STEP 3 – How Many Leads Do I Need to Hit My Goal?
Now that you know how many new clients you need, how do you get them? Let’s understand the life cycle of a client, which starts with a lead. Before clients become clients, they have to find you or you have to find them. The way they usually find you is by referrals and word of mouth and the way you find them is usually by your inbound marketing and advertising efforts.
Regardless of how you acquire clients, you need to know this very important metric:
What is your conversion ratio from lead to client?
In other words, what percentage of your leads convert to paying clients?
This is one of the most important metrics for running a home care agency and in fact running any business. Think about that. How many of your leads actually turn in to clients? Is it 50%, 30%, or 70%? That number is different for every agency. Let’s take 50% conversion ratio and base our calculation on that.
Based on the 50% conversion ratio, in order to get 19 hourly clients, you will need 38 hourly leads and to get 9 24×7 clients, you will need 18 24×7 leads over the next 12 months. So, your monthly goal in terms of leads looks like this:
|
Hourly Leads. 24×7 Leads Month 1 0 0 Month 2 2 2 Month 3 2 0 Month 4 2 2 Month 5 4 0 Month 6 4 2 Month 7 4 0 Month 8 4 4 Month 9 4 0 Month 10 4 4 Month 11 4 0 Month 12 4 4
Total 38 18 |
Table 2 – Number of new leads over a 12-month period
So now we are one step closer to an action plan in terms of how many leads we need.
STEP 4 – What are My Lead Sources?
There are basically 2 sources for lead generation you can draw from; Referral sources which include word of mouth and online leads.
Referral sources include:
- Current customers
- Area hospitals
- Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNF)
- Assisted Living Facilities (ALF), and other senior living communities such as
- Board and care facilities
- Continuing Care Retirement Communities (CCRC)
Online leads come from your digital marketing efforts such as:
- Direct to your website
- Search engine traffic to your website
- Advertising
- Google ads
- Yahoo ads
- Yelp advertising
- Third-party lead generation companies
Here is a very important trend which is crucial to understand. More and more people who are referred to you by your referral sources and word of mouth are going online to check you out first before they contact you. This means you are getting more online leads even if they are referred to you by off-line referral sources.
There has never been a more important time to have a solid and functional online presence than now and to understand what it takes to generate leads. We will cover these important points in the next few steps.