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Home Care Marketing & Sales Mastery by Approved Senior Network®
Dawn Fiala, Lisa Marsolais, Annette Ziegler, and Valerie VanBooven RN BSN provide insight into home care marketing strategies. They cover in-person, in-field sales and online marketing every other week. These podcast episodes are part of the Home Care Marketing Mastermind, sponsored by Approved Senior Network®. Find more information at https://ASNHomeCareMarketing.com
Home Care Marketing & Sales Mastery by Approved Senior Network®
ASN's Home Care Marketing End-of-Year Webinar Replay!
Unlock the secrets to mastering digital marketing in the home care industry with Lisa Marsolais, Valerie Van Booven and Dawn Fiala. Learn how to enhance your online presence by optimizing your website for Google's algorithm, harnessing the power of AI searches, and leveraging effective SEO strategies. Dawn brings her wealth of knowledge to the table, sharing best practices for training community liaisons and salespersons, emphasizing the seamless integration of sales and recruiting efforts for exponential company growth. Also joining us is Lisa Marsolais, our client happiness representative, who contributes her expertise in home care and marketing.
Explore the dynamic world of online visibility as we delve into effective SEO, pay-per-click advertising, and AI trends. Discover why site speed, on-page SEO, and local SEO are crucial components in crafting high-quality content. Understand the importance of maintaining accurate business listings on search engines like Google and Bing, and how this affects AI-driven results. Plus, get an introduction to the groundbreaking concept of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and its relevance in this rapidly changing landscape.
Navigate the complexities of referral relationships and caregiver recruitment with our practical guidance. From maintaining strong connections with referral sources to establishing trust with clients during initial assessments, we cover the essentials. You'll also gain insights into crafting compelling caregiver ads and seamlessly integrating online and offline marketing strategies. Prepare to elevate your marketing efforts, refine your sales training, and thrive in the dynamic home care landscape as we guide you through these transformative strategies.
Continuum Mastery Circle Intro
Visit our website at https://asnhomecaremarketing.com
Get Your 11 Free Home Care Marketing Guides: https://bit.ly/homecarerev
we're zooming. Yay, all right. Thanks everybody for joining us. We have lots and lots of folks on here. Everybody's muted and we can't see you, but we hope you're listening and we hope you're watching. We will open up the platform for questions. There is a q, a section which, when I have this full screen, I can't see it, so maybe.
Speaker 2:Lisa, can you see it? I can see the Q&A and I can see the chat. Well, we won't be using the chat, right?
Speaker 1:no that, for whatever reason, chat doesn't like me.
Speaker 3:I think that was working this time. Last time it didn't, but it seems to be working now. I don't see Q&A on this one, so something's different. I have both, okay. Okay, so type your questions in Q&A or chat either one oh yeah, now I see it um.
Speaker 1:Michelle said 75 in Fort Myers we're so lucky Michelle. I'm not taking those hurricanes, I can't do that. But but I love Fort Myers, florida, love it. It's beautiful there.
Speaker 3:I agree, one of my favorite places.
Speaker 1:All right, let me go back to slideshow, all right. So thanks everybody, and let's get started here with our agenda. So we're going to have a little introduction of us, in case you haven't met us or don't know who we are, can't even imagine that I'm just kidding, or don't know who we are, can't even imagine that I'm just kidding.
Speaker 1:I'm going to go first with website requirements to rank well with Google showing up in AI search and why it matters this is going to be a new topic for you all what's new in SEO and then Dawn's going to take over best practices for training your community liaison, your salesperson, and then sales monthly marketing plan and key elements of an effective caregiver ad. So this is our end of year 2024 into 2025. What do you need to do to be successful? And I have a few comments I'll reserve to the end that we've heard lately from clients that I just want to anonymously share with you so that you have some idea of why all this works so well together. Okay, I'm Valerie Van Boeven.
Speaker 1:I'm the founder and co-owner of Approve Senior Network. We started in 2008 as LTC Expert Publications, if any of you have been. We do have clients who've been with us that long, believe it or not, which is lovely, and we've seen a lot of people retire and sell their businesses. So I feel like I'm old, but we started out as LTC and now we're ASN. We rebranded a few years ago and I'm registered nurse by trade and played many roles in that profession, and today we have a lovely team of folks all across the United States. We are 100% virtual, but we're all US based and it's just been an amazing journey. So that's me. Who's next? I'll go.
Speaker 3:I'm Dawn Fiella. I have been here at Approved Senior Network for close to three years now. I can't believe it's coming up on three. I can't believe you just said that. Senior Network for close to three years now. I can't believe it's coming up on three years. No, I can't believe you just said that it's a wonderful place to work.
Speaker 3:I started at Home Instead Senior Care almost God, I don't even want to say a long time ago. I don't want to age myself. I was there for about 10 years. I started in the community liaison. I was a community liaison for about six, seven years and then the operations manager. We were the number one company throughout the entire United States and other countries the entire time I was there. More recently, I was in an independent home care agency. I'm in Arizona. It's a very competitive market here and I helped to grow that company's private pay to $3.5 million in under four years. I've worn many hats in home care, as many of you probably do as well. It's just the way that it works, that everything is so interweaved that you know it's like oh, I want to sign a new job but we don't have caregivers, okay, so now I'm going to go help over here in recruiting because I've got a sales background right. But it's helped me to understand how it all works together.
Speaker 3:I think my favorite part of home care is growing the company. I love it, and Annette is not here with us. She is in our sales training program right now, but she's been with us close to a year Valerie, I think it's pretty close to a year now. She is running our 12-week live Zoom training. We have several people who have been through it. They're doing really, really well. So if she were here, she would love to be here, but she's she's busy training right now. So we're going to we're going to let her do that, and she has a very big background in home care as well. She started, or her last was, at Touching Hearts. So, anyway, that's, that's Annette, and so, lisa, I'll leave you to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and she's in New York. My name is Lisa Marcella, and I see lots and lots of names here. Love seeing that you all are here. I've been with ASN for almost two years, right, gosh, and you know I have worked in home care, worn all the hats you can imagine, because you just can't stay in your own lane in home care. I mean, it's just that unique to where you just have to touch everything. And before that I was in, you know, newspaper and internet marketing. So before you know, back when the newspaper was cool, before the internet killed it, and then I learned lots of cool stuff online as well. So I always thought this was just the perfect fit for me. I am your client happiness person, so I love chatting with you and talking with you about all your programs and making sure that you're, you know, participating and that we're doing all the things. So, yeah, I'm just happy to be here and a part of your journey. Call me, ask me anything. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:If it weren't for Lisa and Don, I mean I would be. I'd jump off a bridge some days. They're so good at what they do. I would just want to be. I have to stay in my lane and just do the internet stuff. They're so good at what they do.
Speaker 3:Oh, I love it. I think it's home care that prepped us, though, because I know when I started, then Lisa started, then Annette started, george, who's co-owner, said you know, there's something about you home care gals, it's true. It just you just wear, so you're just used to juggling and handling and and keeping people happy. So I think that it prepped us for for this for sure.
Speaker 1:Well. I can honestly say that our customer service is like not 10 out of 10. It's like 45 out of 10 because of these ladies For me? I don't know.
Speaker 3:Anyway, all right.
Speaker 1:So I'll keep going here. We'll keep going and sharing, okay, so also, there is a Q&A section, and Lisa's gonna watch that for me because I can't see it. But if you have a question as we go, please just go ahead and put it in the Q&A thing on your little dashboard that you have, and we'll just go through and answer in the order received. We'll take a little break once in a while throughout the slides, so don't hesitate to just throw it in there, because if we need to rewind on a topic, we certainly will. All right. So everybody wants to know. Most people want to know how do you make my website rank well in a Google search? I'm located in Fairfax, virginia, and it's a very competitive market. Or I'm in Miami, florida, or I'm in Manhattan, new York, or I'm in Phoenix, arizona. How do you get my website to show up when somebody types in keyword phrases that I want them to type in? And so that's what I'm going to talk about. This is so. What I want you to do is take out your phone, take a screenshot, or, if you're on a computer, take out, if you can screenshot this, because I just put it instead of having 15 slides about this. I put it all in one slide because I'm not going to go deep on any single one of these, but I want you to see how hard it is to make your website rank on page one, especially if you're in a really competitive market. And I always give this analogy If you are located in West Winnemucca, nevada, I can rank your website today, but if you, there's nothing there, right. But if you're in Las Vegas, nevada, it's going to take a long time because you have, you know and by long time, what do I mean? It depends. It could be three months, it could be six months. There's all kinds of variables that go into that.
