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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®
Mastering Home Care Marketing in 2025: Proven Strategies for Online Lead Generation
Unlock the secrets of mastering home care marketing in 2025 with the expertise of Valerie Van Booven, who shares insights from her 17 years of industry experience. Ever wondered how to make your website not just functional but also a lead-generating powerhouse? Valerie humorously critiques the common design pitfalls to avoid while offering tips on creating visually appealing, user-friendly sites that even the most tech-averse can navigate. Learn how to balance the art of online branding with real-world engagements to leave a memorable impact on your community and prospective clients.
Explore the dual channels of lead generation: the power of professional referrals and the nuances of capturing direct consumer inquiries, predominantly through strategic phone communication. Discover the value of well-placed website forms and how well-trained staff can act as your frontline marketers, making phone conversations a pivotal part of lead acquisition. Valerie delves into the significance of SEO, social media, and email marketing in enhancing search rankings and client attraction, with a focus on achieving visibility in the competitive landscape of home care services.
Harness the potential of AI and video content to elevate your marketing strategies, as Valerie shares practical examples of integrating these tools for enhanced brand visibility. Whether you're hesitant about on-camera appearances or unsure about utilizing AI, this episode offers a roadmap to overcome those challenges. From developing a strategic local presence to leveraging social media and crafting engaging email campaigns, Valerie equips you with actionable insights to effectively connect with your community and grow your home care business, whether you're just starting out or already established.
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Visit our website at https://asnhomecaremarketing.com
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All right, welcome to Home Care Marketing Mastery 2025. We're going to talk about proven strategies for online lead generation today. Everything we've accumulated, learned and continue to learn every single week, month, day, minute about online marketing it changes all the time. We're going to talk about the latest and greatest and I'm happy to answer your questions as we go. My name is Valerie Van Boeven. I'm a registered nurse and the founder and co-owner of Approved Senior Network. We've been in business since 2008, and for the last 17 years we've been helping home care and home health care agencies market their services. Throw in a few assisted livings, care homes, independent living communities, anything in the elder law, attorneys, anything in the senior market, but 90% of our clients are non-medical home care and medical home care or home health care. I am a wife, a mom of triplet girls and a dog mom of two and I am certain before this ends, you will hear the dogs. At the bottom of the screen you can see my little family. Those are my three girls and my husband, charlie, and then on the right-hand side you can see some of our team. So let's keep going here. If you have questions, please put it in the chat and I'll be happy to answer. I'm so glad you guys are here today. Oh, we're filling up as I speak, so that's great. We had over 100 registrations for this, so that's great. Agenda we're going to talk about building a high performing website, boosting organic reach with SEO, the role of SEO, maximizing social media, crafting email marketing campaigns. I'm going to show you what we do Online reviews, leveraging marketing automation and AI, and creating impactful videos to attract leads. So all of these we're going to cover in just an hour. I hope we might go over just a touch, but with frequently asked questions, but hopefully we'll get through everybody's questions and everything. So I'm going to go pretty fast. I am recording this, by the way, and I will send out the recording to everyone who registered. So if you have to leave or something happens, um, or if you are watching this as a replay, which a lot of people do then welcome, and this will be sent out as a replay. So, building a high performing website this is the first part of our talk today. These are just some of the websites that we've built recently, and I will give you some insight into what we do that's great and what to avoid. So here's my what not to do slide.
Speaker 1:I used to do a great presentation that called out ugly websites, and this is kind of the list. Over the years hasn't changed much. These are this is what not to do. These are ugly websites, or I don't know why people don't care to have up-to-date websites. This is crazy. None of these are home care agencies. I would be in big trouble if I put a home care agency up here. So we just go with people who are not in the home care business, but you do not want sites like this.
Speaker 1:And my favorite of all time that's ugly is Mr Bottles. So if you go to mrbottlescom, you will see why it's one of the ugly. It's interesting and weird, but very ugly, and these are, it's just too much not friendly. And the one that really surprises me, though, is Susan Collins. Susan Collins is the author of oh, mockingjay, and what's the big? What is it? Hunger Games. She's the author of Hunger Games. This woman's got some dough, and her website is abysmal. Now, if you look at it today, it's actually a little bit updated, but you can still tell that it's kind of a do-it-yourself website or something, or like her cousin does it. I don't know, but I mean you'd think that her publishing company would want her to have a beautiful website with all these books Nope. So, having said that, please avoid doing things like what you see on the screen here. There's lots of reasons, but this is what not to do.
