How to gather valuable customer insights from your care home marketing campaigns

Care home marketing isn’t easy. Your prospects are influenced by many different factors – many of a highly emotional nature. These all impact on how they move from early-stage interest in your care home to an actual move-in.

The prospects we’re talking about, of course, are most likely the relatives of your next residents. They may live near your care home, or hundreds of miles away. As their search for a care provider ramps up, they’ll have particular questions in mind and act in specific ways before they get in touch.

Your job as a care home marketer is to get as much insight into their behaviour as possible. But with buying journeys becoming more diverse and erratic across many different online and offline channels, this isn’t a simple task.

Luckily, with the right tools, you don’t need to leave it to guesswork. You also don’t need to rely on staff quizzing prospects about every touchpoint they’ve had with your brand, hoping that callers will remember what they’ve done.

Now it’s possible to have powerful customer and prospect insights at your fingertips instantly. Whenever prospects call you, there’s a huge opportunity to gather data on their needs and preferences. This will help you determine how to best engage with them and shape your marketing and messaging strategies.

4 things you need to know about your prospects

When you’re planning your care home marketing strategy, feeding in these four pieces of insight should be top of your to-do list:

1. Which messages resonate best

Which of your campaigns and messages are getting the most traction?

2. How they found you

Which channels did they use before they called you and what research sources do they trust?

3. What information they search for

Which keywords, phrases and terminology do they use when searching for information?

4. Where they live

Which areas of the UK seem to give you a better response?

Because the care home customer journey tends to be longer, it’s important to understand the touchpoints that contribute to a conversion – and how prospects engage with content at each stage. With this in mind, you can link your revenue to your marketing spend.

The trouble is, while some attribution data appears to be easy to get hold of, other data can seem harder or even impossible to uncover.

Here are three ways you can gather insights from existing campaigns and challenges you may face with each:

Paid search insights

Paid search gives you detailed information on the keywords producing inbound calls and enquiries. But budget can be drained quickly by incoming sales calls, suppliers, recruiters and relatives.

Landing page insights

Website and landing page impressions give you a sense of traffic from searches and campaigns. But if someone calls, can you tell if they’ve come from your website and which pages interested them?

Offline marketing insights

Offline marketing activity like magazine advertising and direct mail is essential for care homes, even though ROI is hard to identify. But what if you could make a direct connection between your offline campaigns and conversions?

With the right tools and techniques, it’s possible to discover far more about your prospects and their buying journeys than ever before. And as a result, understand which of your marketing activities are proving most effective.

Case study: How Barchester Healthcare did it

As one of the UK’s most successful and largest care organisations, Barchester Healthcare has more than 11,000 residents and patients in over 200 care homes and seven independent hospitals in the UK.

With the help of our call tracking and marketing attribution software, Barchester used a combination of source and keyword tracking, visitor tracking, URL tagging, and sales tracking to improve occupancy. This enabled them to re-allocate budget to keywords that lead to more move-ins.

See how Barchester Healthcare used call tracking and marketing attribution software to uncover valuable customer insights. Read the case study

Now, new campaigns are consistently being launched with precise tracking of telephone enquiries and residential move-ins.

“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,” says Mandy Macara, Head of Marketing at Barchester Healthcare.

Many care home marketers achieve outstanding results for their organisations – building their brands and attracting residents, year after year.

But in today’s market, understanding which channels and activities result in the most move-ins is a huge challenge. Luckily, there are tools and tactics that can help you tackle the problem and feel confident in your decision making.