Speaker 1:So the first thing we all need to remember is that conducting keyword research is really important, but the reason you want to use an organization to do this for you that has a background in home care is for this reason. Over the years, we have had lots of people come to us and say rescue me. I have signed up with some goofball place and they are doing nothing. I don't rank for any of the real keyword phrases. And so we will do a little investigation and look at the website and see what keyword phrases their search engine optimized for, and we realized that they're completely wrong. And it's because whoever did it is not someone who ever worked in home care and they just don't understand the industry. So, in other words, if you, you know, if you were to look at keyword research, you would see that the word home care jobs or home care careers is one of the number one searched keyword phrases in the United States. That's because of the caregivers, right? You don't want to rank your website for that. Maybe you do for your. You know one page of your website, your careers page, but not your whole website, and we've seen goofy things like that. So please understand that conducting keyword research is really important and we do it all the time. It's not a one and done. We kind of know, because we've done this for so long, what keywords work, but sure your pages say who you are, where you're located and what you do. Who you are where you're located and what you do. If your website pages don't say those kinds of things, then you will never be found.
Speaker 1:Create high-quality content. The content on your website used to be well. It still is today that I see a lot of websites that just have a bulleted list of services and that's it. And if you're going to compete against Home Instead huge, huge website. I don't know if you know this, but if you have a Home Instead in your area and you go to their website, their local page or their local set of pages that they have for their website, it's connected to every other Home Instead across the country. So that website is actually not just the five or six pages of the people that are local to you, it's hundreds of thousands of pages. That website is enormous. Not only that, they have a great brand and they've done a great job of branding themselves. Home Instead. That keyword phrase used to be one of the number one search keyword phrases in the United States because they have branded so well, which I'm going to come back to pretty soon. So you want to make sure that your website has a lot of good quality content on it, not just a bulleted list of services. I could rattle that off in my sleep. I know what your services are, but for SEO purposes, that needs to be long form content.
Speaker 1:Ensure mobile friendliness. Always look at your website on a mobile device and see what it looks like and ask a friend say what do you think of this? And ask them to look at it. Do you know how to contact me? If you were on your phone and looking for home care services and you clicked on my website, does my phone number show up there and is it clickable or a form? Is it? There's a button that says contact us? Can you tell how you're supposed to get ahold of me? By looking at this phone? Make sure you know because, as time goes on, most of the searches greater than 50% are done from mobile devices.
Speaker 1:Improve your site speed. You want to have an A rating in speed. We do speed tests all the time, not only on our own websites, but on other people's websites. Speed tests all the time, not only on our own websites, but on other people's websites. And if you're slow loading on mobile specifically, google is going to say you know what? No, because they want Google, wants their, the people that are using them as a search engine to have a good experience. So if it takes, you know, even five seconds for your website to fully load, google's not going to put you on the first page of Google. You have to have a speedy, well-polished website on mobile.
Speaker 1:Quality backlinks you need to have those. That means other websites that are not purchased. Don't go buy backlinks from somebody on Fiverr, because they will have a million spammy backlinks headed to your website. Don't do that. These are quality backlinks you need from reputable sources. Enhanced user experience it just needs to be visually appealing, easy to navigate. Think about the fact that a lot of moving parts on your website aren't necessary. Not only does that slow your website down, but it also is confusing to people, especially if they're not web savvy Seniors in particular. They don't need a lot of. Don't make your website loud. Make it simple, clean and easy to navigate.
Speaker 1:Leverage local SEO We'll talk about that. Monitor and optimize using analytics. Of course, everybody needs to have Google Analytics. You should know how many people are coming to your website and stay updated with SEO trends. Now, because you're home care agency owners, I don't expect that you're going to stay up with SEO trends, but I can tell you from doing this for so long that it changes every year, every six months. We're doing something different, we're doing something new. We're making sure as technology advances and you're going to see this in the next slide so does SEO. So if you have any questions about SEO or your website, go ahead and put them in the Q&A. Anything I need to address yet.
Speaker 2:Yes. So I do have a question about keyword phrases. You know what makes the biggest impact. Is it pay-per-click? Does increasing your pay-per-click make the biggest difference in competitive markets? And then a follow-up to that question is what are the top three things that if you were to pick three in this diagram, what would the top three be?
Speaker 1:Ooh, on-page SEO. Okay, I'll do my top three first. That's pretty easy Site speed, on-page SEO and leveraging local SEO. Those three would be my top, but those also kind of include the high quality content, so that would be my top three. Now, what was the first part of it? Keywords.
Speaker 2:First part was what makes the biggest impact. And then the question is does pay-per-click you know, increasing your budget and pay-per-click does that make a big difference in a competitive market?
Speaker 1:Okay. So pay-per-click is a whole animal in and of itself. That is very expensive more expensive than you think and more expensive than you can even imagine and to make it work and also having paid traffic to your website, it might help a little bit. But paid traffic, generally speaking, is not an indicator of, is not helpful in the SEO world, in the organic world, because Google knows you're just sending paid traffic to your website. It's not going to give you any kudos for that. It can't. That would be against FTC guidelines, against advertising guidelines. So in other words, google can't favor you because you're using pay-per-click.
Speaker 1:But if you're asking me, does increasing your budget on pay-per-click help? It depends on who else is doing pay-per-click. But if you're asking me, does increasing your budget on pay-per-click help? It depends on who else is doing pay-per-click. If you have somebody who's better at pay-per-click than you in your local area then or has more money to spend, it doesn't matter how much you increase your budget If you're not doing it right. Pay-per-click is complicated anymore and it can definitely backfire and you can get a whole lot of nothing. So that's a whole conversation in and of itself.
Speaker 2:Okay, I hope I answered that in some way. All right, let's keep going. Sorry, and there was one more question that just came in about site speed. Just if you could, I guess, when you chose your top three, a little bit more about site, site speed would be helpful, and maybe you're getting to that Sure.
Speaker 1:Site speed is how long it takes your website to load on a desktop and how long it takes your website to load on a mobile device like a phone. So back in 2018, google said all we really care about is the mobile experience now. So desktop is fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, really care about is the mobile experience now. So desktop is fine, yeah, yeah, yeah, but mobile is where it's at, so your website needs to load super fast on a phone or an iPad or whatever. So desktop is always important, but mobile speed is what makes a difference. So if your website takes a really long time to load, people aren't going to wait around. They want it like this, you know. And so if it takes five seconds and I'm 1, 1,000, 2, 1,000, 3, 1,000, and I'm still waiting, I'm moving on because your website's broken, even if it's not. So that's what I mean by website speed. It needs one second. It should be one to two seconds. It should be fully loaded and easy to use.
Speaker 2:Okay, and I don't know if you want one more question on that, but follow up to that is how do you increase that site speed?
Speaker 1:You can have a website built by us. No well, there's lots of ways to increase website speed. First of all, your web developer should know how to do that. So you need to go to your web developer and say, hey, I think this is loading slow. Can we fix it? There's all kinds of code behind the scenes. If you have lots of moving parts, like numbers that are flashing by, we've taken care of 200 clients and 50 of them are happy and blah or whatever, you know how people have like, or if things are going like this, when it loads or whatever, a video that plays, please don't automatically play a video. But if you have a video that needs to load, all of that is a big no and and there's ways around that, but there are it just slows your website down. So the stuff that looks pretty to you maybe a lot of fun and it looks amazing when it loads, but that doesn't mean it's a good experience for everybody and it doesn't mean that it's gonna load fast. So talk to your web developer about that.
Speaker 1:Okay, showing up in an AI search and why it matters. A-e-o. This is new. I bet you haven't heard about this, so we're going to just kind of keep it simple. Some people love AI and some people do not love AI, and I totally get it, but I'm going to tell you that it's not going to go away, no matter how much you love it or hate it. Ai is going to drive a lot of things. It's going to drive content. It's going to drive how we do stuff. It's going to have impacts all over the place. One of the ways it's going to have an impact on business owners like you is that people are going to start using AI as a search tool as opposed to just a Google search, and I'll show you some examples of that in just a minute. It's here to stay.
Speaker 1:So, while you don't have to be an expert in AI, you need to understand that it is going to be important to your business, if it isn't already, and it can level the playing field in a few ways. You know, automating some of the things that you don't want to do every day and some things that you do. All softwares that you use are already kind of an AI setup, so you're using it probably in some form in your business already. It frees up your time, so it can help you if you use email marketing. I mean all of our clients, whether they know it or not, have some form of automation, and the systems that we use know only to send this email to these people who are tagged with this tag, or only to send to referral sources, or only to send this email to consumers. So you're kind of already using AI anyway and it will be effective in helping you with data. So lots of data and policy regulations will be out there, but you can make sure that your data that you have, whether it's customer data or it's just your numbers all of that stuff can be generated with AI. If AI understands your business, your documentation, the things you know, the frequently asked questions about ABC home care and all of the data that goes into it, you can definitely use AI to help you understand what moves you should make next. So that's more of the financial world of AI, but it doesn't replace human creativity.
