Care home marketing: Should I invest in care home directory listings?

When it comes to care home marketing, a listing in a trusted online business directory can be a cost-effective way to drive leads to your website. But it’s not always clear which ones deliver the best value.

Investing in a listing (or multiple listings) gets expensive and unless you can demonstrate a growth in occupancy off the back of your ads, you’ll be throwing budget down the drain.

Which care home directories should you advertise in?

Online care home directories help you reach potential new residents and their families who are browsing online for a care provider.

With larger directories, such as carehome.co.uk, you can reach a wide online audience, while also piggybacking on the SEO benefit bigger directories can bring.

Depending on your marketing budget, the larger directories can be a considerable investment for your business. And they can be really beneficial in terms of ROI by generating qualified enquiries and move-ins.

With other sites such as Lottie and Autumna the exposure can be less, but with the benefit of more qualified and higher converting leads.

These kinds of directories can also provide a rich database of prospects to market to – great for smaller care homes that may not have a CRM system in place.

How do you prove the ROI of care home directory listings?

The number one rule of any marketing activity is, of course, to monitor performance and prove the ROI of your efforts.

Most care home directories will give you figures to show how many leads have come through your listings. However, don’t rely on this. Your own data will always be the most reliable and trustworthy for proving the ROI of your care home listing investment.

Tools like Google Analytics can show you basic information about web traffic coming in from referral sites such as your directories.

But if you want to truly understand which care home directories are driving the most leads to your business, you’ll need a tool that can go deeper.

Know which care home directories really increase move-ins

The bottom line is you want to know whether your directory listings really drive new move-ins for your care homes.

This can be tricky with today’s very non-linear ‘customer’ journey. It’s not always as simple as a prospect seeing your listing then getting straight in contact with you.

In reality, prospects that find you via a directory can go on to contact you in many different ways. Perhaps they see an ad on social media a week later and then get in touch with you. Or maybe they click through from your listing and onto your website, then pick up the phone a few days later and call you to book a tour.

The difficulty comes in knowing exactly which prospect journeys started with a directory listing. And ultimately, which directories are really driving move-ins and increased occupancy levels.

That’s where a call tracking and marketing attribution tool is invaluable.

How Mediahawk helps you prove the ROI of directories

With Mediahawk, care home marketers can understand with certainty which directory listings are bringing the most leads and, most importantly, actual move-ins. Here’s how:

Static phone numbers

When you create a directory listing, you can add a trackable phone number to your ad. It means that whenever someone calls you via that phone number, you’ll be able to trace the prospect back to the originating listing.

Dynamic phone numbers

Dynamic numbers help you track people who click through to your website from your directory listing. But that’s not all. With dynamic numbers, all customer journey data is assigned to the prospect – so you’ll know exactly what they did throughout their journey and crucially, whether your directory listing did its job.

Speech analytics

With speech analytics, you can listen in to enquiry calls and get deeper insights into the content and quality of your phone calls. You’ll be able to identify whether the calls that come via directory listings are good, valuable leads or simply a waste of budget.

Sales reporting

To truly understand the ROI of your directory listings, you’ll need to know whether your ads are actually driving move-ins. With Mediahawk’s sales reporting feature, you can see the prospect journey from first contact right through to move-in. It also helps you:

• Track and analyse website visitor actions including call handler responses and details of the prospect journey
• Link move-in data and analytics to marketing touchpoints and decisions to buy
• Understand individual prospects and identify patterns across groups of leads

Integrations

To make life even easier, we’ve made Mediahawk so it integrates seamlessly with the tools you use every day. It makes it far simpler to track and report on how your directory listings (and marketing activity overall) are performing.

• Google Analytics – With our Google Analytics integration, you can analyse your phone call data right alongside your web and form fill data, giving you greater transparency in how prospects convert.
• Google Business Profile (GBP) – You can quickly and easily assign static phone numbers to each of your care homes in their Google Business Profile listings. This means when people call you via those numbers, you’ll know exactly where they’ve come from

Care home directories can provide a great source of leads for your business. But you need to closely monitor your ROI and be sure that your investment is paying off.

Marketing analytics tools hold the key to the insight you need when making decisions about which directories to invest in.