Attracting private pay home care clients can become a complicated endeavor. Depending on how you focus your efforts, lead generation may not be as effective or fast as you need. Relying on a digital marketing agency and some traditional marketing tactics can improve new client acquisition for your home care agency.
Here are nine ways to help attract more clients to your private-duty home care agency:
- Optimize for organic search
- Create a Google Business Profile
- Sponsor community events
- Build local citations
- Partner with other healthcare professionals
- Ask for referrals
- Volunteer in your community
- Attend speaking engagements
- Develop paid search campaigns
Of course, each of these strategies comes with its own intricacies. This article breaks down each of these tips to help build your in-home care agency’s clientele and attract new patient leads.
1. Optimize for Organic Search
Optimizing for organic search through SEO (search engine optimization) is a fantastic and sustainable way to passively attract more clients to your private duty home care agency. Ranking high in Google’s results gives you a better chance at driving more and more traffic to your agency’s website, as people tend to click on higher results since they’re the first ones they come across. Fewer users scroll or dive deeper into Google’s results, so ranking on anything other than the first search results page, or even outside of the top 5 results, provides little to no value to your site.
Part of optimizing for organic search as a private duty home care agency is creating pages and articles around your specific services. For example, if you offer home care, home health care, companion care, or home hospice care, you should create service pages around each of those. Showing potential clients what you can do for them or their loved ones can help convince them to reach out and use your services.
The next part is optimizing pages that target the actual areas or locations you serve. These pages should be optimized around a service and the location you want to target like “service + location.” For example, if your home care agency is based out of Cherry Hill, NJ, some example page titles may be “Home Care Agency in Cherry Hill,” “Home Health Aides in Haddonfield,” or “Home Caregivers in Collingswood.” Using location-specific language helps you attract prospective clients in the areas you are developing pages for. What’s more, you can expand your reach by targeting nearby locations depending on how far your caregivers or home health aides are able to travel.
Additionally, you may produce blog content answering questions and addressing concerns people may have about private duty home care. This SEO tactic helps build trust in your agency and authority in the space. Furthermore, it allows you to expand the scope of topics you can potentially rank in Google for. Often, blog topics are those that don’t really fit on a service page but may still offer some value to prospective clients.
The biggest benefit of SEO is the lower cost per lead compared to other forms of digital and traditional marketing efforts. Compared with other tactics like PPC, SEO comes with a cost upfront, but if done correctly, it can continue to drive leads for weeks, months, or even years with minimal effort.
Overall, you should develop an SEO strategy to help passively draw new clients to your private duty home care agency. Of course, there are many steps involved in optimizing your business for organic search, but you can get started with our tips for getting more home care leads using SEO.
2. Create a Google Business Profile
A Google Business Profile, formerly known as Google My Business, is a free tool provided by Google that enables business owners to manage their online presence across the Google platform. By creating and optimizing a Google Business Profile, businesses can display essential details such as their name, location, operating hours, and services directly in Google Search and Maps.
It also allows for customer interaction through reviews and photos, and offers insight into how customers are interacting with the profile. This tool is particularly beneficial for local businesses, like home care agencies, looking to increase local visibility and engage with their customer base online.
Since you’re offering private duty home care within specific areas, you need to set up a Google Business Profile. This gives you a way to tell Google directly and explicitly what your business is, where you’re located, what areas you serve, what services you offer, and other crucial information.
That said, the main benefit of setting up and optimizing a Google Business Profile is getting listed in Google’s local results.
When someone searches for a service, especially a local service, Google lists nearby businesses that best match the intent of that search. Appearing in Google’s local results confirms to prospective clients that you are, in fact, a local private duty home care agency.
For example, here’s an example of a search for “private duty home care.”
This shows how Google includes a local pack showing nearby businesses offering home care services, even without specifying a location or target area in my search. Google used my location to identify local private duty home care providers in my area.
To have a chance at appearing in these local packs within your service areas, you need to create and optimize your Google Business Profile.
3. Sponsor Community Events
Moving away from digital marketing, you can attract prospective clients for your home care agency through sponsoring local community events. This helps in establishing your presence in your area and demonstrates how you support your community.
Being a healthcare service, people like seeing that private duty home care providers support their community. Of course, this means budgeting some amount to sponsor said events.
That said, it may be worth it to not only get your agency’s name in front of more people but also to connect with your local community. This connection can open more possibilities for attracting new clients as people get to know you and your business.
