Medicare-certified home health is a peculiar marketing environment. Professionals attempting to make headway in home health marketing have to wrap their heads around the fact that the people ordering home health are not the people receiving home health, and neither the people ordering nor the people receiving home health are the people paying for home health. The whole situation turns traditional marketing philosophies on their ears.
Founded by a former home health business administrator in 2003, Brazzell Marketing Agency has implemented marketing ideas for hundreds of home health agencies. Here are some home health marketing ideas that work.
Home Health Marketing Idea #1
Monthly Physician Bulletins
If this just sounds too commonplace for you, let us start by telling you that this strategy has consistently proven to be one of the most cost-effective home health marketing ideas available. Home health agencies often assume, much to their detriment, that the doctors showing them loyalty or preference are sending all the referrals that they can and should. This is usually far from the truth. Doctors are prone to under-utilize home health if their home health agencies fail to implement a concerted and consistent physician education and top-of-mind awareness program. Physician bulletins have the added benefit of guarding existing loyalties against new competition and warming up prospective referral sources.
More discussion on this topic: How to Increase Home Health Referrals
Get Started: Home Health Newsletters Order Forms and Pricing
Home Health Marketing Idea #2
Facebook Referral Source Marketing
For two or three pennies per ad view, you can put your home health advertising in front of hundreds of referral sources every week, if not multiple times per week! Successful home health agencies are always looking for any and every way to put themselves in front of referral sources. Here's the single most cost-effective way for home health to put branded messages directly infront of doctors. What's more, most home health agencies haven't figured it out, so you can be the only one in your market reaching out this efficiently. In experienced hands, Facebook's advanced advertising targeting features enable home health agencies to distribute a set of ads only to likely referral sources in their area. This means the Facebook ads will only be seen by discharge planners, the right types of doctors, and their staff. Think of all the other ways you pay to put your message in front of doctors and how much each ad view usually costs your home health agency.
More information and get started: Facebook Referral Source Marketing
Home Health Marketing Idea #3
The Follow-Up Customer Service Call
Here’s a method that can get you new home health starts-of-care today. If you are an established home health agency, and referrals have declined recently, then you have nurses who are not fully scheduled. Schedule time for each nurse to sit in the office and telephone your old patient list. Have nurses call patients and families they themselves served. The goal is to have a real and helpful conversation about their health status. When you have real conversations with them, you will find that a few have a current skilled need. A busy home health agency in a temporary decline will typically get three or four starts-of-care from this activity the first time it's done.
More detailed discussion: Need a Quick Boost in Home Health Referrals?
Home Health Marketing Idea #4
Quarterly Patient Newsletters
To understand how this is a marketing idea that can actually increase your monthly counts of starts-of-care, consider this:
- Even past patients are rarely aware of all the ways you can help them. Educate them.
- Some past patients loved your nurse, remember your nurse's name, but can't remember the name of the agency. Remind them.
- You know someone in a position of influence will eventually encourage your past patients to use a different agency. Your past patients are probably not aware of all your strengths, credits, and accolades. Protect their loyalty.
- They may need you and know you can help them. But it's often human nature that we don't do things until someone specifically invites us to do them. Invite them.
More discussion: Why and How to Market to Past Patients for Home Health Growth
Get Started: Home Health Patient Newsletters
Home Health Marketing Idea #5
Appear in Search Results Such As Google
Want to get more new patients than what the doctors and discharge planners send? Here's the fastest and most cost-efficient way. In your market, every month, thousands of people are searching online for home health or asking questions where the answer is "home health." They're not searching for your company name. They're usually not even searching the word "home health." Instead, they are using the best terms they could think of to mean home health, or they are searching for solutions to their specific needs. When your website appears in their search results and your website is good enough to make them call you, this strategy makes the phone ring in a cost-effective fashion.
These calls are not beneficial for every home health agency. Some agencies are dedicated to and satisfied with the referral-source marketing model. Turning these phone calls into patients usually requires having a staff member who will visit the caller at home, have a plan of care developed, and then deliver that plan of care to the doctor for certification.
You could accomplish this search results presence with SEO, but there are faster, more cost-efficient methods. Brazzell's Search Results Now campaign is not SEO. It gets agencies on the first page of Google literally overnight. It puts agnecies in the results for hundreds of relevant keywords and phrases. This results in higher and much faster return on investment.
Learn More Order Form & Pricing
Home Health Marketing Idea #6
Monitor the Trends and Breaking News
Make sure you receive notes on the latest trends and ideas in home health marketing. Understanding small shifts in the home health marketing landscape can make large differences in the effectiveness of your home health marketing plan. For instance, did you know that replacing the word "care" with words such as "assistance" and "support" can increase the effectiveness of your home health advertising 71% (more)? Or did you know that home health advertising with custom photography proves 77% more effective than home health ads with stock photography (more)?
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