4 Tips for Marketing Your Home Care Franchise

Are you interested in running your own home care franchise? If working within the caregiving sector appeals to you and you’re thinking about making an investment, it’s important that you first understand how to effectively run your franchise - including how to market your business effectively. There’s fierce competition in the sector and it can be tough to stand out, but the following five marketing tips will help.

Starting a homecare franchise is an exciting opportunity as not only is it a chance to enter a profitable sector, it’s also a job that allows you to give back to your local community on a daily basis, doing truly meaningful and valuable work. If you’re committed to building a successful home care franchise, a strong marketing plan is a must. Keep reading, and find out Point Franchise’s best tips for making that plan as good as it can be.

5 tips for marketing a home care business 

1. Regularly communicate with patients/clients/employees and keep everyone updated

If you’re invested in the idea of running a caregiving franchise, you also need to be willing to invest in effective, honest communication in order to make it a success. If your marketing is patchy, misleading and confusing, you’re going to struggle to build trust with your client base. If your marketing is informative, regular and honest, you won’t. 

Regular updates are especially key in the home care sector, as information can change on a daily basis, whether that’s info related to care standards/rules being impacted by things like Brexit, or whether that’s new info related to COVID coming out and causing disruptions. If you build updates and honesty into your marketing plans, you’ll find communicating respectfully and informatively comes easily and often - and everyone is kept happy.

2. Remember to emphasise what makes your home care franchise unique

As mentioned already, there is plenty of competition in the caregiving space. That means strong marketing has to make your franchise stand out from the crowd. The best way to do that is to focus on the aspects of your business that feel the most unique, whether it’s the range of services being offered, the availability of loyalty discounts, the attitude and ethos or, really, anything else. Find an angle that the competition isn’t working, and work it well. 

Just as the uniqueness of your franchise is something you can emphasise to potential funding backers when building a business plan for your home care franchise, it’s something you should continue to emphasise to your customers. Always seek to answer the question: Why your franchise? Why not a different company offering similar services?

3. Create an informative, engaging and well-designed website (and keep adding new content to it)

When looking into how to effectively market a home care franchise - or, indeed, how to effectively market any kind of franchise - you’ll soon see advice recommending you get digital and create a strong website. If this isn’t something your franchisor has already provided, it’s something you need to get onto ASAP, as a website is crucial in 2022 if you want to run one of the UK’s top home care franchises. 

A website builds credibility, allows for the easy communication of information and enhances your franchise’s ability to provide quality customer service. It’s also going to help you, via SEO friendly content, to reach an even wider audience of potential customers online. Here are a few things to include on your home care franchise’s website:

• A CQC rating 
• Testimonials from families and clients 
• Third-party testimonials 
• Pictures and information about the team 
• Any awards and achievements 

Setting up a website is relatively easy. Making sure it’s attractive, functional, accessible, and mobile-friendly can make your business look professional. There are many affordable website services you can use to get your business online fast and with little cost.
- Entrepreneur Handbook

4. Arrive on social media (and stick around)

Similarly to tip three, social media is another can’t-miss digital space in which to promote your business and attract new clients. While a website raises your credibility and allows you the perfect place to offer news and advice, a social media platform like LinkedIn or Instagram is ideal when you’d like to get a little more personal and casual, connecting with your audience on a deeper level and building up levels of customer loyalty. Social media:

• Humanises your brand
• Helps to generate click-throughs to your website
• Gives customers and potential customers the chance to start a conversation
• Generates more leads
• Offers you a new promotional avenue
• Raises brand awareness

When you’re promoting your home care franchise using social media, be sure to set and measure goals. Regularly evaluate, then, whether you’re meeting these goals or whether you need to make adjustments. Know your audience. Find your brand’s voice and stick to it. Plan in advance with a content calendar and post scheduling to be as consistent as you possibly can be about all things social media.

5. Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of print marketing 

If you’re interested in running your own business, and starting a homecare franchise in particular, note that many older people (who will make up a good proportion of your client and patient base, most likely) prefer some good old-fashioned offline marketing. If your target market isn’t online all the time, don’t feel your marketing needs to be, either. There are many continually valuable forms of marketing in print in 2022, such as:

• Business cards
• Letterhead and envelopes 
• Labels 
• Brochures 
• Leaflets 
• Posters
• Testimonials 

Successful marketing is key to starting and running a homecare franchise

Hopefully, after reading this article, you’ve developed a strong sense of what goes into marketing a home care franchise - and determined whether this is something you can do, whether working with Apollo Care, Heritage Healthcare or any other franchise network in the caregiving space. Stay on Point Franchise if you’d like to continue your research, discovering how to become a caregiver, how to choose the home care franchise that’s right for you and the five biggest advantages of running a home care franchise.