Four ways to improve your care home marketing with market research

Care home marketing has become increasing important in many geographical areas. As a more effective marketing strategy will help to improve performance as well as enabling more efficient use of the budget, it’s crucial to fully understand residents and prospective residents.

So how do you ensure that your target customers select your care home above one of your competitors?

1) Understand where your care home catchment area extends to

Not all care homes have the same catchment area in terms of the acceptable distance to the nursing home.  If you know where the boundary of your specific catchment area is, you can focus your resources on this area.  Marketing communications activity outside of this area will yield less of a return on investment.

2) Select the right target audience

Investigate your catchment area to find out what type of residents are available to you or may become available in the future.  What is the demographic breakdown of this area? Are prospective residents likely to be funded by the local authority or would they self-fund?  Are you targeting residents themselves, their children or both? Selecting the right target audience will allow you to focus your greatest resources on the segments that will yield the greatest profit, therefore maximising return on investment.

3) Understand your customer’s needs

How do you know the services you are offering meet the needs of your prospective residents?  Are there any aspects of care that are not meeting the expectations of future residents?

4) Monitor customer satisfaction

Are your residents and/or their families happy with the care your home is providing? Do your customers share positive word of mouth testimonials? As word of mouth referrals are one of the most common referral methods for care homes, it is important to find out if word of mouth communications are positive – and if they are negative, why.  Are there any services you could feasibly provide to improve your care home?  Do your levels of customer satisfaction increase or decrease over the years?  Are there any aspects of your care that are receiving increasingly negative feedback from residents over time and need to be rectified?

To develop effective care home marketing, it’s crucial that the marketing strategy decision-making process is based on facts rather than opinion or a perspective from within an organisation.  This is where a market research company can help. Contact CARD Group to find out more or visit Care Home Market Research for further information.