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Do you have a website for your residential care home? If not, there’s a place to start. If you do, there are ways you can focus on increasing traffic to your site and growing your audience organically. This means you don’t need a dedicated marketing professional and advertising budget to attract visitors to your webpage.
Here are 7 things care services can do to boost online presence and attract new leads without spending a fortune.
Use simple but informative headlines
Think: ‘Family-owned dementia care home in the heart of Sun Valley’ or ‘Outstanding senior care in the Ozarks’. The main headline acts to reassure the visitor that they are in the right place.
The subheading should expand on a specialization or unique selling point. For example, ‘5-star supported living accommodation in a peaceful cove. Our vibrant activity schedule and tight-knit community make for a smooth transition from home.’
Carefully choose images and include real photos where possible
A lot of businesses use stock images on their websites. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. However, this type of imagery often fails to fulfil a purpose, provide meaning, or help visitors convert.
You want to hook your visitors emotionally and build trust in your excellent care quickly. If you have cheesy stock images plastered on your website it can reduce trustworthiness and leave a lacklustre impression on people you’re trying to reach.
Ensure contact information is prominent
The entire aim of a website is to get visitors to contact you for more information about your care home service. Therefore, it is imperative that your contact information is easy to find. Ideally, your phone number and the home manager's email address should be located at the top of the webpage and/or on the footer of every webpage. It doesn’t hurt to have a dedicated contact page as well with a form submission option.
Display testimonials
Using testimonials or reviews from your residents and their families is a good idea. If you have positive business reviews on care home directories, be sure to link to those as well. If you are lacking in this area, ask or incentivize your resident families to leave reviews. Anything mentioning personalized care or enhanced health and wellbeing is ideal.
Provide a virtual tour of your facilities
Why just show images to potential new residents when you can entice them with an experience? Virtual tours are a fantastic way to increase user engagement. You can create beautiful 360 tours with sites like Kuula or Roundme. This would be similar to what you see on real estate websites.
Alternatively, you could provide continuity for visitors by having a member of your team host a guided tour. This could be outsourced if you’ve got the budget for it. If not, all you really need is a smartphone and a YouTube account. YouTube even has video editing functionality built into it for free.
The key here is to focus on the details that make your care community attractive. Perhaps you even say hello to a few friendly faces along the way (with their consent, of course).
Write blogs or newsletters
Potential residents and their families will want to get a feel for the culture and environment of your care community. Posting blogs or newsletters to your website is one way you can invite them into your world through the internet. What could you include?
- Events and activities that have taken place in your community
- Improvements to the facilities
- Awards and recognitions
- Special occasions or announcements for staff and residents
- Ways for families to get involved
- Support groups offered
- If you use a digital care management system like StoriiCare, you could explain the ways it has improved the quality of care you provide
- If you use something like Storii, which connects resident families with their loved ones in care, you can explain how it works and what the benefits are
Blogs don’t have to be lengthy or laborious but it does help for them to:
- Be structured with headings and subheadings
- Have compressed images, where images are included (image size can reduce loading speed and go against your page ranking)
- Be grammatically correct
- Get shared on any social media accounts you have
Make your activity calendar accessible
Activity programs are the lifeblood of many residential care communities. Prospective residents will want to know that there is a vibrant community life with plenty of opportunities for them to keep busy. You can easily evidence this on your website even if you don’t want to go to the trouble of creating a dedicated webpage for activities. You can simply share your schedule by uploading the PDF of your monthly activity calendar or linking to a digital signage URL.
Contact StoriiCare Today!
StoriiCare has helped hundreds of care providers around the world with digital transformation. See a demo of StoriiCare for yourself and discover how easy it is to use.
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