Using Social Media To Market and Grow Your Aging Care Business

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How To Use Social Media To Market and Grow Your Aging Care Business

With the obvious popularity of the constantly-changing technology for the past decade, many companies are trying to play ‘catch up’ and are forced to re-assess the efficiency of their marketing strategies. Consider this: when an individual is looking for something, where do they look first? Yes, you answered right! They go to their mobile device, whether that is a smart phone, iPad, tablet, or laptop. These devices have become the norm for the savvy shopper or the person ‘on-the-go’ who just wants to find something really fast.

What does that mean for businesses? A smart business owner will jump on board this bandwagon to take advantage of the myriads of opportunities available on the mobile marketing and social media marketing platforms.

using social media to grow your aging care business

Online Marketing

For companies that have embraced the Internet and the potential offered by online marketing, they are seeing more results with their brand and also with customer loyalty. A smart home care business owner should take special notice of the various modes of marketing on the Internet. homecaresocialmediathree5-19Why? Well, with a Facebook account, you have access to more than 750 million people globally. Youtube.com also serves a wide range of targeted individuals who prefer to watch a video rather than read content. You are missing out if you don’t have a Youtube channel with marketable videos.

Other game changers include Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Digg, Reddit, Google Hangout and Google Helps. Integrating all of these options into a marketing strategy allows companies to virtually ‘hang around’ a multitude of their potential customer base.

Your Target Audience

Now the question you should be asking at this point is what type of audience would search for home care or anything in the aging care market? Let’s answer that question for you. You will find an adult child looking for aging care services including home care, hospice care, an home healthcare for his/her elderly parent. The adult child is likely to be in an age range of 45 to 65 years old. These are the people you should try to build relationships with. They are your best friends when it comes to genuinely helping them and in turn, improving your bottom line. These people are usually Internet savvy and know where to hang out or search for what they want.

Your Strategy

As these target audience begin their search, your aging care business should be positioned on many of the social media websites. This should be a priority and so you need to take advantage of it now more than later.

LinkedIn, for example, offers you a free and premium listing. In your profile and to be easily found, use keywords and keyword phrases such as home care agency, home care service; elderly care, caring for the elderly, caring for elderly at home, home care for elderly, and elder care. These are only a few examples.

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Find similar companies on LinkedIn to see what they are doing. Start an elderly home care group on LinkedIn and invite your target audience (which you will find on LinkedIn) to participate. By starting an elderly home care group on LinkedIn, you will be able to start a discussion to educate the group of the benefits of home care. This puts you in an ‘expert’ light and your opinion will be well respected. Remember, you are trying to build solid relationships so trust is important. You don’t want to seem as if you are only looking for business; although, subsequently, this is what you want. The same is true for Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.

Social Media

On your social media accounts, begin small using well-thought-out strategies. One of the main focuses here should be about educating and informing your audience about problems that people deal with when it comes to finding reliable home care. Of course, with this strategy, you will be creating awareness about your agency brand.

Tips to follow:

  • Interact with your prospects regularly
  • Join Facebook and Twitter groups or organizations associated with elderly care
  • Ensure that you make a specific number of posts each week
  • Add to your fan base in a given period of time
  • Make frequent updates on your social media accounts
  • Ask and answer questions posed by your fans and followers
  • Always follow up in a timely manner when questions are asked of you
  • Join in various discussions and let your voice be hard
  • Facebook and Twitter allows you to post videos and this is an excellent way to deliver a message to the right audience so take advantage of this.

As you complete each of these steps, take time to analyze your efforts to see if there is any tweaking necessary. If something is not working, do it differently. Hootsuite is one specific tool to help you to analyze, gauge and track your progress. Use it as much as possible.

Remember, this is not a one-time process. It will take time, but the long term results could be amazing. The key is to gain exposure on the web for your home care agency.

Tweeting

Twitter has added so many different elements to its platform. Now you can post pictures and videos along with your tweets. You can do searches for trends in order to find live leads. Go to the “Search” feature located at the top of the Twitter page, after logging into your Twitter account. Type the words, “adult child for elderly care.” The first search result was:

#NowHiring live-in caregiver in La Porte for 4 elderly residents. Private room, salary+bonuses. Call Grant for more– http://ow.ly/ugeFz 

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What does this mean? This person is looking for someone to care for 4 elderly residents. This is a live lead! Think outside of the box now at how you can leverage this information to your benefit.

Lastly, hashtags have become the new SEO. On your Twitter account, search for your target audience using the hashtag #baby boomers. The search results will show the age group that you are looking to target.

Blogging

If you don’t have a blog, you should create one NOW! On your blog, you will post daily articles, after which you will share your posts on social media. Let’s say you wrote a post titled, “How to travel with medical oxygen,” you would then share it with your audience on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Tumblr. You would also submit it to digg.com and reddit.com. Make sure you include a link to your website in the posts and also include a call to action so that when your visitor reads the post, they will know the next step to take.

Conclusion

Home care agencies should understand that Internet marketing does not have to be complicated. The success is in the proven and applied aging care marketing strategies. Simply begin by integrating your online marketing efforts with what you are currently doing. If you are not sure about all of this, hire a professional. In the end, your goal is to reach the right individuals and to emit change. If you are game, then just dive right in yourself and follow the advice that you have learned here. Soon enough, you will discover new techniques on your own.

 

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About Anthony Simonie

Anthony Simonie has more than 19 years of successful business development, marketing and sales experience. He's the founder and co-founder of multiple successful businesses and has helped more than 20,000 people increase their success in life and business. His focus is to provide proven marketing, sales strategies and advice that enables smart, but overwhelmed business owners to attract (and retain) more clients, while increasing profitability, eliminating wasted effort and frustration, and creating more quality free time to spend with their families, rather than being enslaved to their businesses.

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