Marketing Your Business to Consumers: Where to Start

It can be difficult to know which strategy will work best for attracting new clients to your home care business. Finding a strategy that works for you and your business is often a trial and error process, testing various strategies until you find one that works for you. Healthcare Success Strategies calls this important process “testing, tracking and adjusting.”

For example, a home care owner places an ad in the local newspaper to test whether or not the ad will attract new clients. Over a certain time period, she tracks how many new clients mention seeing the ad. Next, she weighs the profit they’ve made from those new clients versus the overall cost of running the ad. Was it worth it? Through this process she might also make adjustments to the ad, move the ad to a different section or have it print on a different day. She’ll again track the results and adjust if necessary. In the end, they’ve either discovered a successful marketing strategy for their business, and they continue on with it, or they’ve discovered it just doesn’t work, and they abandon that strategy and try something else.

Depending on your marketing budget, this could be easier said than done. Make sure you have a realistic marketing budget, one that allows you—as much as possible—to aggressively market your business to consumers. Be aware of where your marketing dollars are being spent, and be diligent at tracking and adjusting your spending. If you determine that a certain strategy isn’t producing enough new income for your business, stop spending your marketing budget on it. Move on and try something new.

When it comes to the money you spend on marketing, Forbes says, “Spending the right money in the right places can drive the success of your business.” So, where do you begin? Which places are the right places for a home care business to advertise? Here are some ideas, according to the “2014 Private Duty Benchmarking Study,” that many home care businesses use for consumer marketing:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Corporate web leads (such as a franchisor website)
• Company website
• Listing in local telephone directory
• Google Ad Words (pay per click)
• Newspaper ads/local community paper/senior newspaper
• Ads in senior directories
• Flyers/brochures in public places
• Public speaking/giving presentations (at churches, senior centers, etc.)
• Sponsorships (sponsor a community/charity event)
• Internet lead sites (such as BestofHomeCare.com)
• Exhibiting at health fairs
• Open houses
• Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn
• Email campaign to consumer
• Postcards mailed to consumers
• Local press releases

As you select a marketing strategy to test, think of the community you serve. What will people respond to? What will grab their attention and help them to remember your business? With this in mind, become involved where you can and design a marketing strategy that you think will work best. Then test, track and adjust!

Advertising is an art, not a science If you look at marketing from that perspective, you realize how certain strategies work for some businesses but not for others. Every situation is different. Every community is different. Think creatively and use your imagination. Be unique in your approach, and don’t just think about introducing your home care business to your community. Try to understand how your community will receive your company, based on your marketing efforts.