Speaker 1:So I will say that we have experimented with AI in many, many ways and it does not replace the personal touch for our business or for your business. That is not what it's designed to do. That is not what we want it to do. It can enhance the experience of the person who comes to your website or the client who needs support, but it's never going to replace you. So we recognize that and we know that in the home care business, which is a very touchy-feely business, that you guys understand that as well. It's great to experiment with different AI tools and learn what you can use and what you really don't need for your business, but it will change over time.
Speaker 1:Stay updated on trends and educate yourself and your team. Now, I know you guys are not going to probably spend a whole lot of time staying updated on trends of SEO or AEO, which I'm going to show you here in a second. That's our job, right? So that's why we're headed this direction. We're going to take a little bit of AI in 2025 and help our clients, but again, we understand that human touch is way more important than having somebody answer questions. That is not a real human. We get that. So let's just talk about what we're doing right now and what we're seeing out there. So we're going to talk about answer engine optimization.
Speaker 1:So what I did was I took the big AI platforms Google, gemini, chatgpt, which you've probably heard of, and there's a few others you're going to see on these screens and I asked it a question and I want to show you the answer. So you're going to see some comparisons here and I'll give you my opinion on what's going on. So what I did was I asked all of them kind of the same question. So for Google Gemini I asked give me a list of the top 20 home care agencies in Fairfax, virginia? I don't know why I always use Fairfax Virginia as an example, but I do. And it did, and it gave me. Google Gemini gave me the list, and at the very bottom of the screen, right above our copyright thing, it says Google top 20 home care agencies in Fairfax and then you can click on view sources.
Speaker 1:And the sources that Google drew that answer from were a combination of their own search results and things like carecom, caringcom. You know the aggregators of data. So I would suggest that, if you're not already on carecom or caringcom, if you can get a free listing or something minimal there, if it has to be paid for I'm out of the loop on what that is you don't have to buy leads, but you need to have a very up-to-date listing on those platforms. I would highly recommend that. So that's the first thing I learned.
Speaker 1:Next door to that, we see the chat GPT results for the exact same question and underneath each response you can see where it got that information. And one of the websites that it kept referencing here is Assisted Living Support, which is probably a lead generation website. I didn't go there. It's probably owned by A Place for Mom and it just happened to be one of the top websites that were in that that it picked up on. Now you can also see if you go down a little bit. It picked up on Comfort Keepers and a couple of other things, but for the most part it's got all of these results from assisted living support, which didn't really make me too happy, but I learned quite a bit about this.
Speaker 1:So where Google and ChatGPT are getting their information are two very different places. So I asked ChatGPT Chat do your search results come from Bing or Google? And Chat said to me my search results are sourced from Bing. Let me know if you need further clarification. So, as people start using these search engines, well, the AI engines, these AI engines just know that Bing is important to you. Bing is important to you whether you use it or not. Bing and Microsoft are important. So we have largely ignored Bing for a very long time because nobody uses it. But guess what? They made a very cool chat.
Speaker 1:Gbt didn't want to get in, you know, didn't want to use Google Gemini. So here we are. So I'm going to talk to you a little bit more about this as we go. So I also asked Claude AI another one Best Home Care Agency in Fairfax, virginia and it didn't tell me any answers, because Claude does not go to the internet to find answers. It only has what it's learned up till, maybe a year ago or maybe six months ago. It's getting faster and faster. Claude will not go online and find answers for you. It'll give you some recommendations, but it won't tell you any names. So out. Claude, however, I will tell you, is very good at writing content. So, while it might not be good for a search, it's great for writing content.
Speaker 1:Perplexity is another one, and so I did ask perplexity do you primarily source Google's database or Bing? And it said sources. It gave me Bing. Bing versus Google. It gave me predominantly Google is what it uses. So perplexity is going to be using Google. People are going to be using these. I know this might sound like a foreign language at this point, but people use these, and then we have our friends at Meta, facebook, instagram, nextdoor all owned by Meta, and I'm sure there are more Meta.
Speaker 1:When looking for answers, do you primarily search Google or Bing? I don't search Google or Bing. Looking for answers, do you primarily search Google or Bing? I don't search Google or Bing. Instead, I was trained on massive corpus of text data, on a massive corpus of text data which allows me to generate human-like responses. My training data is sourced from web pages, books, articles, research papers and user-generated content. So, and then I asked it to give me top 20 home care agencies in fairfax, virginia, and it gave me the source, which was from google, and the answer came out of carepathwayscom. So if you're not listed on carepathwayscom, you will need to get listed on carepathwayscom. So meta it's probably using a variety of things, but it certainly said it didn't. And then it went to Google and found the answer and gave it to me Microsoft, copilot, another one using Bing and this is the answer it gave me. And here are some of the root sources that it used Caringcom and careyayaorg. Do you use Bing or Google? I use Bing. Of course, microsoft is Bing All right, so check your business listing on Bing.
Speaker 1:You probably have spent a lot of time I know we do for our clients making sure that your business listing is very good on Google my Business or Google Business Listing. It's good and it should be, and you should spend a lot of time on that. However, if you haven't taken an adventure over to Bing and looked at your own listing, you should do that Now. We went through, I went through and made sure that all of our clients that use our services are updated on Bing and I hooked up their Bing to their Google my Business so that if Google my Business gets a little change or a post, it goes over to Bing and also posts it there Magical over to Bing and also post it there Magical. So if you're not updated on Bing, please go take a look and make sure you have a listing and see what it says about you. It's going to be very important.
Speaker 1:Does anybody have any questions about where the answers are coming from? On AI, it's Google and Bing. On AI, it's Google and Bing, all right. So the next thing you want to do on any of these, just like people have told us for years, go do a Google search on your own name or your own company name and see what comes up. You should do that, but you should also know what comes up when somebody puts in an information request about your home care agency. So I put in tell me about in credit care home care. And it gave me a lovely response. And the reason it gave me a lovely response is because we made sure that when we wrote the content for this website, we not only coded it the right way, we wrote it nicely, but we coded it on the back end with schema. We made sure that anyone, anything, any person who came there, would get a nice AI description of everything that they do and all the places that they serve. This is a beautiful example of what you should find when you put in your own business name. If you're not finding something like this, then let's work on it. You should have a very nice summary of your business on here.
Speaker 1:And then I asked for Plexity the same thing and it gave me a little bit of a different answer, but it gave me all the sources that it used and it gave me all the information I needed. So it was a little bit different, but you know pretty much the same stuff it was. I was happy with it. And then I asked meta. The same thing, nice, except at the bottom it said to learn more about. It was as if it was writing an article to learn more about in credit care. Visit their website, which I don't know why it thought it wanted me to, wanted to write an article. But anyway, there's Meta, ai and then Claude. Claude doesn't go to the internet. It didn't know anything. They knew it was located in Woodbridge, virginia, but that was it, and that's going to be your response from Claude most of the time.
Speaker 1:It's not a good search engine. Gemini Google, it gave me a very nice listing and it also gave me a bunch of places where we could find more information about it. So that was great. And then Bing Copilot gave me a great answer. We know that this website is done well, it's search engine optimized well and it's written so that AI understands it. You have to make sure that all those parts and pieces are in place for you to show up and for people to be able to get information about you. All right, let's talk about what's new in home care SEO. Do I have any questions about artificial intelligence?
Speaker 2:No, everybody's like no, there was a question, one question that said what are Google search results based on? You know, history, your search history, geographic location, other factors, and then how do you account for that one, seeing how your business ranks?
Speaker 1:Okay. So if you're looking, if you are logged into Google into your own account and you do lots of searches all the time for stuff and you've been like looking to see if your business shows up, google is going to show you what it thinks you want to see. So it's going to give you some kind of false results. It's not bad results, it's just it thinks you want to see your website in the number one spot. So it's going to show you that because it thinks that's what you want. You want to see your website. So you need to log out of Google, you need to open an incognito window, you need to do it from a different browser or whatever, and not be logged into Google and do your search. You'll get a better picture of what other people in your local area are seeing. However, we use third-party services that tell us exactly how you rank and we send that report out monthly, so you don't have to do all that crazy stuff. We do it for you. We use a third-party service and we say so in Fairfax, virginia, with these keyword phrases how do I rank? And our clients know that they're number one, number two, number three, number four. They know where they rank on the page. They know if they've increased over the last month or if they've gone down in rank. They know all the things. So having a third-party software generate that for you is really the best way, and having reporting come to you monthly to show you your ranking on your main keyword phrases is mandatory. If your SEO person's not doing that, then they're not helping you. You need to know what your SEO person is doing for you every month.