4. Get Listed on Home Health Directories
People want the best care for their loved ones. Often, when researching home care options, they’ll visit directories and review sites. These directories are basically just another way to get your home care agency’s name in front of more prospective clients.
For private duty home care agencies, this means getting listed on sites like Care.com or Caregivers.com. These are two major opportunities since people use these sites to browse for caregiving options. That said, listing your in-home care services on general directories like Yelp, sites most people know and trust, is also a good way to get in front of more prospects.
Links from trustworthy directory sites like these can have a significant impact on your website’s traffic. For one of our clients, we saw an over 30% increase in site traffic from cleaning up and adding more local citations and directories.
While you can try to manage your directory listings on your own, that is often not the most efficient method. Using a tool like BrightLocal or Moz Local helps streamline the process.
5. Partner with Other Healthcare Professionals
Working with and building relationships with other healthcare professionals in your area is a great way to get more leads to your home care agency.
The trick is you need to build genuine relationships with these other healthcare workers. You can’t simply use them to direct potential clients your way. They need to understand you’re trustworthy and will provide adequate care.
Put a different way, you can’t build transactional relationships with other healthcare providers and professionals in your area.
Essentially, building genuine relationships with other home care providers, private duty or otherwise, means gaining an avenue for referrals if or when those providers don’t have the ability to take on more clients. Once you build trust with other local healthcare providers, theythen may refer those potential clients to you.
6. Ask for Referrals from Existing Clients
It’s never easy to ask existing clients to refer your services to others. That said, your caregivers could gently ask (never push for referrals) or encourage their patients to tell their friends and family about their services. This helps spread awareness of your agency and how you can help individuals who need a caregiver or home health aide.
There are few things better than hearing from a friend about a service they trust. This is especially true when it comes to health-related services. Getting your existing clients to refer their friends and family to your in-home care services is a great way to attract new clients.
7. Volunteer in Your Community
Like sponsoring local events, volunteering within your community demonstrates you care about the area, which can help build trust with prospective clients. Volunteering also provides you an opportunity to build relationships with local residents who may need a caregiver for one of their loved ones. This could lead to them either expressing interest in your home care or sharing your name with others.
The purpose of this again is to build trust within your community and demonstrate that you are, in fact, a local service. Ideally, the networking your caregivers do while volunteering assists in lead generation for your agency.
8. Attend Speaking Engagements
If you have the opportunity to attend local home care provider events, or even general healthcare events, you can network with other private duty home caregivers and healthcare professionals. What’s more, if you’re able to speak at one of these events, you can further build a pool of providers who may refer potential clients to you if they can’t bring on any more.
Attending home care speaking engagements and events is a great way to get a feel for other providers, both local and non-local, while increasing awareness of your home care agency. This is essentially an extension of developing relationships with other providers but on a bigger scale.
9. Develop Paid Search Campaigns
If you have the budget, establishing a paid search or PPC (pay-per-click) campaign can help attract more leads for your private duty home care business. When appropriately implemented, this strategy can place your website at the top of Google’s search results in the form of ads.
For the most part, when you win a bid on a specific keyword through PPC, your website gets placed at the very top of Google’s search results. This benefits your business because, generally speaking, the higher your website is in the search results, the more traffic you’ll attract.
The same idea as ranking higher in SEO applies to PPC. However, the key differences are 1) Google ads always appear higher than organic results (and sometimes throughout the search results page) and 2) you need to constantly funnel money into your paid campaigns to keep them running. SEO requires work to optimize your site, but it can drive traffic and leads on its own while PPC needs an constant influx of money or they’ll stop appearing.
Of course, as with any PPC strategy, you need to establish a solid ads campaign. Google Ads can be a complicated beast, so you should check out our guide to PPC for home care agencies as a starting point.
Get a Digital Marketing Agency to Help Attract More Private Duty Home Care Clients
This all said, doing everything for an effective digital marketing strategy and running your home care business is a tall order. That isn’t to say you would do all of these listed tactics at once, but you’ll often have overlapping strategies and campaigns.
Finding a digital marketing company to perform SEO, PPC, or both for your private duty home care agency ensures you’re accomplishing at least some level of advertising while you can focus on running your business.
If you want to learn more about how we can help your home care agency’s digital marketing, call us at 856-701-7947 or schedule a discovery call through our contact form.
