How to Achieve Rapid Growth through B2B Marketing for Home Care

You may have been running your home care agency for 5 weeks or 5 years - it doesn’t matter. The reality is that most of us start out by recruiting 20 caregivers, and then finding new clients to give them work. It’s like the cat chasing the mouse, a constant juggling act of hiring and retaining caregivers, scheduling them to clients, and always prospecting for enough new clients to keep everyone busy, regardless of how long you have been doing it.

The recent caregiver shortage has placed enormous pressure on agency owners to focus more on recruitment and caregiver utilization and retention. This comes at the expense of sales and marketing, with many agencies relying too much on SEO, PPC, digital marketing, advertising, and a part-time marketer to generate sales. 

Today, most of the effort, and the marketing $ spend, is on online strategies, and not so much on B2B marketing (or referral generation) where 80% of all the revenue, and the bigger cases, come from for home care. So, let’s focus on what it takes, using a proven system such as 52 Weeks Marketing, to get your business growing.

Increasing Referrals through B2B Marketing

Home care B2B marketing refers to the process of finding families-in-crisis, needing home care, who are patients of referring businesses in the health care industry. Without B2B, how else do we reach these families?

The first step is to recruit or retrain a marketer, to work with a marketing system, managing all the relationships with referrers in the local community. Remember, a marketer without a sales tool kit is like a caregiver without a client to care for. Without a system, it’s going to be a struggle to establish the deep relationships that are required to 'win' the trust of the referrer to refer to them.

Building deep relationships involves three things: frequency of visits, consistency of messages, and a business reason to be on-site weekly, if they refer to home care daily.

So, here’s a simple, stepped process for how to get your marketer busy, focused and generating referrals:

1. Describe your service area, by zip code and population, within a defined geographic territory, and keep the population to around 300,000.
2. Build a database of key referrer centers in the catchment area, targeting major health care facilities – at least 50.
3. Build a database of referrers (at least 100) attached to each referrer center, who either refer to home care daily or influence the referral. Then decide on a frequency of visit.
4. Divide the zip codes into quadrants, and allocate evenly over 4 days of the week. Mondays are for sales meetings, making appointments, and follow-ups.
5. Develop branded marketing materials, like those of 52 Weeks Marketing, to give your marketer a conversation starter when visiting referrers each week.
6. Develop a way, using a CRM (such as S52 CRM) to track and monitor marketer activity, stick to a route, and view/analyze weekly results.

Making a Plan for Productivity

So, let’s analyze your marketer’s current productivity, without a system. Where do your marketer’s referrals and leads come from, and what does their activity look like? For example, in a week, your marketer might visit 10-20 referral sources, handle some of the leads that come into the office, and do a percentage of in-home assessments. It’s not enough, compared with a marketer with a specific plan, a route list of key referrers, a business reason to be there (with a visual aid to leave), and meetings with 50+ key referrers each week. The obvious result is that the marketer starts to generate more referrals, delivering bigger cases to keep caregivers busy.

In short, these are some of the weekly KPI’s you want to see with your marketer:

1. Keeping to a defined route, and visiting enough key referrers, with a face-to-face meeting as the targeted activity.
2. Dividing the territory into routing quadrants, which optimizes the number of referral centers to be seen, whilst at the same time ensuring your marketer is seeing 3-5 people at each center.
3. Using branded materials to build deep relationships, which will create the confidence to refer (and will lead to more referrals and a higher conversion rate).
4. Using the CRM to track activity and analyze reports.

When your marketer has the structure, a database of key targets and a reason to visit weekly, the number of quality visits will increase dramatically. More new clients and bigger cases means more work for caregivers (new and current), and your agency becomes the #1 employer for each caregiver.

With a highly structured local area marketing program, the B2B approach will generate immediate results. B2B marketing is going to deliver more referrals, higher conversions, bigger hours per client, deep relationships with referrers, and caregiver retention. It’s a winner for all departments in your home care business.

Grant Gaston has an extensive background in sales and marketing, from small to medium businesses. He has expertise in senior care from a corporate perspective, building and structuring home care agencies, and is also an expert in sales management systems. He commercialized the 52 Weeks Marketing System, and developed the 52 Weeks Sales Management Software with an application program for mobile devices (app), designed specifically for independent owners, franchisees, marketers and internal sales and marketing coordinators. Click here to learn more about 52 Weeks Marketing.

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