Speaker 1:I love looking at ugly websites. It just kills me. It's like Ripley's Believe it or Not, okay, so most important factors in website development. First of all, we all know you all know, as home care agency owners and marketers that we're talking to an audience that is not web savvy all the time. Some are very web savvy it's adult children of aging parents, it's the seniors themselves, in some cases spouses. We know what our target market is, right, but we need to be easy on the eyes and you can see right here I've got my readers on.
Speaker 1:As soon as I turned 40, I started needing readers, and so if your website is cluttered and clumsy and images are missing and there's a lot of little bitty text, I'm moving on so easy on the eyes of your target market. So big, bright. You know good contrasting colors. One of the things that our web developer, mark, does is he is very in tune with making sure that the colors we use on a website are easy on the eyes so they're not too grayed out. They're not too. You can have pastels, but they're not too pastelly. You have to have some contrast in there for folks. Your website needs to be fast loading on mobile and meaning that your web developer should be building for mobile. That means it looks beautiful on a desktop, it loads fast on a desktop, but everybody's on their phones, so you want to make sure that it looks great on a mobile device.
Speaker 1:A clean back end. Great on a mobile device, a clean back end. You don't want to have a dirty back end, right, so you want to have a clean back end and that means that you don't have a lot of. We use WordPress. You don't want a lot of plugins cluttering things up. You don't want a lot of build over, build over build and like years of junk in the back end of your website. You just want to keep it clean and like years of junk in the back end of your website. You just want to keep it clean, easy and clean. The more plugins you have on a WordPress website, the slower your website will roll. So we try to minimize the plugins, keep the back end very clean. The theme we do our own. We start with a very blank theme and create the website so we're not adding to someone else's build.
Speaker 1:We recommend less moving parts. So you'll see some websites that have these things that fly in and you know and things that circle around or pop up or do. And it's okay to have a pop-up, it's okay to have one or two little things, but just keep it simple. Nobody is going to choose you over the next guy because of the little fly in stuff on your website. Professional is great, attractive is great. Less moving parts Pretty does not mean it's functional. Pretty actually slows down your website and you don't want that.
Speaker 1:You need to have a lead generating website. Where are your forms located? How are people getting a hold of you? Look at this little image right here. This is a mobile version of this website. It says get started and the phone number right at the top. There's no denying how to get a hold of them and on desktop you should have the service area on the top.
Speaker 1:So what area do you service? You might know the answer to that, but if I live in Los Angeles, california, and you and my mother lives in Arlington, virginia, and I'm looking at websites, if your website doesn't tell me that you serve Arlington. I don't know where. I didn't grow up there, I don't know what that is. I mean, I know what Arlington is, but I don't know the surrounding areas maybe as well as my mom does. So I need you to tell me what areas you serve so that I know and I mean towns, so that I know she's in a town that you serve, excuse me, okay, so let's talk about content.
Speaker 1:I see a lot of websites out there and I have over the years and we've even, you know, 10 years ago built websites this way where really you only have a bulleted list. So if you see, on my little picture here on the right hand side, there's a bulleted list services include. But if you were to scroll down on that page, you would see that there is a ton of content on that page. You can't just limit it to a bulleted list. That is not going to work. Especially if you want to be found on the internet. You need to have other content. So long form content you don't have to write yourself. If you go with the right website provider, they will write it for you, but you also have to read it. If you have someone else write it. You have to make sure it really does say the right things. Having people write it who maybe aren't familiar with the United States health care market could be a mistake. I've seen a lot of errors in content because people maybe was outsourced overseas. The folks that wrote the website didn't. They spoke British English instead of American English. They didn't understand the American health care and the information on it is incorrect.
Speaker 1:Keyword optimized content. Internally linked content. Professionally written content. Frequently asked questions.
