Five Reasons Why Marketing Your Social Care Service Isn’t Working
From the Marketing Social Care hotdesk
Marketing a Social Care Business Demands a Specific Approach
Marketing your care home or in-home, community care service, is very different from selling widgets. In fact, the entire operation of a social care business is unique. There are virtually no other kinds of business where the demands of the clients and workforce, coupled with a tough regulatory environment and governmental oversight combine in a ‘perfect storm’ to produce such a challenging business environment.
Marketing has never been more important to sustainable and viable social care services, yet like all other aspects of operating in the sector, doing it well presents some unique challenges. Here are five reasons why marketing residential care settings and homecare businesses presents some similarly unique demands:
Clients vs. Workforce: Marketing Social Care Services to Two Distinct Audiences is Tough
Marketing is challenging for social care businesses because it must address the needs of two distinct audiences.
Firstly, attracting a competent and dedicated workforce is arguably the greatest challenge the sector has ever faced right now. Positioning your care home or domiciliary care service as an ‘employer of choice’, and establishing a positive employer brand can revolutionise your staffing situation and enable future growth. Compared to fierce competition for average candidates on internet job boards, it’s also very inexpensive.
Secondly, presenting your residential home or community care service to future clients (in reality, the families of those prospective clients) in a warm, inviting way whilst simultaneously imparting great chunks of vital information is no mean feat. Yet to do this and present your message to those individuals at the right time, and via the appropriate channel, truly is a dark art.
Now consider that to build and maintain a sustainable and viable commercial business, you have to have this dual marketing approach, each equally convincing to these essential audiences, and that you must do it without crippling cost (in both cash and time) is a tough ask.
Adopting the appropriate marketing strategy with consistent execution is one way to meet the needs of both of these audiences and reduce the cost of hiring staff, and signing clients as a bonus.
Regulated Social Care Demands High Standards of Marketing Too
In unregulated environments, let’s take widget sales as an example, pretty much anything can go. Yes, there are standards of truthfulness and honesty that businesses should adhere to, but in reality, marketing and selling widgets is the modern-day equivalent of the Wild West. Will the town sheriff bring to justice every single snake oil salesman using misleading tactics or who doesn’t comply with the necessary regulations? Of course not.
Marketing in such a regulated environment is harder than it seems on the surface. Not only must every message be “legal, decent, honest, and truthful”, but the consequences of misleading statements or inappropriate marketing methods — whether or not intentional — could, in fact, call into question the suitability of a service’s leadership and owners fitness for being granted a license to run a care home, nursing home or homecare service in the first place.
A spotlight is shone on all aspects of a service’s operations, marketing included. Corner cutting and the disregard of rules and acceptable practice calls into question every other aspect of that service. After all, if an owner or leader is prepared to use questionable methods to secure staff, clients, or both, how can the regulator or the public at large have any confidence in how any other aspects of that service are run? In short, they can’t. Cue a world of pain and misery for the leaders and owners of said service, both publically and behind the scenes.
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Whilst a widget-selling business may suffer an occasional bad Google review or even a disapproving glance from a local government body or newspaper, the actual consequences of poor marketing practice to an unregulated business is likely to be minimal. Contrast this with the existential risk to a social care business.
Social care services need to work to the same high standards in their marketing as they would in any other part of their operations, and with the expectation that those marketing practices and policies will be closely scrutinised because, in reality, they most likely will.
Too Much Selling Turns Off Your Audience
Marketing is not — strictly speaking — the same as sales. Marketing should, however, lead to a measurable impact on the business’s core objectives, which is almost certainly attracting an appropriate workforce and the right clients.
Marketing messages that are too ‘sales-y’ turn off your audiences, rather than engage with them. Neither prospective employees or clients want to feel that they are being sold to, even though this is your intent.
Social care is a soft sell. Avoiding overly-aggressive sales language and marketing cliché is just the start. The soft sell starts with understanding the journey that the person will be expected to take to an eventual destination that is one of the critical business objectives, for example, to accept an employment offer or sign a contract for your services, and to lead them hand-in-glove to the natural conclusion of that journey. Customer journey mapping is an integral part of the marketing process and helps to position the marketing tone and message.
Consider too that with social care being such a people-centric offering, marketing messages and processes that are seen as glib or impersonal send signals that profit, rather than people are important. That’s clearly not the message that a residential home or community care service should be putting out (the matter of profit is not to be hidden or denounced, however). A genuinely personal and positive intent avoids the overly sales-y message and engages on a genuine level with the audience. That dear reader is where the magic happens.
Build It and They Will Come. Not.
With such heavily publicised social care shortages, owners and leaders of small to mid-sized social care businesses may (mistakenly) believe that merely having a service to offer, whether vacant beds in a care home or slots available in a domiciliary care service roster, is enough. It isn’t.
The ‘build it and they will come’ mentality is seriously flawed in a general sense and dangerously so in a social care context. Having a sustainable business (and therefore, by definition, a profitable one) doesn’t mean having any clients at any cost. Rather a service with long-term viability means having the right clients. What constitutes the right, or ‘optimum’ client will vary from service to service taking into account the local market and the strengths of the service itself, but filling beds or rotas with any client is a risky approach.
Marketing is essentially about putting your business in front of people, as well as making it easy for people to find you when they need to, even if they don’t know it’s you they need.
Simply existing, having a website, or paying to get your name in a ‘discharge booklet’ for the local hospital (Are those still a thing? Really?) isn’t marketing and absolutely isn’t enough to achieve your commercial objectives.
Be Nice: Running Down the Competition Always Backfires
Direct comparisons have been marketing tools since the Mad Men age of marketing. And it works. Kind of.
Pepsi vs. Coca-Cola, Tesco vs. Aldi, Target vs. Walmart, Ford vs. General Motors. All these legendary corporate battles have one key ingredient that makes the direct, explicit comparison strategy viable: money. And lots of it. Social Care — even in the big leagues — does not have the budget to fight and fund these kinds of battles. For the typical reader of this blog, marketing is about achieving a lot with a little. So be nice, unless you have millions you’re prepared to spend (and arguably waste) on picking these kinds of fights.
Benchmarking yourself against the competition is not a bad thing, rather it is essential. However, using that statement to pitch yourself directly and publically against the other social care businesses operating in your service area is a perilous strategy. It is also one which always backfires.
Never run down your competition in order to win a few points: you will always lose in the long run.
You may have the only 5-star or ‘outstanding’ rating in your area and it’s a powerful message to send to a prospective worker or client, but pointing out that your competitor down the street is only an average-rated business will — guaranteed — incur their wrath. And whilst you might score the point today, who can say if the tables will ever be turned and that your besmirched competitor won’t exact bitter revenge?
Running down the competition is also a very sleazy practice in an industry where reputation is valued so highly. Extolling your own virtues, your unique features or evidenced strengths is absolutely acceptable and encouraged. Yet doing this at the expense of direct comparisons against your competition is considered very unsportsmanlike. It actively undermines the rest of your marketing strategy and serves only to make you less attractive to your future workforce and prospective clients. Or at least the workers and clients you want to attract to your business.
This article was written by the Editorial Team at Social Care Network and first published on the Marketing Social Care blog site.
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