Speaker 1:All right, so let's talk about SEO. What's new? So AI powered content creation? Yes, people are using AI to generate content. And here is the rub. It's okay to use AI generated content as long as it is a piece of content that is helpful for other people. If you're generating a rambling piece of doo-doo, then it's not going to rank, it's not going to help your website, it's not going to do anything for you. But if I generate an AI piece of content that gives you the answers you want it may come with quotes and pictures and illustrations that show you how things work then absolutely that is great content and Google's going to be very happy with that. And so are AI engines that are used to search. If you just you know, don't you just put in some gobbledygook that has a bunch of keyword phrases stuffed into it and it doesn't make any sense. Nobody, no search engine, is going to care about that. So you can create high quality content. You can incorporate video imagery, all kinds of things to make that content really valuable to the people that are on your website and to Google. Enhanced user experience signals. So Google is placing more emphasis on core web vitals, which means page load speed and visual stability. So again, we're coming back to speed every single time Voice search optimization.
Speaker 1:So a lot of times what we do when we write content, we ask Google or whatever search engine or whatever artificial intelligence we're working with. We're going to ask for seven frequently asked questions written in an NLL natural language. We want seven frequently asked questions that are written in natural language. Meaning I want frequently asked questions that people also ask and I'm going to show you that in another slide and that's really important to have on your website A great set of frequently asked questions that are written in natural language. So if I were to say, alexa, tell me about the weather today, if I say it too loud, she's going to talk to me, alexa. So what's the weather today? 23 degrees. We've gone up a little, but if you ask Alexa a couple of other questions, you're going to use a natural language and she's going to understand. That ends it EAT focus.
Speaker 1:I know it's hard to know what all these crazy things mean. Google wants you to have content that demonstrates expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. So we ask you to make videos. Our clients. We ask them to make videos. We ask them to make an authority or a trust video. And it's hard. It's hard to look at yourself on camera, but it makes a difference. So keep doing video. We're going to hone in on video. Maybe do some clinics with video and maybe get a few videos done on either not on Zoom, but together in 2025.
Speaker 1:In local SEO and hyperlocal targeting, we want to make sure that we are targeting everything local to you and make sure that all of the things that we talk about on your website are very local to your office location. Okay, brand is king Brand, brand, brand. So here's the thing I get a lot from our clients and I want you to understand how important it is. The name of your company is your brand and it's super important. So I will hear. I don't care if I rank number one for ABC Home Care, insert your company name. I want to rank number one for Home Care. I totally get that. You do, I know. I know you do, and we want you to rank number one for Home Care too. However, don't discount the name of your company. Home Instead for a long time got 30,000 searches a month on Google and they were one of the number one searched home care queries in the United States for years because of brand. Now you don't have to be that big, the United States for years because of brand. Now you don't have to be that big, but local to you.
Speaker 1:When your sales rep is out there, your name is in people's heads. They know you provide home care, but they're going to put in I use in credit care as an example but in credit care they're going to put that in there in a search and come up with some information about you. Your brand should be associated with every keyword that matters to you. So keywords that matter to you should be ABC Home Care, Home Care, home Care in St Louis. Abc Home Care in St Louis. So not just the word home care by itself, but you have to associate home care with the location you provided in and home care with your name, and especially if your name does not include the words home care, your name, and especially if your name does not include the words home care, then you want to make sure that you're incorporating the word home care into a lot of things out there on the internet that are exactly related to your business. So your brand name needs to be part of your SEO. Hope that makes sense, and I use St Louis and ABC Home Care as examples. They don't neither. That doesn't exist here.
Speaker 1:Okay, long tail keywords push all the keywords in the right direction. So here's another thing I see a lot. I don't care if I rank number one for in-home elderly care in St Louis. Nobody's gonna type that in. I wanna rank number one for home care, and we want you to rank number one for home care too. But long tail. Long tail means long phrases push the more desirable keywords to the top. So the words that matter to you in this case should be ABC home care provides elderly in home care. Elderly in home care in St Louis. Elderly in home care.
Speaker 1:Eventually, as you use those long-tail keyword phrases in some of your articles and some of your SEO, in-home care and home care are both going to start being pushed to the top. So you want to use long-tail keyword phrases a lot in your content because you know if you've ever looked at what people actually type in when they're looking for home care, they type in some weird stuff because they just don't know what to type in. So long tail keywords are your friends and they will push everything else up to the top. I guess I probably could have done this. I'm not taking up the whole hour Like no, say no. Oh, yes, I am Okay. So this is the last thing I want to talk about. People also ask.
Speaker 1:So if you want to know why long tail matters, why these long keyword phrases matter, if you go to Google and you type in home care in St Louis or I need home care in St Louis, you're going to see this little section that says people also ask, and if you scroll down further, you're going to see people also search for this is your key.
Speaker 1:This is what people are searching for who qualifies for home health care services in Missouri? How to care for immobile elderly. This is stuff that people are typing in all the time. So you want to make sure you have articles about these things and these. If you have articles that answer these questions, then Google is going to refer you more often for other things. So all of this matters and these are all long tail keyword phrases. So that's what we're heading toward in 2025 and what we've been doing for a while. I hope that helps with all of your SEO and website needs and, of course, please hit us up for more information and we can help your website. So I'm going to turn it over to Dawn now. This is probably the best part of this whole webinar, so you can turn your attention to Dawn, because she knows what she's talking about here.
Speaker 3:All right. So we've talked all about the online stuff. It's important and the most important thing is to marry your online to what you're doing out in the field. We're preaching that all of the time, so we talked online. Now we're going to talk about some of the other things. So best practices for training, your community liaison, so your community liaison. We're going to cover these five things industry knowledge, terminology. We're going to talk about an elevator speech, referral types and how to break in Community liaison goals and asking for the business booking and signing clients. So, oops, I don't. Oh, there we go. I didn't have control there for a second. All right, industry knowledge it's going to be really important, before your marketer hits the field is there that they have some industry knowledge and understand the language and terminology out there. Part of getting referrals is being trustworthy and part of them trusting you is that they know you get it, you're in the industry, you understand what they're doing, you understand the terminology in the language. So having some background information in just industry knowledge and abbreviations that are used, like D-O-N, p-t-o-t. When a social worker is talking to your marketer and says he's going to need P-T-O-T and your marketer is just you know what is? I don't know what that is. They lose credibility when that happens. So it's going to be really important that you go through the industry.
Speaker 3:Where is home care's place in the industry? When does somebody decide to use home care instead of placement? Why are they using home care and not assisted living? They need to understand the place that home care has in this industry. They need to know all the abbreviations that could be out there and terminology also. Terminology also. They need to understand what ADLs are. They need to understand what Medicaid is, what Medicare is. They don't need to be experts in it, but they need to understand what those things are and how they relate to home care and how they relate to seniors that are discharging or seniors who live in assisted living. And the terminology changes based on your audience. I learned this long time ago that there are really good relationships with those social workers so much though that they educated me.
Speaker 3:I would be in there and I'm like, oh yes, that person that discharged, he's our client now. And they don't like the word client. And they told me that that sounds businessy, that sounds like you're in it for the money. You know they don't want me to use the word client. So when you're in with any of your referral sources skilled nursing facility, their patients, even the people that you have that you're caring for in their home you're talking to a social worker. Call them a patient, because that is what sinks in. That is the language that they use day in and day out and they see you as one of the same. When you're talking about a people in assisted living, they're residents. So the language and terminology is going to change based on who you're talking with as well.
Speaker 3:They need to know what long-term care is. I had a social worker one time said that you guys take LTC right. I had no idea what she was talking about. That's not good. It's not good. In our sales training we teach all of this and a lot of it's just like what I did wrong, right. The things that I have learned, painstakingly learned that we're teaching so that they don't have to go through that LTC long-term care insurance. They're great clients to have, so they need to know that. They need to know that private pay, private duty and custodial care those are all the same thing. They mean the same thing generally In the same thing. Generally, in general terms, they mean the same thing. Va is veterans. Make sure that you have given them this information before they go out and they start meeting with referral sources. Oh, I've lost slide control. It's very strange. It's very jumpy.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:We're going to talk about the elevator speech next. Most salespeople in general have an elevator speech. You should be able to roll it off your tongue in 30 seconds and we're going to talk about the key parts to the elevator speech. The most important part of your elevator speech is going to be your differentiator. That is what makes you different. This can be the reason you get in in the first place.
