6 care home marketing challenges speech analytics can solve

For many care home businesses, the phone is hot property. It’s the main point of contact for everyone from prospective clients, relatives of residents, tradespeople, recruiters, and more.

Sure, you have a website with contact forms, email addresses, and maybe even a web chat feature.

But for many people, the phone is still the preferred means to get in touch. It’s more direct, it gives an instant response and, well, people like to talk to people, don’t they? Especially when it’s about something as sensitive as end-of-life care for a loved one.

It means that, for a care home marketing team, the enquiries that come in by phone are a big deal.

For marketers, only one type of call really matters and that’s those of prospective clients. These are the calls that give you the insight you need to build ever-more successful marketing campaigns.

But there are a few challenges to deal with when it comes to making the most of your incoming calls. In this blog post, we’re taking a look at those challenges – plus the not-so-secret weapon you can use to overcome them: speech analytics.

Challenge 1: Quickly identify your most valuable calls

Your care homes are bombarded with calls every day. But not every call is a prospective new client. It means marketers have to sift through countless irrelevant calls to uncover the conversations that really matter. What if there was a way to ‘filter’ out the irrelevant calls and get straight to the good stuff?

Speech analytics holds the key. With this super useful tool, you can automatically apply voice tags to each call and put them into categories. For example, calls from tradespeople, recruiters or suppliers can be categorised separately from prospective customers, so you can quickly access information on your sales and marketing pipeline.

What’s more, when you know the origins of all your calls, you can put measures in place to reduce the burden of less important ones. And you’ll free up the lines for genuine enquiries.

Challenge 2: Understanding sources of inbound enquiries

Historically, it’s not been easy to know from where your phone calls originate. People can get your number from many different places – your website, a banner ad, a door drop campaign, or a magazine, for example. As a marketer keen on attributing every lead to a source, this makes life pretty difficult.

Using voice tags, you can easily categorise your care home enquiries and, in conjunction with the rich data available in Mediahawk, you’ll easily see which marketing sources and channels your prospects are coming from.

If you find you’re getting lots of suppliers clicking your PPC ads and then phoning you, you can put measures in place to stop this. Because a supplier clicking your PPC ad means your ad budget is being drained unnecessarily. And that’s never a good thing.

Read how to make speech analytics your competitive advantage

Challenge 3: Pinpointing call geography

Do you have an accurate picture of which regions your enquiries come from? Do you know whether you’re getting a sudden influx of calls from the North East? Perhaps enquiries from the London area have dropped?

By categorising you calls based on the content of conversations, you can quickly establish which regions are driving the most enquiries. With that knowledge in hand, you can make strategic decisions about how to market your care homes in those regions.

Perhaps ramping up targeted PPC ads in a growth region would be beneficial to you? Or switching off a few ads where you see interest dwindling might save you some valuable budget.

Challenge 4: Prioritising high value calls

When it comes to sorting phone leads that are hot from those that are warm and cool, things can get tricky pretty quickly. And if you don’t have an accurate way to prioritise your leads, you won’t be following up with the best opportunities first.

One of the big benefits of speech analytics is, well, its ability to analyse speech (the clue’s in the name, really!). You can define words and phrases that you want the speech analytics tool to listen out for during phone conversations. If any of those words are detected – for example, the phrases “reserve a room” or “arrange a tour” – the software can automatically apply a score to that caller.

As you can imagine, this becomes an extremely useful feature when you need to understand which calls are from the hottest leads – or simply from sources you want to focus on for other reasons.

Challenge 5: Keyword research

Every discerning marketer has the challenge of identifying relevant keywords. Everything from SEO and PPC work, to content strategy and website development relies on a good understanding of the words and phrases your target audience uses to do their research.

The ace up speech analytics’ sleeve is that it helps you build an accurate and reliable bank of keywords – taken straight from your prospective clients’ own mouths.

You can easily uncover the exact words and phrases people use when they ask questions or express their concerns. With this insight in hand, you can create more effective and targeted ad campaigns, care home marketing content, website copy and more.

Challenge 6: Spotting trends and opportunities

Staying on top of changing market conditions is always a challenge. In fact, simply knowing what matters most to your clients and prospective clients is a daily problem for care home marketers.

A crucial part of a marketer’s role is to always know where market trends are going – and be one or two steps ahead.

With speech analytics in your toolset, this challenge becomes much less of a headache. The insight a speech analytics tool gives you means you’ll be the first to know if clients start shifting their behaviour or asking for certain things during phone conversations.

For example, you may see prospective clients consistently requesting information about payment options. If this information isn’t easily accessible on your website, there may be an opportunity to create some content that answers these queries. And makes phone operatives’ lives easier, too.

As you can see, speech analytics packs a lot of punch. It’s a tool that can help you do so much more, with very little effort.

And for care homes, it can mean the difference between missing opportunities and smashing your move-in targets year after year.

About the author - Natalia Selby

Marketing Executive at Mediahawk, with 20 years experience in analytics and content management.

Man and woman using laptops.
Don’t just take our word for it…

See Mediahawk’s speech analytics tools for yourself. Book a 15-minute, no-obligation demo and we’ll show you how your care home can benefit from powerful marketing analytics.

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