Understand trends in your enquiries and increase care home admissions using marketing attribution

When demand for one of your care services rises or falls, can you confidently identify the cause? It’s a challenge that marketers at care homes of all sizes face regularly – but it’s one worth solving to increase care home admissions.

If you can spot the touchpoints in your campaign that suddenly drive a huge increase in specific types of care, you’ll gain valuable insights that’ll help you accurately optimise your other marketing efforts and increase care home admissions.

Similarly, being able to spot the tactics that aren’t generating enquiries will help you avoid wasting valuable budget on ineffective campaigns.

So, how do you capture this information?

The answer is marketing attribution

Marketing attribution links conversions and revenue to specific marketing activities, and shows you exactly what’s driving your enquiries and move-ins.

Using the right marketing attribution tool, you can trace every step a lead took before contacting your care home, as well as the touchpoints they engage with during and after their call.

Whether they made a quick journey to your website through a social campaign or took a route that spanned multiple channels over the space of a week, you’ll see what they interacted with and what encouraged their engagement.

Why marketing attribution matters for care homes

While attribution insights are valuable in any sector, they’re especially important for care homes. Most care homes operate with an incredibly diverse marketing mix across both online and offline channels, making it difficult to pinpoint where leads actually start their journeys.

When someone contacts you from the number on your site, there might have been dozens of other marketing assets that led to that engagement – and without marketing attribution, there’s no way to identify them.

The care home market is also competitive when it comes to paid marketing, with many spending a significant portion of their budget on paid campaigns. In fact, our most recent care home trends report revealed marketers have increased their spending on pay-per-click (PPC) ads, and that Google PPC is the top source for generating visitors to care home websites.

The competition makes it much harder to stand out and reach your intended audience. It also increases the risk that spending on a specific paid campaign might fall flat.

As Faye Thomassen, Head of Marketing at Mediahawk, explains: “Strong competition makes it crucial to know which efforts generate the enquiries you want, whether it’s PPC ads, print ads, or placements in directories. Otherwise, it’s really easy to waste a lot of budget on minimal results.”

That’s where marketing attribution comes in. Using marketing attribution, you can identify your most valuable marketing activities and accurately understand what’s causing trends in your service enquiries.

Mediahawk makes marketing attribution effortless

The best part is that, with the right tools, marketing attribution isn’t difficult or time-consuming.

Mediahawk’s marketing attribution features, including powerful call tracking capabilities, can help you gain 100% attribution across your online and offline channels, so you can understand what’s generating your most valuable enquiries. Using Mediahawk, you’ll be able to:

• Understand the true ROI of specific marketing specific activities, including inbound calls
• Know your top converting channels – whether online or offline – to help improve lead generation
• Identify every touchpoint in your customers’ journeys, from clicks and online interactions to phone calls

This is all valuable information that can help you better target and optimise your marketing campaigns to ensure they generate enquiries that actually turn into move-ins.

For example, say you’re looking to specifically boost residential move-ins, but most of the calls you receive are about domiciliary care. Using Mediahawk’s call tracking, you’d be able to identify marketing activities that specifically trigger residential enquiries and invest more of your budget in those areas.

Similarly, if domiciliary care is less of a priority, you’d be able to reallocate budget from campaigns or channels that mostly generate domiciliary care enquiries.

You can even go a step further and identify the specific touchpoints that often lead to enquiries who actually move in. This data will show you how to start encouraging higher-quality, more valuable visitors to contact your care home’s website or call directly.

Putting marketing attribution insights into practice

Leading care home provider Barchester Healthcare uses marketing attribution insights to strategically reallocate budget within its paid search campaigns.

Some of the company’s keywords generated a lot of enquiries but didn’t often lead to move-ins. Mediahawk helped the team identify which keywords encouraged engagement from enquiries who will actually move in, allowing them to prioritise those terms in future campaigns.

Now, Barchester can feel confident that a significant number of its telephone enquiries from paid search will result in a new resident.

“Having a full picture of response has allowed us to be much smarter and confident in our actions, we have upped the ante by considerably improving our campaign effectiveness.”
– Mandy Macara, Head of Marketing, Barchester Healthcare

Summary

The most valuable part of marketing attribution is that it allows you to move away from analysing your results on a campaign-by-campaign basis, and take a more granular, data-driven approach to marketing.

Instead of just witnessing peaks and troughs in enquiries for specific services, you’ll be able to understand their causes and make strategic changes to your campaigns on the fly – ultimately, helping you encourage more care home admissions.

Book your free Mediahawk demo today to see what marketing attribution looks like in practice, and see the insights it could help you unlock in your marketing strategy.