Testing says your potential patients may not be very interested in claims about how much you care. In home health, it is almost ubiquitous marketing material touts how much this agency cares and how honest their compassion is. Are these claims persuasive to prospective clients or would the agencies be better served to make a different point while they have the prospective customer's short and precious attention?

We recently completed a testing campaign in Facebook advertising for a physical therapy client who wants to test three potential new slogans. We created three ads. Then we created two new versions of each ad with the only difference being the tagline. That's nine ads total, so three test campaigns. Across all three campaigns, the slogan that talks about how much the practice cares gets the lowest (and in some cases zero) user engagement. Reaching more than 15,000 ad views for a total cost of less than $300, it's a great test and much more reliable than running around the office and asking everyone what they like. In this testing, the audience responded much more to the same ad with a tagline saying the practice philosophy is to treat every client as an elite athlete.

We find similar trends in home health and home care advertising. In search advertising campaigns, we create multiple ads for the same client to test different text. In most cases, ads about how much the client cares perform less well than ads about more tangible aspects of the service such as the hours, minimums, transportation assistance. The theme seems to be that both seniors and their adult children respond more to messages about quality service than they do to messages about compassion. Some aspects of compassionate language may even be counterproductive if the senior perceives it as patronizing. 

Have you tested your new logo options, slogan, branding colors, or top sales pitches to see what is most engaging to your audiences?