To answer this question, we separated the typical marketing activities that home care agencies engage in into a handful of categories. While the answers will always depend somewhat on the circumstances of the individual agency, these are generally applicable across the board.

Note from Connor at Careswitch: We compiled this article from a recent interview with Amy Selle and Marissa Snook of corecubed care marketing solutions. While it was put to paper (so to speak) by our team, we’ve listed Marissa as the author because her and Amy's knowledge formed the subject matter of the article (and we can only list one author).

Also, we’re writing to all sizes/levels of sophistication of agencies here. If something feels ridiculously basic, assuming we’re speaking to someone who needs it but have taken care to include nuggets that will be valuable for you too.

Activity 1: Brand-building

What this typically includes in this context: Creating a logo, naming your company, choosing a color scheme, creating a brand story.

(In context of a home care agency, creating a brand story generally means either a well-crafted way to tell how you got into this business, or a way to explain your agency’s unique differentiator or service offerings in a way that is emotionally resonant. ‘We give great care’ isn’t a good brand story unless you’re truly epic in how you articulate it, because it’s such a common and easily-duplicated message.)

What makes sense to do yourself: Any of the above can be done by you, and all these activities should always at least be guided by the owner, who will have a better vision of the company’s identity than anyone. That being said:

What you’ll probably want to outsource: Don’t try to do the design work, including the logo, yourself unless you have a background in graphic design. Graphic design often appears very simple/accessible, but getting strong, professional results is always more difficult than it appears. You can outsource this work to a service like DesignCrowd or Fiverr that allows you to get submissions from multiple designers and then only pay for what you end up using.

As an owner, it’s both cost-effective and a good exercise for you to craft your initial brand story yourself. Eventually, typically somewhere past the million-dollar-revenue mark, you’ll reach a stage where it’s beneficial to bring on professional help to assist you in refining and sharpening that story. That same partner may be beneficial in revisiting the visual elements of your brand at the same time.

Activity 2: Your website and SEO (search engine optimization)

Your website is almost always going to be a home care agency’s most important marketing asset.

As corecubed’s Amy Selle says: “If you’re a brand-new agency and have limited funds, you can build a high-quality website using a template service (like Wix or Squarespace) that helps you with the design. Then when you’re able to, hire a partner to upgrade that website to something more professional. What you want to avoid is having the neighbor down the street who kind of knows how to develop a website, sort of, throw something together with paragraphs and paragraphs of text and images with watermarks that you’ve stolen from across the internet. You need to wow them right from the beginning.”

What makes sense to do yourself: It might make sense to build your initial website yourself using a no-code template builder—but only if you can’t afford to do otherwise. If you decide to do it yourself, avoid some of the common mistakes by using pictures of your own care team rather than stock images and taking care not to fill the site with large paragraphs of text.

If you're making your website yourself, make sure you use imagery that’s reflective of how people feel when they use your services. Don’t just show literal imagery of a caregiver helping someone walk. Show the outcome you’re selling: family members and clients living the life they’ll be enabled to live when their quality of life is being empowered by your caregivers.

(Medication ads are a great example of this. They don’t just show someone taking a pill. They show someone healthy and happy, spending time with their loved ones.)

What you’ll probably want to outsource: As soon as you can afford it, hire a reliable marketing partner to build or refine your website. This is particulary important because your website’s SEO (likelihood of getting found on search engines) is highly reliant on factors that become increasingly technical and difficult to do yourself (site speed, backlink profile, schema, and more). It’s also important to point out that mobile responsiveness (how it appears on a phone) is highly important, and template website builders may or may not do a good job of helping you design your site with this in mind.

Activity 3: Google Ads

What you can do yourself: A half-baked, dare I say half-assed job of Google Ads.

What makes sense to outsource: Google Ads.

(The corecubed team actually takes a softer stance here, saying that you absolutely can do Google Ads yourself, but you’ll get better results using a partner. I suspect they’re trying to be balanced and not come across as championing their own services too hard.

To me, this one is black-and-white. Because it’s so simple to calculate ROI from Google Ads, it’s very easy to ensure that whatever you’re paying a partner to do is coming back to you in increased revenue. It’s easy to not know what you don’t know when it comes to Google Ads, and because some aspects of it, like bidding strategy, get surprisingly technical, it’s a clear choice to outsource very early unless you or someone on your team has a fairly strong background in digital advertising and keeps up on updates to the Google Ads platform.)

Activity 4: Social Media

Social media is a broad category, and the answer of what to outsource depends on how you’re using it. In general:

What makes sense to get done yourself or by someone on your team: Posting to social, monitoring accounts, engaging with comments.

What might make sense to outsource: As you develop a more built-out social media strategy that involves posting more original content (videos, for example), it might make sense to bring on a partner to help you decide what content to produce and how. At the very least, you should eventually enlist a professional’s help in building your overall strategy.

Activity 5: Referral networking, sales, and sales training

What makes sense to do yourself: It’s very unusual not to handle referral networking yourself at the beginning, but you should hire someone as soon as you can afford to hire someone you can trust with those relationships. This will often be your third or fourth hire.

What makes sense to outsource: A marketing partner can help train you and your reps, figure out what your plan is over time (what do you do in different visits), and help you either plan or produce content to help in these efforts. They can also help your staff perfect your intake call process to ensure that leads aren’t slipping through the cracks.

Using a marketing partner to refine and augment your referral marketing efforts isn’t a do-or-die like it is for your website or Google Ads, but it does typically have a very fast ROI.

Choosing a Marketing Partner

My final question to the corecubed team was how to choose a marketing partner to outsource some of these things to. Together we came up with this list:

• Recognize that you get what you pay for, and choose a partner that charges a price relative to the level of quality you want. This will take some shopping around and familiarity with the typical price points for different services. (We’ll talk more about setting a marketing budget in next week’s Zoom class/podcast; you can register for the live class free here or listen to it when it comes out here.)
• Ask for references and examples of their work.
• Search home care Facebook groups for mentions of the partner and read what people have to say.
• Find someone who focuses specifically on the home care industry.

Additional Resources

If you’ve read this far, you’re clearly dedicated to making good decisions when it comes to marketing and growing your home care agency. Here are some additional resources that might be useful to you:

1. How can I make sure I’m maximizing my ROI from internet lead sites like APlaceForMom.com? (article)
2. How to build a marketer’s compensation plan (article)
3. The podcast episode about this topic, but that goes into way more depth