Speaker 3:People, social workers, people in assisted living, independent living they have home care agencies coming in all day long. They're inundated with home care agencies. When they know you're in home care agency I have 10 I'm working with I don't need to talk to you and they don't unless you're different. So you have to have a reason. You have to have something that's different. So the key elements are an introduction. The introduction should include your name, company, what you do, where you do it, and be sure to include a solution we help seniors with in your introduction.
Speaker 3:Differentiator must set your agency apart from other companies. A unique service offering could be a differentiator. Specialized care expertise could be a differentiator. Exceptional caregiver training strategy could be a differentiator. What I can tell you it can't be is oh, our people really care, our carers really care. Our scheduling team really cares. They all say that Everybody cares. That's not going to be enough. It needs to be something meaty, something big, something different. The next thing is a reassurance statement, because as they're listening to you, they're paying attention to the introduction. If your differentiator really stands out, they're still paying attention. This is where you tend to lose them. You have to have. They think, oh, all of that sounds good, but then there's the but. So you have to give them a reassurance statement of some kind. If I'm in assisted living or I'm in, all of the referral sources are worried about seniors being taken advantage of, so caregivers are very well screened.
Speaker 3:Or we drug test them or their CPR for something that's going to reassure them that this is a safe company and we've done what we need to do to make sure that your patients, your residents, are going to be safe. And then there's a call to action. Be careful with this. Most elevator speeches are done when you first meeting somebody, right? So you don't want to be too pushy. It's your first meeting, so just something like feel free to call me if you ever have a patient or a resident needing that is discharging or a resident that's needing a little additional help. So be very like, not pushy with that call to action during the elevator speech. The asking for the business will come later on.
Speaker 1:Okay, it's me, it's me, I'm the reason you can't change.
Speaker 3:Okay, yeah, I'm not able to change, but also.
Speaker 1:but also, don't worry about going over an hour, because it's good, it's all so good. Just don't't rush, don't. You're totally cool, okay, all right, sorry types.
Speaker 3:There's lots and lots of referral types.
Speaker 3:All of this in our sales training class but this is going to be a brief overview. It'll still help you, though. All of this is going to help you. So I've found through the years, the main referral types that that have been good for me. Skilled nursing facilities, hands down, have been the best the way that it worked years ago, back when I was at home. Instead I would go into the hospitals, we were free to just walk the hospitals, talk to all the case managers. I learned that case managers case manage a certain type of disease or a certain type of orthopedics, orthopedics, or they're doing heart disease. They had their own specialty that they were working in in the hospital. Okay, and so that was very cool because I would bring heart articles to the heart ones and I would bring bone articles to the ortho, like I was very in tune to what they were doing. Then, boom, it stopped. Why did it stop? Hospitals or insurance maybe has decided it's too expensive to stay in a hospital for a long time, so we're going to discharge to skilled nursing facility. So then all of my referral sources, the hospital started saying you know what? We're not sending them home anymore, they're not going home anymore, they're now going to skilled nursing facilities. If I were you, I would start marketing there as well, so I did that. Then the hospitals you know they still have people going straight home, right, but but not the way that they used to. Plus, they're very difficult to walk the halls and get in. Skilled nursing facilities is where they go before they go home. You have everybody there, is discharging right and if in the short term side, so that's a very good one.
Speaker 3:What's happening now, though, that I've noticed? I think the hospitals are missing out on some money because they don't own skilled nursing buildings. So now they are opening rehab hospitals here in Arizona. This isn't happening where you are. It could be, and you just don't know. Start looking for some rehab hospitals. This is a hospital that's in the same parking lot or very close to the hospital that's owned by the hospital, and they get discharged now, not to a sniff to the rehab hospital. The rehab hospitals have been very open, very friendly, allowing us to come in and do lunch and learns, very open to the home care arena, very open. So that's a place that you should be going. If you're not, if you have rehab hospitals we have about. There's been about three or four that have opened in the last three years here and I'm in Arizona, so maybe I don't know if it's gonna happen here first and then spread or what. But look for the rehab hospitals.
Speaker 3:Hands down SNF's rehab hospitals, best referral sources. Independent living buildings are good. Independent senior living communities. This is where you have maybe six square feet, six square miles, of independent seniors living in their own homes. Within that six square miles there are doctor's offices, renal care, there's all kinds of different buildings and places where the churches are going Marketing to those is a very good idea. Assisted living buildings, memory care, home health and hospice. So those are all the best referral types that I've worked with. That's not to say there aren't others, but I would say the better jobs, the most steady jobs. I was able to build relationships and get consistent referrals out of them. So how do you break in? How do you get in there? Well, I'm going to give you some tips. Speak their language Again, if you're in a SNF, talk to talk about people as patients, their patients, not clients.
Speaker 3:Also, what are they doing in skilled nursing facility? Understand what this referral sources day to day is like. What does that look like? Skilled nursing facilities are discharging all day. Have a discharge package right, assisted living. Maybe they've got a wait list and they can't move these people in because of this wait list. Right, maybe you can offer to take care of them at home until that wait list, until their turn comes up, and you're going to talk about how wonderful their assisted living building is while you're caring for this person, until there's a spot for them that opens up on the wait list.
Speaker 3:There's always an angle. There's always a way to work with every different type of referral source. Go often, go every eight to 10 days. I know this sounds like a lot. I know that even the referral source will say oh, you don't need to come by every week. I love you, I'll always refer to you. They don't even know that you need to come more often than that. I can tell you I had referral sources in my back pocket. They love me, they sent me everything. I would go on vacation for a week. I would come back the next week and it would be crickets, quiet, not a referral in sight. They need you to come by. They don't know it, but they need you to come by every eight to 10 days. They're just off and running to the next home care agency that came in while you were on vacation or while you didn't make it that week. So go every eight to 10 days.
Speaker 3:You should see every referral source once a month, face-to-face. You shouldn't expect more than that. One face-to-face a month is all you should expect. If they're calling you in more often, that's great, that's fine. But if you're initiating and you're wanting and expecting to see their face more than once a month, they're not going to refer to you. They don't have time to do that. So every eight to 10 days you're going by and once a month you're seeing their face. What are you doing the other times? You're leaving things behind and we're going to. I'll show you some of those here in a minute. So the leave behind when you leave something behind, always call, text, call or text or email and let them know I just left you something. I always do this while I'm still in the parking lot, because in home care you're just running all day long and once you leave that parking lot, your chance to do that is gone. That's how I've trained my marketers. So before you leave the parking lot, you've texted, emailed or called them, left them a voicemail letting them know what you left and a quick one-liner as to why it matters and what's important about it. Offerings and programs that support them to make their job easier. Discharge package, skilled nursing facility I can't stress enough how well this works.
Speaker 3:Communicate we have interviewed social workers across the country. Their biggest problem with us, with home care agencies, is we don't communicate, which I was shocked to hear. And it's not just communicating in general. This is I gave them a referral, I sent it via text and I never heard back. I cannot imagine a home care agency doing that, but it was the common theme amongst all the social workers we've interviewed. I send a text, I tell them I have a referral for them and I give them the about the referral and I never hear back. So then I don't know. Are they working on it? Did they ever get it? Do I need to send it to somebody else? Because I don't know if they're working on it and this person's discharging it really stresses them out. So, even if you're busy, a quick text got it. I'm in a meeting or I'm doing this right now. I'll call you. Let them be responsive too.
Speaker 3:Responsive and communicate those were the two biggest complaints they had about home care agencies. Offer to help, even when it's difficult I've had, you know, I've had them say you're going to hate me for this referral. You're just, you're just going to hate me. This person screams she's not nice, she, you know, she's just awful. But I trust you to handle it because you're just so good. So offer to help, even when it's difficult. It doesn't mean you want to do all the difficult ones. I've been that person too.
Speaker 2:You don't want to be the person who takes only difficult clients, but offer to help even when it's difficult.
Speaker 3:That's when they know that your heart is involved in this and it's not just about money for you, because you're willing to take on something that's a little more difficult. Build a solid relationship and don't focus on the referrals. I can't stress this enough. You should have the kind of relationship with these people that, if something went south, they are comfortable enough with you to call you in their office and say look, your caregiver fell asleep last night on the wake shift and I just wanted you to know, and that you can bounce back from that. That's the kind of relationship you're looking for, and we teach you how to do all that in our sales training. But that's the kind of relationship you need to have to have ongoing referrals.
Speaker 3:If a referral source has ever just stopped talking to you, just completely disappeared, doesn't return your calls. It could be that something happened or they heard something about you or about your company and they just decided they're not using you anymore. If you don't have a good relationship with them, you're not going to be able to have that conversation and turn it around. Okay, Are you doing slides now, Valerie? Then yes.
