Call tracking for care homes: 5 helpful facts for marketers

Thinking about using call tracking to boost your care home marketing? If so, then the experiences of two UK residential care groups will prove invaluable.

Barchester Healthcare and Dormy Care Communities have revealed how call tracking software helps them to use budgets wisely and increase occupancy.

Their stories help to demystify the technology, crystallise the benefits, and show how easy it is to transform marketing performance once you get deeper insights into customer behaviour.

When analysing the benefits for both companies, five facts become clear:

1. Care providers of all sizes benefit from call tracking

Barchester Healthcare is one of the UK’s largest care organisations with more than 200 care homes and seven independent hospitals. In contrast, Dormy Care has four sites and a marketing team of two people. And yet, call tracking delivers major results for both groups.

Teams don’t need to hire extra people or send colleagues away on weeks of training. They just open their web browser, log in, and see what’s happening across their campaigns. Call tracking isn’t an extra burden. It puts the answers at your fingertips, which speeds up decision making.

2. Call tracking is an asset, wherever you are in your marketing journey

Barchester uses call tracking to supercharge its existing marketing strategy and campaign effectiveness. The marketing team can see which online marketing channels are most effective at generating calls – and also attribute revenue directly to marketing activity.

In contrast, Dormy deployed call tracking at the same time it rolled out a new marketing strategy and a refreshed digital presence. Initially, call tracking helped to track ad performance. But it soon became key to the company’s new website and marketing strategy going forward. Now the team better understand how prospective residents interact with digital campaigns and web pages before they call.

3. Static and dynamic numbers are both important

Using a unique, static phone number is essential for big-ticket activities, such as radio promotions, glossy magazine spreads or TV advertising campaigns. Very quickly, you can see how many phone calls and leads they deliver — and whether they justify the spend.

Dynamic phone numbers give you an extra level of detail for every single visitor to your website. Both Barchester and Dormy use dynamic numbers on their websites, so each visitor is assigned a unique phone number. This enables their marketing teams to track their callers’ earlier journey around the website as well as any keywords they used in search engines. Every visit can be tracked back to the originating source, so they can see which marketing activities produce both online and offline enquiries.

Using a combination of both static dynamic numbers lets you see how your big offline campaigns stack up against digital campaigns. This analysis is invaluable as you shape your strategy.

4. Call recording and speech analysis are key to quality

Dormy values the call recording feature that comes with its call tracking service. As a premium brand, the extra insights gained from call recordings help Dormy maximise quality of service.

In this area, services such as speech analytics can make the difference. The software listens out for keywords that prospects use during calls that are associated with intent to buy. If prospects are slipping between your fingers, this helps you to get to the root of the issue.

5. Call tracking improves marketing strategies

Both care home groups now understand marketing attribution far more clearly and are getting a greater return on investment from their campaigns.

Barchester can see which marketing activities and keywords produce telephone enquiries and, in turn, how many of these result in resident move-ins. This has led to a significant increase in paid search enquiries that result in care home occupancy.

Dormy has a far smaller budget. But the marketing team can easily monitor performance every day, tweak keywords, and fine-tune spending to get the best possible results.

Discover more

Read more about Barchester Healthcare and Dormy Care Communities, who both rely on call tracking from Mediahawk.