Speaker 1:Original images AI images are okay as long as they look good. I've seen a few AI images flash by recently that have fingers missing or weird things, not from our stuff, but from what other people are posting. Don't do that. It's creepy. It's gotten way better over time, but it still can be pretty creepy. Okay, let me go back one. Well, it just doesn't Okay.
Speaker 1:Original images if you have pictures taken um with whether it's models or people pretending you know like they have your your shirt on with your logo, that's great. We love it when people have originals, but not everybody's going to go to that trouble. Um, we we can also use better stock images, so we want to use stock images sometimes. Our clients love stock images that have been used for years and years and other times they just don't. It's just old, it's used. We've seen the same stock image of these two people a thousand times, so let's upgrade a little bit. Let's use some that people haven't seen.
Speaker 1:Okay, I want to talk about brand for just a minute. Your brand does matter. So whatever the name of your home care agency is and whatever your logo looks like or your colors are, that really does matter. So if you look at my screen here and you see all of these logos, depending on where you're located in the United States, you may not know who any of these services are. You may not know. These are not national brands. Maybe one is kind of national, but they're not national brands. They're local. But I guarantee you, because these agencies have been around for a while they have been around more than five years, more than some of them more than 10 years, some of them more than 10 years, some of them more than 20 years. The people in their local communities absolutely know who these brands are and the reason that they have survived all this time is there's a lot of reasons behind that, but one of them is that they have done some focusing on their brand.
Speaker 1:So, while search engine optimization is a nice, important thing to do, your brand matters. The name of your company should be on everybody's mind when they're looking for home care services, and there's a couple of ways to make that happen. One of those ways is to make sure that you have someone out in the field. You have sales staff out in the field doing community outreach, or you yourself are doing community outreach. People in your community won't know who you are just from a website. Right, you have to be out there, feet on the ground and you have to be doing it right. Get out there and participate with your community and give back, and your brand will become way more noticed. But brand does matter, so I want you to keep that in mind as you name your home care agencies as you move forward. Your brand is top of the list for keywords.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's talk about lead generation. I only have one slide on this, but this will apply to everything I'm going to talk about for the rest of this. Now, lead generation is in the home care world, is either a referral from another professional that's in the senior care industry in your local area, so you have a referral, or you have a consumer that comes to you, and that consumer and that referral are either going to come to you by phone or by form. There's really only two ways they're going to come to you, unless you're still taking faxes, but most of the time it's phone or form. 90% of your leads are going to come to you by phone and 10% are going to come to you by form. So if you've been around the block a while, you know that you get a lot more phone calls about people inquiring for services than you do forms filled out. But you still need to have really good forms in really significant places on your website, so you should have something available on your homepage.
Speaker 1:We usually have a pop-up like this one in the middle that asks them for some information. You need to have a longer form, which we call a get started form, and that's here on the right. You can't see everything, but it's just basically ask some very basic questions, but it gives you, the receiver of that form, more information, and you need that information in order to know what you're working with when someone fills it out. Are they private pay? Are they talking about Medicaid and you don't take Medicaid? Those are the things you want to know. And then we do have a contact us form, which is very generic, but we hope that people are going to have a more significant conversation with you. So these are the three types of forms that we put, plus a careers form, which I haven't talked about, but we're not really talking about recruiting in this webinar. But you should have a careers form if you don't have a third-party service that already supplies all of that.
Speaker 1:So let's talk about phone calls for a minute. I think, dawn, somebody recently asked you for phone training for their office and I would agree that that is really important. The people who answer the phone in your office are the first line of marketing. Everybody that works for you is a marketer, no matter what their role is dismissive or meh, or then you are going to lose that senior or that adult child. If I call somebody, they go. I have no idea what you just said. Who is this? Where did I call? So they have to be someone who speaking clearly, not like me with a little cough. They're speaking clearly. They are. You know. They are interested in what that person is saying on the phone. They're acting interested, they're asking good questions, even if they aren't the intake person. They need to be really good on the phone. Maybe that's you, maybe that's someone in your office, and having a tracked recorded line is really helpful.