Speaker 1:Okay, I think I always was Okay.
Speaker 3:It worked once. I'm not going to stay here at the same time. It's magic, all right. Community liaison goals these are weekly goals and I I just had somebody that I met with a couple days she goes who can do that? That's so much, and it's going to depend on your geography. Like you probably can't do this in New York City, right, because it's so, you know, how are you getting to? 40 to 50 stops a week. It's eight to 10 daily. It's definitely doable in most places, most parts of the country. Most people that see this are like yeah, yeah, I can do that.
Speaker 3:Out of those, eight to 10 stops a day or a week, 40 to 50 stops a week, 15 to 20 of them need to be face-to-face stops. Again, those face-to-face stops are important, so you've got to keep track because everyone's getting one a month. So about 15 to 20 each week should be face-to-face stops, and there's lots of ways to do a face-to-face. So with us in Mastery Circle, we meet every other Friday and we have a meeting much like this. We do a lot of training and those kinds of things too.
Speaker 3:We are creating Lisa is creating she's wonderful at it four leave-behinds for you every single month. One of the leave-behinds is guaranteed to get them to come out and talk to you, and so we're already doing that and we're going to get into leave-behinds here in just a minute. So that is how you're going to get that face-to-face once a month. You could do it with the leave-behinds Out of that. If you're doing your 40 to 50 stops a week and you're doing 15 to 20 face-to-face, you should be getting five to seven referrals from your referral sources every single week. This should happen. It's not going to happen tomorrow. These are solid relationships, right? You don't want a one-in-one. Okay, she referred once, she tried me once, and now she's off to ABC Home Care. That's not what you want.
Speaker 3:You're building a solid relationship. We have five impressions you have to go through to build these solid relationships. When that starts to happen, you will be getting five to seven referrals from your referral. So it doesn't mean they're all going to turn into jobs, but they're not. All of them are great. There's going to be. They can't afford it. There's going to be little things here and there.
Speaker 3:Some of that's about educating your referral sources too. Now, when a referral or service inquiry comes in, you should be booking 70% of those. So if you take 10 service inquiries these are people calling in about services 70% of those, seven of them should be booked and turned into appointments. You should have a 90% signing ratio. So if you go out to sign 10 clients, nine of them should sign. When all of this is said and done and you're doing all of this right you should have three to four signed jobs a week from your referral sources. You should have one to two signed jobs from, maybe, google Ads, from Website Leads, from AgentCarecom, from whatever other things that you're doing. You'll also have some signed jobs there. Do we have any questions?
Speaker 1:I haven't even. Yes. Yes, we have a couple of questions. Okay, let's see. Is it legal to leave things like small snacks for marketing?
Speaker 3:Yes, so, it's legal, yes, it goes. It kind of goes back and forth. The people who don't do the right thing ruin it for everybody for a while. It's a temporary ruin. From what I've seen the years and years I've been doing this, I've always left little things. We can't buy people purses and we can't buy people facials and massages and take them out to get their nails done. That cannot be something that we're doing. It has to be little. When you say little snack, that is fine. There's nothing wrong with leaving a little snack. Just be careful. Social workers take like a code of ethics kind of thing when they take their job and part of it is, you know, not to be like. I'm only going to refer to this company because they give me things like they will not do. That it's dirty, it's ugly.
Speaker 3:If you're offering to do those things, a good social worker is going to you know, and even if the social worker is taking these things, eventually their boss is going to get wind of it. And that's when it ruins it for everybody. For a while, like, I've had them say we can't even take post-its, we can't even take pens, I mean, they're just devastated about it. But eventually it breaks back open and everything's fine. So, yes, a little snack is fine.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I just keep it under $5 or under, you know, like small, small, I mean. Anything that we recommend literally you can buy it at the dollar store is not something you're spending 25 bucks on per referral source. No way, all right. Oh, the other question is most home health agencies and hospice agencies. Their patients are Medicare, not private pay question mark, question mark but they always need private pay help. I mean, I'm what I'm answering, what's the question? The question is most home health agencies and hospice agencies I think you're talking about.
Speaker 3:You were talking about partnering up with, oh, yes, yes, okay, medicare, what so if they're on Medicare typically not always, but typically people on Medicare will have some money to pay for home care. People on Medicaid usually don't, and so for Medicare they usually do. Hospice and home health alone typically isn't enough to keep somebody at home. They need additional support. They need additional help. If family's not there, they're going to need home care. I've worked side by side with several home health and hospice agencies through the years and they refer and we refer back and forth. So, okay, hope that answers that All right. Next slide Asking for the referral. So I mentioned there's five impressions. We're not gonna go through all of those today. The fifth impression so they are trust, confidence, camaraderie, prove reliability. Those are the four other impressions. We're not going to deep dive. This is the terrifying one. This is the one, and I've been in sales my whole life. That's the scary, oh my gosh.
Speaker 3:Now I have to ask Am I scared to ask? This is terrifying. It's scary because there's not always a need. There's not always a need. Let's say we're selling cars. I need to buy. I don't need a car, I love my car, my car is great. But I have a salesperson who wants to sell me a new car.
Speaker 3:Not only do they have to convince me I need a new car, they have to also convince me that I want their car. So that's a very different thing here. That's not what's happening. These seniors because you're going to referral sources who are with seniors all day long. They already need care, they're already going to get home care, they're already going to be referred to home care. All you're doing is directing the referral. There's nothing to be afraid about here, because the need is already there.
Speaker 3:You are just taking the referral and saying I'm the better company, so the differentiator can do that, you proving that you're reliable and trustworthy and all the things. So there's no. Of course it's still going to feel scary at first, but really this takes the fear out of it Because you're not convincing them that they need home care. You're just taking a referral they were already going to give and asking them to send it to you, so convincing them that they need home care. You're just taking a referral they were already going to give and asking them to send it to you. So it takes that away. The fear is gone. Next, yeah, asking for the business booking assessments. So I like I call this the 10 second connect. That doesn't mean you're going to rush through the phone call and you're not going to give them your full, undivided attention. The biggest problem salespeople have when they take a service inquiry is they're trying to sell the company, they're trying to sell the services. They want to sign the client. That's not the point.
Speaker 1:Whoops, it's me Sorry. I'm trying to find the questions, that's not the point of this phone call?
Speaker 3:The point of this phone call is to book the assessment. That's it. Don't worry about am I going to sign this job. This job's going to be hard. Oh, they want Saturdays, whatever. Don't get into any of that. The only goal of this phone call is to book this appointment. And I call it a 10 second connect. Two things have to happen when you're on the phone with them. One is you need to connect emotionally with the heart. Two, you need to establish you're an expert, and this can be done very easily.
Speaker 3:Most adult children, when they call you and I'm sure many of you have taken lots of these calls they are in crisis, right, they're in crisis mode. Mom and dad have been in charge and now I'm in charge and I have to decide what I'm going to do. I have no idea what to do. So they call. Usually they're going to tell you the whole story, right. But if they don't, a simple thing you can say is what prompted your call to me today? And then they're going to tell you, as they start to tell you, something has happened, something for them to call you, something in their mind sort of tragic has happened and they don't know what to do.
Speaker 3:A lot of this is an example. My mom fell and broke her hip two weeks ago. It is okay in that moment to jump in and say I'm so sorry to hear that that can be so difficult for everyone involved. You've done two things just then. One you connected emotionally. I'm so sorry to hear this. That can be so difficult. Two, so difficult for everyone involved. This sounds like you've been through this before.
Speaker 2:This adult child hasn't.
Speaker 3:They are so excited to hear that you've been through this before this adult child, hasn't? They are so excited to hear that you've been through this before. You can use words like typically in this situation, or, I find, when this happens, oh, she's in skilled nursing. Typically, they stay there for about two weeks. We have plenty of time for me to come in and talk to her. When you can establish that you care, you connect with them emotionally and that you're an expert in this, you can hear the relief in their voice.
Speaker 3:They want to take this situation and hand it to somebody else to solve because they have no idea what to do. So then book the appointment as for today, if you can. I happen to be in your area today, or I have a rep in your area today. Does three o'clock work for you? Because they've got websites pulled up? They have a list in your area today. Does three o'clock work for you? Because they've got websites pulled up? They have a list from a social worker. How do they get your phone number? They're going to call other companies, but if you can book an appointment, they're done. They're not going to call anybody else. They have an appointment with you today.
Speaker 3:There's no point in calling anybody else. And you know what you're doing and you care, and so why would they call somebody else? So just have the mindset of I've got to get this booked for today.
