Care home marketers: Discover how to track every stage of the care seeker customer journey with Mediahawk

Care seekers are taking longer and longer to reach a decision – 30% longer than in 2021, according to Lottie. And that’s no surprise; there are so many factors to consider, and many options for care facilities and providers.

In our recent blog, we explored three ways to capture care seekers’ attention and encourage them to schedule a move-in with your care home group. It all comes down to whether your marketing and resources offer a clear path through all that noise.

To achieve this, you first need to understand how care seekers find and interact with your resources, to help you highlight areas where you can optimise their customer journey. “With 100% attribution for your move-ins, you can start to piece together a more comprehensive view of your audience, what they need, and how effectively you connect them to that support,” explains Faye Thomassen, Head of Marketing at Mediahawk.

“With 100% attribution for your move-ins, you can start to piece together a more comprehensive view of your audience, what they need, and how effectively you connect them to that support.”
Faye Thomassen, Head of Marketing, Mediahawk

So, how do you plot that path from the care seeker’s first interaction to the resident’s first day in their new home? Let’s explore how you can use Mediahawk’s customer journey tracking tools and experience of supporting care home marketing strategies to:

• Discover what works best
• Hone your approach
• Boost your occupancy rates

Know your marketing sources – and your channels’ true value

Care home marketing can be expensive, especially if you’re spreading your efforts across a wide range of channels or multiple directories. But cutting down your channels doesn’t necessarily mean reducing your reach or the volume of enquiries you receive – you just need to know which ones are delivering the most return on investment (ROI).

With Mediahawk’s static call tracking, you can assign different numbers to each PPC ad, social channel, and directory, and each type of offline marketing collateral, whether that’s a leaflet, a newspaper ad, or a billboard. That way, when a call comes in from one of those numbers, you have a direct link between an ad and an enquiry.

“While this won’t give you detailed insight into your prospective residents, it’s a vital first step for understanding where you’re most visible and most effective at driving enquiries,” says Faye. “It’s a simple way to free up budget by prioritising channels and campaigns that deliver the most value.”

Our Parameter Connect report brings together calla and revenue data from all your on- and off-website sources to help you compare different channels and campaigns based on conversions and revenue. The more budget you can save by trimming ineffective channels from your strategy, the more you’ll have available for better ads, more powerful tools, and advanced journey mapping.

As Dormy Care Communities’ Marketing Director explains: “Since implementing Mediahawk, we can spend budget much more wisely, by switching off or tweaking the ads that aren’t delivering a return and pushing more budget into the ads that are working.”

“Since implementing Mediahawk, we can spend budget much more wisely, by switching off or tweaking the ads that aren’t delivering a return and pushing more budget into the ads that are working.”
Director of Sales and Marketing, Dormy Care Communities

Link every interaction to a move-in

“The research phase is a key contributor to the long timelines care seekers are experiencing,” says Faye. “It’s the stage where your website has the opportunity to really cement your care home group as the right choice – and you have the best chance to learn more about your care seekers.”

Dynamic call tracking, which is also known as website call tracking, helps you trace a care seeker’s journey throughout your website. Here’s how it works: Mediahawk assigns each unique web visitor their own phone number, which is displayed throughout your website in calls to action, footers, and any other spot where you include a contact number.

Each action a care seeker takes when they’re on your site, such as downloading a brochure or launching a live chat, is tracked and captured in the Mediahawk platform. This means you can understand how an individual interacts with your website and resources, and look for patterns across all the care seekers who explore your website before making a phone enquiry.

Sales Matching can combine this activity data with revenue information about scheduled move-ins to help your team understand what drives decision-making among care seekers, so you can curate your strategy to guide them along the path more effectively.

Unlock hidden insights from all your phone enquiries

Care seekers want to talk on the phone – it’s the best channel for explaining complex care needs, asking sensitive questions, and getting the reassurance that they’re choosing the right facility.

These calls are a treasure trove of information about prospective residents, their demographics, how they found your care home, and how effectively your team supports them – all knowledge that can feed back into your strategy. But capturing that information can be tricky. Asking call handlers to make extensive notes can take their attention away from the caller and risk details being missed. And manually reviewing calls after they’re concluded is hugely time-consuming.

Our Speech Analytics capability uses conversational AI to extract these insights automatically, delivering data directly to your customer relationship management (CRM) system or other key systems. It also builds a resource you can use to assess and improve your strategy, with AI-generated call summaries, automatic call categorisation based on keywords, and full call transcripts.

Using the Speech Insights feature, you can even ask custom questions that enable you to learn more about the content and outcome of a call, such as:

• “Was the call about placing someone into a care home?”
• “What is the type of care needed by the caller?
• “What is the care funding type?”
• “How soon is care needed?”
• “Were vulnerabilities discussed during the call?”

Speech Analytics offers depth and breadth, so you can check on individual care seekers’ journeys and examine strategy performance across different categories of calls. You can spot signals that callers are ready to schedule a move-in, and identify objections or unanswered queries that you can address in your marketing.

Summary

Whether your care home group is already a data-driven business or you’re just starting to unpick the care seeker customer journey, Mediahawk can help you capture the insights you need.

Our platform’s capabilities enable you to build a marketing strategy that welcomes, educates, and converts more residents, clearing that vital path through the increasingly complex process of finding the right care setting.