Though providing high-quality care is the goal of your home care business, you need clients and income in order to stay afloat. This means marketing is perhaps the second most important aspect of running the company. While there are plenty of effective marketing strategies out there, few have better conversion rates than word of mouth.

Providing great care means clients spread the word to their friends and family. Yet, no matter how big your network of clients is, you are still missing potential clients with this method alone. That’s where home care surveys come in. A survey allows your home care business to gather positive word of mouth testimonials and feedback, and then use it in your marketing material. Essentially, this allows you to spread word of mouth in a targeted way to the audiences with high likelihood of becoming clients.

Marketing A Home Care Businesses Starts With Surveys

When you’re ready to use survey feedback in your marketing, the first question to ask is, “What type of survey should we use?”

In fact, there are a few types of surveys useful for marketing your home healthcare business. The obvious one is the customer satisfaction survey. By including a section for written feedback, you can quickly gather customer comments on the performance of the business. Feedback can come in the form of stars or numerical rankings which can then be used for promotional purposes. More on that later.

Meanwhile, challenge surveys can be used to identify areas where clients will need help in the future. This helps your home care business get ahead of the curve and start preparing for the next phases of patient care. This shows your forward-thinking approach to care that is sure to reel in potential clients on the edge.

Finally, instant, one-question surveys help gather valuable data on a targeted objective. For example, whether or not customers are satisfied with a certain aspect of care, cost-effectiveness, or safety measures. This is great when you have general feedback for your marketing material and want to fill in the gaps.

By utilizing a combination of these surveys, home care marketing becomes as easy as asking questions. Compiling the feedback received basically constructs the marketing material you need to attract new customers faster than ever.

How To Create Home Care Marketing Materials With Survey Results

When considering using survey results in marketing materials, your home care company should focus first on providing stellar care to current clients. Of course, you should already be striving to do so. However, when attempting to market your business to future clients based on past service, that history must be pristine.

Before using certain survey data, your home care business needs to determine if the information is anonymous or if it could be attributed back to a client. For example, using a direct quote from a client’s survey without asking permission is a big no. But didn’t we say survey feedback is perfect for marketing? We did. It must be done in a careful manner, however, to avoid privacy breaches.

Testimonials, Stars, Scales? Oh MY!

So, imagine a client has left glowing feedback in a survey and your home care business wants to use it in an upcoming marketing campaign. The first step is reaching out to that client and asking if their quote (or a modified version of it) can be used. In most cases, clients will be honored and willing to let you use their words. Other times, your home care business can offer compensation, financial or otherwise, for using the quote. Once the client has given permission (get it in writing) the quote can be used in a testimonial gallery online, on brochures, and even in media commercials.

What about less detailed survey data like ratings on a scale of 1-10? Since this data contains no original feedback from the client, you don’t need to worry about obtaining permission. In fact, the best practice is to average scores from several different clients or all clients to get an average score. Hopefully this score is high. If so, your marketing materials including business cards, flyers, and your website will look great!

Occasionally, averaging scores from all clients can result in not-so-great numbers. For better use of marketing material, you can consider segmenting a portion of your client base and averaging their scores. For example, only clients for six months or more or only clients with non-terminal conditions. As long as you are clear in your marketing, you can play with averaging different client segments to find the highest scores possible. As a bonus, this can help you identify areas your business can improve in.

Let Home Care Marketing Pros Help!

Home care marketing is complex but ultra-important. Using client surveys as marketing material is one of the most effective ways of bringing in new clients. Word of mouth is powerful, so harness it and use it to your advantage. Home Care Marketing Pros can help you navigate the client survey process and use it as a tool to bring your home care business to the next level!