Speaker 3:That's it, don't worry about the rest of it. Okay, next one, asking for the business when signing clients. I've given you some tips about signing clients. Just in general, never park in front of their home or in their driveway. They're going to come out. They're going to come out either before the assessment or they're going to come out after the assessment. Your car is not usually in a situation in which I always would think, oh, I'm just going to park, I've got calls to make. I'm just going to park right here and make my calls. They will come out to see you. So don't do that. I always told my caregivers not to park in the driveway either. If you drip oil in the driveway, they just never let it go. So don't park in the driveway.
Speaker 3:Be prepared, read your notes ahead of time. You should know who's there. You should have mom and dad's name, brother, sister, whoever's there, you should have their names from the service inquiry. You should be getting those facts before you go in. It's nice to book for the same day because I still remember I just talked to her this morning. I don't have to read all of my notes. That's also helpful for you. Don't come too early. Absolutely never be late, but also Don't come too early. Absolutely never be late, but don't also don't come too early. I have come too early and they're arguing about me and about home care and why am I coming? And I don't want to talk to her and I've heard them.
Speaker 3:I'm outside the door and I hear them like having a having it out and I have to walk into all of this. So don't come too early, they're not always ready for you. I would say five minutes is okay and definitely don't be late. I had a rep that was late all the time and the senior would call me and say what do they think? Because I'm old, I don't have anything better to do but sit here and wait for her. I have a life too. I mean, they don't like it, so don't be late, and they're a different generation also. They did their time, they were. They don't like it.
Speaker 3:If you're late, greet everyone when you walk in, even if the client seems incoherent or has dementia, as long as they're not sleeping, greet them and the adult child will probably oh, she can't hear you, she doesn't know what you're saying, it doesn't matter, it's disrespectful. And most adult children will see it as disrespectful if you just walk right past mom and ignore her, like unless she's asleep, and I would even say, oh, I see she's sleeping. Others I would say hi, because that's why you're there. That's the person. So don't leave them out. Ask for permission to sit down in where they would like to have the assessment done. Always bring a clipboard. Tell them I have a clipboard, we can sit anywhere. Where would you like to sit, because you're going to need to sit down. But you shouldn't come in and like take charge. Remember there are probably people in the room that aren't so sure they want to do this to begin with. So you really got to. You know, be very respectful. You should be able to tell when you walk in who wants the service and who doesn't. I've had adult children. You could. They even sit on different sides of the room. This group wants us and this group doesn't. Don't shy away from the ones that don't Try to figure out what it is that they're uncomfortable with what you know they're sitting like this.
Speaker 3:Try to figure that out and address those concerns for them. You need to show the need and how your services are the solution. A lot of times you're called out there because there was a fall or because they're not eating well or they're diabetic and they've been eating the wrong foods. Address that. Why have you been called out? We don't want that to happen again. So how can you put the services in here as a solution to keep that from happening again? As an expert, they're going to expect for you to probably tell them what kind of hours we're looking at here, because you're the expert they're waiting for you to say she needs three days a week she needs. This is what I would in this situation. This is what I would suggest. So be ready to do that.
Speaker 3:You should have some sense of what's going on from the service inquiry, reconnect with the person on the phone when you get there and suggest what you think. If they need bathing, automatically, that's three days a week. Right now, that's three days a week and build the service from there. They're not going to want the caregiver sitting around. So what are other things that they could? You know? Does the trash can need to be wheeled back and forth? Does it need to be done? Are we using a walker and dealing with laundry in the laundry basket? Like, think you have to put yourself in that client's head and their life and what does their day-to-day look like and how are you gonna solve these problems?
Speaker 3:And to get it signed, this has always been very difficult for people. For me it's always just been. The next steps are give them this and once the agreement is signed, we'll start looking for your caregiver. So a lot of times they'll be like oh, we'd like to start on Friday, maybe it's Tuesday. Okay, well, we need to get the agreement signed and once that's signed we can start looking for the appropriate caregiver. So they know you're not going to look at the caregiver to the agreement. So it's a very easy transition from there. Any questions, valerie? Oh, you're muted.
Speaker 1:Sorry. Do you normally assign your liaison to do assessments and sign prospect, or should there be a separate person to do intake for new clients?
Speaker 3:So it depends on who where the referral came from. So if it came from a referral source, they're going to want you to be that person. In most cases, they trust you, they like you. They're going to want you to be the one to spend the time with the family. If it's a website lead or it didn't come from a referral source directly or someone that you know will be fine with it, then yeah, somebody else could go and sign it. But usually your community liaison, your marketer, is the best salesperson in the company typically. I mean that's why you hired them. They're probably better skilled at this anyway, but definitely a referral source is going to expect that the marketer is going to sit down with that family.
Speaker 1:Yep, okay, and so most discharge patients from rehab have home healthcare meet them at the home. How do I get the patient to understand that home healthcare will discontinue visits?
Speaker 3:So well, we'll back up a little bit. If I have somebody who's discharging from skilled nursing, I'm going to sign them up in the SNF. I'm not going to wait for them to get home and maybe you're not anyway but I'm going to offer and this is going to make the social worker's job easier. It also makes my job easier I'm going to sign them up in the SNF before they discharge, so home care is set in place before they discharge. Before I go into that room, I'm going to ask the social worker are they going to have home health? And if she says yes, I'm going to set the stage for that before they ever leave the SNF and I'm going to tell them I see that you have home health coming in.
Speaker 3:Understand that this is short-lived, it's not going to be a long time, and they just come for an hour or so a couple of times a week and it's only until they see the needs not there anymore. So it's not gonna be long-term. You still are going to need the caregiver. So that's how I handle that. I always wanna know who else is gonna be in the home. Else is going to be in the home. I can't tell you, and I learned this from from not doing it that way.
Speaker 2:Oh, home health and hospice, or hospice is coming, I don't need you guys anymore.
Speaker 3:Or home health is coming, I don't need you anymore. It's, they don't. One does not replace the other. They compliment each other. So sign them up in this sniff. It gives you more time to find the caregiver too, and talk, have that conversation with them before they discharge. So there's no surprises. All right, sales monthly marketing plan.
Speaker 3:We talked a little bit about this. The leave-behinds so they're getting three to four leave-behinds a month. Out of the leave-behinds, two can be themed leave-behinds. Two to three. They're the fun ones. They're the July 4th, they're the heart month, they're the Valentine's Day, and you leave a little trinket that's like worth less than a dollar with it. Right, that's that one.
Speaker 3:The other leave behinds that you're going to do is going to be like a company kind of leave behind, something that my company, something unique to my company, a discharge package, a flyer that talks about how our caregivers are safe, facility specific work, maybe one that is, for this is how we work with assisted living, this is how we work with memory care, this is how we work with home health. A work within the budget. We work within seniors budget. These are going to be company specific type leave behinds, and if you have a new referral source coming in, you're going to get them added to this. Usually with a new referral source, I'm going to hit them with the one that makes the most sense.
Speaker 3:The first lead behind someone in assisted living is going to get is how my company works with assisted living. If they're in memory care, same thing. That's going to be the first one they get, and then I'm going to start my themed ones and then I'll get them into my rotation. Everybody should be seen at least once a month, and so you need one lead behind that's going to get them to come out of their office and talk to you and lunch and learns you should have at least two lunch and learns a year with skilled nursing facilities.
Speaker 3:And the next slide kind of gives you a little more detail. So up on the left, you're going to do one company service specific per month. That's like your discharge package, something like that. You're going to do two seasonal ones a month and then one face-to-face a month, and we have some of our really cute ones Lisa created down here on the bottom as examples and the next slide really breaks it down. So company service specific discharge package boom, that's what that could look like. You can attach something to that a little. You know a little. You can tie it to a bag and have like a little goodie inside. Seasonal, themed. Let us help bring in the new year with less readmissions. Have a sparkling 2025. We are attaching this to little small bottles of sparkling cider and then a face-to-face come one, come all. Abc Home Care. We're crafting cookies. I'm going to go sit down in assisted living and help decorate cookies. So this would be.
Speaker 3:This is what a month could look like, just to kind of give you, we've got December and January mixed up here, but either way, it just gives you an idea of what a month of handouts should look like, and you should be planned three months in advance. You should know what you're doing three months in advance and get all the things and supplies you need for them.
Speaker 1:And I want to tell you, if you guys come to Continuum Sales Mastery, which is every other Friday, we give you everything for three months out, so you don't have to guess at it. You know what to order, where to go to order it and what little things you need to make or customize, and these ladies give you everything. All you have to do is take our logo off and put yours on, take my name off and put yours on, so you don't have to struggle with any of it.
Speaker 3:We even give you the link to Amazon for the cider or whatever that goes with it.
Speaker 1:We have a little link.
