Welcome to February 2017, consumer direct care is here and if you deliver in-home care, your business structure is going to change.You are now going to have to be across marketing Home Care Packages.
Traditionally, in-home care service providers have been reliant on grants and funding, maybe even donors and bequests, to deliver home care services to their clients.
With the changes to Home Care Packages, it’s now clients who will receive the government funding and need to make the choice about which service provider to use.
If you’re one of these service providers, how are you going to go about marketing Home Care Packages? How are you going to attract and retain clients to ensure future growth and viability?
Well, for starters, you’re going to have to budget for marketing and advertising expenses. There is no way around it.
Your business model will completely change with this reversal of roles, where the client has to come to you – indeed find you, trust you, believe that you can deliver the best services to them. You need a budget and you need a plan. You need a direction. You need to know who exactly your target audience is and how to reach them.
Complacency isn’t really an option anymore, nor is relying on My Aged Care referrals. Networking with social workers and GPs and the like may very well be included in – if not form a big part of – your marketing strategy, but you can’t rely solely on word of mouth. Referrals will only go so far, especially if your potential clients decide to shop around or have a deeper look into your organisation.
If a potential client wanted to know more about your organisation, what information can they easily access and is that information of a high quality?
- Are all your brochures up to date?
- Does your website reflect your branding?
- Do you even have strong branding?
- Is your website responsive and viewable on all mobile devices?
- Is it well laid out and easy to navigate?
- Is the copy readable?
- What impression does it leave?
- Does it present your organisation well?
- What’s the community’s perception about your brand?
- Are you well known?
- What communication platforms are you using?
- Do you clients want more or less communication from you?
- Are you using social media?
- Do your offices, staff and modes of transport have branding on them to promote your organisation?
- Do you currently know how clients found out about your business, and therefore, the most effective ways to reach new clients?
If you’re sitting there thinking, I haven’t asked myself any of these questions, I don’t know how to market my brand, I don’t know how we’re going to get new clients when the changes to Home Care Packages are made – then you need to speak to a marketing person, your organisation will not thrive or see growth unless you do.
You may be able to retain your current clients, you may be able to get by for a while – but the whole aged care landscape is changing. It’s not just Home Care Packages, the NDIS is undergoing a complete, complex, overhaul. More and more for-profit businesses are coming into the marketplace, they have big marketing budgets and they know the importance of marketing and how to market.
You need to find your niche, your target audience, and build your brand so you are the preferred service provider.
We at Hugo Halliday can help you with that – we want to help you with that! We want to take your organisation from reliant on grants and funding, to being able to generate a solid, individual, non-reliant income.
If you’re ready to tackle the Home Care Packages changes head on, please contact us. One phone call, one meeting and we can begin getting you on track to longevity and viability.
We are based in Sydney, but we work with organisations across Australia.
**Our Director, Jessica Craig, previously worked for a not-for-profit community organisation who delivers in-home care services, so understands the unique position such organisations are in and how to go about marketing Home Care Packages.