data you collect, so trust in our BI and marketing tools to illuminate the best path forward.
To learn more about how we can help you agency thrive at every stage, request a live demo from our team.
