STEP 7 – Importance of Tracking Leads
Now that more people are finding you online, this step outlines how and why you need to dig deeper to see how they are finding you. This will give you insight into what’s working and what’s not. Put your resources and efforts towards your more successful referral channels.
Most small businesses don’t know where their online leads come from. Did they start their search on Google, Bing, or Yahoo? Did they then go to Yelp and call you?? Did they click on an ad or did they click on organic results? Were they originally referred to you from a hospital? You see, it’s really important to know the answer to these questions because you can then decide where to allocate more resources.
There is a cost-effective way to do this. It’s called call tracking. Call tracking works for both online and offline marketing efforts. For your online efforts, it works by embedding code in your website that allows for Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI). Here is how call tracking works to track the sources of your leads. You get a pool of phone numbers from the call tracking vendor you can use to track calls coming to you via different channels. You can get 5, 10, or 100+ different phone numbers. Next, you will assign each online and off-line marketing channel to a specific phone number. For example, for a print marketing campaign, let’s say you plan to send out a mailer to people in five different cities in your area. You print a different phone number on mailers for each city, meaning you will have to have 5 different versions of the mailer. When people call you, you would know which cities are producing more leads and conversions because they are calling those specific phone numbers that you can now track and attribute to each city.
The way you can tack online campaigns to see where people are calling you from is with DNI. When a visitor searches for home care and they end up on your site, depending on how they ended up on your site, a dynamic phone number appears which is specific to that visitor’s path to your website. Basically, visitors see different phone numbers depending on how they were referred to your site. DNI works in the background to sort everything for you so when you look at your reports you will see how many leads you got from each online source. As they say, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
By analyzing the tracking data provided by the DNI vendor, you can measure which sources are sending you leads and by knowing that you can effectively decide and manage which ones you want to allocate more resources to. You no longer have to have a blanket approach to your marketing. It is not unusual to find out that your agency may be getting a lot of leads from Yelp for example. But after analyzing the data and looking at your conversion rates, you may realize that those leads don’t convert as well as the others that are coming to you from Google organic. Without this data and analysis, you would not know where to allocate more resources. However, in a case like this, you may want to consider allocating more budget to your organic campaign than your Yelp advertising.
STEP 8 – Live Chat: The Most Important Tool in your Toolbox
As you can see and as you may already know it takes a lot of effort and money to get visitors to your website. But here is some bad news! The majority of your website visitors will leave your site before they even contact you. Why? Because they are looking not only at your site but also 5 or 10 other agencies at the same time. The attention span of an online consumer is about 8 seconds these days. If you don’t have a way to engage with them within that time they are gone! What if they were a potential 24×7 client?
Your next step is to include a chat solution online. This is how you can grab the attention of your visitors within 8 seconds before they leave your site!
HINT: When looking for a chat vendor, use ones that are handled by actual humans who can have conversations with the visitors of your website. AI and robot chat solutions don’t work well for health-care-related conversations. There are too many nuances when it comes to health-related issues that only humans can understand and have a conversation about. AI chatbots are not that sophisticated, yet!
An online chat tool can be a powerful engagement tool. Plus:
- It provides a discrete and private solution so visitors don’t have to talk on the phone
- It’s immediate and easy so people don’t wait on hold or leave messages for someone
- It presents value to the customer because it’s frictionless, immediate, and easy to engage with.
You want people to have a warm, trusting feeling for every interaction with your company. Remember the 8-second rule. If you can engage now and provide solutions, you’ll get the work.
For a chat solution, visit www.captiva8.com. CAPTIVA8 is a powerful home care agency marketing app and online chat platform that matches your potential customers with your agency’s available caregivers based on their specific care needs.
STEP 9 – Incentivize Your Referral Sources
You know the value of new clients based on Step 1. How much is it worth to you to get a referral from an existing customer?
Your current customers would appreciate a few hours or days of free service if they referred a client to you. For referrals from hospitals or other referral sources like SNFs, ALFs, and CCRCs, make sure they know about you and the services you offer. Good ways to do this are by offering them in-service education (also called lunch-and-learn) about how you can help them keep hospitalization readmissions low and how your services fill an important gap in the continuum of care.
Prepare flyers that explain how you hire, train, and retain your caregivers and the fact that they are experts in taking care of patients with chronic conditions such as stroke, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other diseases of aging. Prepare other flyers about topics such as reducing hospital readmission, services you offer, transportation from the hospital, etc. The name of the game with hospitals and facilities is education. Provide them with valuable information and they will use you as a resource.
An important hidden secret of generating leads is your caregiver staff. They are in contact with many patients in addition to the clients you serve. They work with other agencies, hospitals, and other senior facilities. Offer them an excellent incentive to refer potential clients to you. Even a few clients per year could help you with your annual goal of the number of clients you need to add. How much are you willing to pay a caregiver who refers a 24×7 client to you? You never know, your caregivers may know potential clients in facilities that need help. Offer them what you think it’s a fair referral fee.
Conclusion
By reverse-engineering $1,000,000 in additional revenue you now know how many new leads and clients you need per month for the next 12 months. You also know how to go about boosting your online presence, generating more leads, where to allocate more resources to achieve that by tracking your leads and conversions, and how to use live chat to drastically increase your chances to engage in conversations with your website visitors before they leave your site.
And one last important thing; Don’t forget where the magic happens. Caregivers are the lifeforce of your agency – the frontline workers helping your clients live and thrive.
As your caregivers work to take care of your clients, make sure you work to take care of them. They are the face of your agency. For your agency to succeed, you need to have good people in place to do the work.
SEO results and numbers will bring those leads in, but your caregivers will keep them there and generate positive reviews that attract others.
Work the three R’s – recruiting, rewarding, and retaining –to build a fantastic network full of caregivers you know and trust. The strength of your caregiver network will allow you to take on a wider range of clients and have better odds of making good matches between caregivers and clients.
Caring for your caregivers will motivate and empower them to do their best work. Without them, your agency won’t be in the position to add $1,000,000 in additional revenue!