Speaker 3:I would have killed for this when I was out there. I mean, I would have done anything to get my hands on this, because this is the hard part. Running around is exhausting, and all of that for sure. But being creative in addition to running around with your head cut off all day is too much. I couldn't be creative with all of that going on. I would have done anything to get my hands on this when I was out there.
Speaker 3:That's why I'm providing it, because I know how important it is. Okay, next slide, all right, key elements. This is the last section. Guys, thank you for holding on with us. Key elements of an effective caregiver ad. So there are four key elements your headline, your benefit statement, call to action and making it easy.
Speaker 3:In the headline you need to grab their attention, pull up their heartstrings, and I always list a pay range in my headline as well. The headline should be caregiver, not with an S, just caregiver space. Dash. You don't want the dash touching the R, it's going to. Things are alphabetized, you don't. You don't want anything touching the R in caregiver, so caregiver space. And then you can do a dash or you can just start your headline right there. Pull at their heartstrings A senior near you needs your help, help a senior stay home. If you want the good caregivers, the ones who really care, you have to pull at their heartstrings in those headlines they're going to go. Oh, a senior near me needs my help. Or seniors want to stay home. I want to help them stay home. I can do that.
Speaker 3:And then, after the headline, dash, pay range. Maybe you're 16 to 20 an hour, do a range, don't do just one rate, because your competitors might be a dollar more than you. They might. You know they might be paying just a little bit, so do a range. That way, the caregiver also has to inquire well, what are they going to get paid? Right, that helps them to reach out to you. So the headline's really, really important. Also, you need to rotate your ads every week. That's something else.
Speaker 3:Benefits State your benefit early on in the ad, before the rules and regulations. People love to say you must have this, you must be this, you must have this, you must, must, must, must. Nobody wants to read all that. You want them to work for you. Put the benefit first. What are you? Everybody is with them. What's in it for me? What are you doing for your caregivers that will make them want to work for you and stay working for you? List your benefit right after the headline. Maybe you have caregiver parties, maybe you have a bonus, whatever it is that you're doing.
Speaker 3:And again, you need to differentiate yourself with your caregivers too. You have two markets. You've got your clients and you've got your caregivers. You've got to satisfy both of them. Call to action, call now. Place your phone number for texting. Texting is a game changer. Texting calling email address. Put it in your ad. I know that it won't be linked and you know Indeed and all those places don't like that. They want them to go through the Indeed process and all the things. I've always put text now to schedule an interview in my ads and I put the phone number and you know what they're in text and they do text and I get a lot done that way very quickly.
Speaker 3:Caregivers you got to get them in the moment. They're very much like this is what I want to do right now. They're very impulsive. Lots of them are very impulsive. I'm looking for work right now. If they can text you right now and get a response and get an interview scheduled right now, you're going to have that. You're going to be the one that gets to hire them.
Speaker 3:Make it easy for them. Do not make them jump through hoops to work for you. I know that we need to vet them. I know that all of that is really important. There is a time for that. I always did a phone interview first and I didn't make them fill out an application first. I know that sounds crazy. I know it sounds crazy.
Speaker 3:An application is daunting and check your Indeed ads. Indeed has a system where they have to fill out an application. If they then have to come to your office and fill out another one, they're not going to do it. They're not going to do it. It's too much, it's overkill. Don't make them fill out an Indeed application. I never made them fill out an application. They fill out a short form. We have it in our caregiver recruiting program a very short form giving you the information you must know right now when you're interviewing them. If there's other things you need to know that would be on the application, ask them during the interview and then when they come in for training, orientation, whatever you call it, that's when they fill out the application. They're there. They're there with you for the day, for two hours, whatever it is. That's when you can have them fill out the application. Make it so easy for them. They don't have to jump through hoops because they just won't do it.
Speaker 1:They just want to get hired. Whoever makes it the easiest is going to be the one that they work for. All right, any questions? Oh, you're muted, valerie. I know I mute myself, just in case the dogs bark. I know, I know I do the same thing. Okay, let's see. Indeed has an internal feature that filters headlines. They have encouraged basic headlines, nothing too fancy. They will still post, but give priority to those that are simple. What do you suggest for this? So I had a whole thing with Indeed.
Speaker 3:I had an ad that I was running and I spoke to my rep, just like you did, and he said your headlines are big and long and involved Like they can't be super long, right, I'm talking like caregiver. One little sentence and then pay range. And he said this is probably hurting with our algorithm. And I'm like but people, I'm getting lots. I mean I'm getting lots and lots of inquiries, lots of people calling. And so he said let's do this. I will run you a free ad with a headline I create without the pay in the headline. His thing was the pay in the headline. He didn't like that. I will run one free in the same city and the ad will be exactly the same, except I'm he's going to do his own headline and he's not going to put pay in the headline and I'm going to do my headline with the pay. And I had twice as many applicants as he did. So you know this was. This was a couple of years ago.
Speaker 3:The algorithm could have changed. Test it yourself and see what happens. I can tell you I get double because of what I think is as a caregiver. I'm scrolling, I'm scrolling headlines. I don't want to click in on the ad. I want to scroll headlines and if the headline has grabbed my attention, pulled up my heartstrings and I know the pay range is within what I want to make, that's the one I'm going to click on. So, justin, I still remember his name. He was floored, he goes. I got to go back to my team and tell them what happened. So test it yourself, see what happens. I'm not saying you have to do it that way, but it's worked for me for years and they said the same thing to me. So that's all I can do, and they said the same thing to me, so that's all I can do is share my experience.
Speaker 1:Any other questions? Allie, how do I join? Approved Senior Network Marketing. Well, you can go to our website at asnhomecaremarketingcom. However, I think you're going to talk about something on the next slide.
Speaker 3:Yes, so the next slide, we have a sale. Our infield sales training is $200 off. You have to just mention this webinar. You probably have to sign up, I guess, before the year is over. Yeah, Valerie, before January 1st. We also have a sale on all of our programs that you know. The prices are all going to be changing in January, so right now you can call me if you want, 314. I'll give my number, 310-6008. You can text call. It's right here on the screen. I can help you with the sales training. I can help you with websites, SEO, all the things we've talked about today. If you want a text call, either one works for me or you can email us at support. I'll get it there too. We'd love to help you. But, yeah, this is a really good time because everything is on sale right now. We don't do that, Valerie, Not normally.
Speaker 2:Is George out here, have we told.
Speaker 3:George, we're doing this Because George doesn't do this.
Speaker 1:George is listening. We don't give discounts and we don't put things on sale, so but we know that you know people are making some tax decisions too. If you need to get, you know, spend a little money before the end of the year or whatever you need to do.
Speaker 1:But there's a whole plethora of programs, whether it's online marketing or in-person sales training kind of marketing. Either it's online marketing or in-person sales training kind of marketing. Either way we can help. So you know, even down to our monthly two things, two times a month, continuum mastery program, I mean there's all kinds of stuff. So talking to Dawn is really your best bet, because she can steer you to the right place so I can tell you.
Speaker 3:I ask all the time when I meet with people why are you different?
Speaker 3:How is your company different? And I'm just going to tell you, we have three people on our team that have been in your shoes. We've been in home care for a really long time and we are not a vendor, we are a partner, and I can tell you that is the biggest difference. I get asked all three of us get asked so many. You know, oh, I'm hiring community liaison. What should I pay them? What should the commission look like? What happened? You know, I'm only getting like really like poor quality caregivers. I don't know what's going on. Well, let's take a look at your ad. Like we help with everything. Like it's just the other people competitors, whatever you want to call them out there just aren't doing that piece of it. Want to call them out there, just aren't doing that piece of it. And we just know home care so much, so well, all of it. So, anyway, I just wanted to respond to that because I get that all the time.
Speaker 1:So there you go, Absolutely. And I was talking to a client yesterday who told me that a third of their revenue came from online marketing. So I would suggest that if you haven't experienced that, that doesn't sound like something that's even and this is not a small company. I mean they are a small business but they are in the 2 million range for annual billings. If you are in that position and you're not sure how much the website marketing or sales is bringing in, Dawn's a great person to talk to to make sure you know your numbers, your KPIs. She can kind of walk through that with you so that you do really know your numbers well. And I was happy to hear that online marketing was a third of their revenue, because that makes my heart happy, because only we're the only people they use. So, anyway, that was just a really nice uh ending to my day yesterday. That's. That's great yeah all right.
Speaker 1:We have any other questions? Yeah, um, can we have a digital copy of these slides? What will happen is is we will post a replay. We don't give out our slides, but we will post a replay for you and you can screenshot anything you want. All right, okay, all right, thanks everybody. Thanks for having us. Great to see you all have a great day.
Speaker 3:Bye-bye.
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