Speaker 1:Now, a long time ago, we used to insist that everybody we did a website for had a tracked and recorded line on their website. It wouldn't be something a phone number you would put on your business cards or anything like that, but it would be one that dialed directly to your office. But that way the owner could listen to those calls and know how many phone calls they got from their website and that were leads versus spam, versus solicitors, versus people looking for jobs. I still think that's important. If you think your website is not bringing you any business, the best thing you could do is put a tracked and recorded phone line in the header of that website and on the Contact Us page and, if you have it several times on the homepage, put it there and then just take some time to figure out who's calling and what they're calling about. You may be very surprised at how many leads are actually coming in through that tracked and recorded line. You may have no idea, and knowing your numbers is half this game. So tracked and recorded line I highly recommend it.
Speaker 1:The pushback on that is a lot of times is well, everybody knows our phone number and we don't want to put something different in the header of our website because we have had 314-123-456 for 10 years. P Shaw, if you really want to know your numbers, put a tractor-recorded line on there. You don't have to do it forever. You could do it for a year, six months and see how that goes for you.
Speaker 1:The person who answers the phone should always ask and record on a piece of paper or in a computer how did you hear about us? You're going to get weird answers, right? Social worker gave me a list and then I looked you up online. So was that a social worker referral or was that an online lead? I don't know. I would say online, probably because they liked your website, and then they picked up the phone and called you. Or they might say well, I found it online, but I don't know where. But at least you know it was an online inquiry of some kind. So always ask and record how did you hear about us? So these are the things you need to do in order to track everything on your website. Do you have any questions?
Speaker 2:No, we have someone who wants us to audit her website, so I'll follow her, but that's all I'm seeing so far.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, if you want us to take a look at your website, you can put your website URL in there and your contact information we need to know we can't do it while we're live here on this call, but what we can do is get right back to you. So we just need like an email and a name and a phone number If you really want us to do that, and you can send that information just to the host and that way, not everybody sees it. Totally up to you, but you're welcome to do that.
Speaker 2:We just need your contact info.
Speaker 1:Yeah, perfect, and then we can send you something. So key elements of SEO for home care website. So, keyword research I'm going to show you exactly what keyword phrases you should be looking for. But keyword research is really important but you need to be careful who you trust to do this correctly. I've seen some SEO companies from overseas or maybe just started in the business and they look up what is the most searched keyword phrase for home care agencies and the keyword phrase that will pop up is home care jobs and they will SEO the majority of a website for home care jobs, which is not what you want to have happen. So we've seen that in the past. So you need to make sure you understand the person who's doing your SEO research understands the home care market, and so be careful who you trust. But keyword research I'm going to give you those keyword phrases here in just a minute.
Speaker 1:Long tail keywords If you've ever heard that phrase long tail keyword phrases they are important. They're less competitive and if you can rank for a few long tail keyword phrases, then you're going to rank for the big ones. So you just start at the bottom and kind of work your way up, and that means a long tail keyword phrase would be something I've seen a million of them. People type in all kinds of weird stuff when they're looking for care because they just don't know how to put it or phrase it, or they don't know what to say. They just know they need help for their mom. I've seen stuff like nurse care at home for elderly. I mean that's a really long tail keyword phrase. But that's what I'm talking about. It's not just home care, it's, you know, the description of what the person wants. Those are long tail keyword phrases.
Speaker 1:There are several of them that are really good. Several of them that are really good your Google business profile. If you don't have one, get one. If you're worried, if you're still working from a home office and you're worried about putting that on there, you can rent office space from Regus or get a you know, a virtual office space. Google will not take PO boxes and they will not allow you to use a UPS store. It has to be somewhere where people can walk in and say hello to you and your name is on that door. So that's really important. Google Business Profile is half your battle. Bing also is something that you want. To make sure you have your profile filled out and online on Bing and it's optimized Content. I just talked about this a minute ago.
Speaker 1:But on your website, you don't want to just have a little bulleted list of services. We all know, basically, what everybody's services are. Right, you need to have that long form content that answers their questions, that helps them understand more about long-term care I mean, about home care and you want to make sure that Google is seeing that as well. So you write it for first, for the person looking for your services, and then second for Google and other search engines. That would appreciate that you're describing this a little bit better. And then there's technical SEO, which is speed of your website, and schema code, which I'm not going to go into here today. We do all of that by hand. Some people just use plugins. We believe that there's a lot more to that story, so we do it by hand. And of just use plugins. We believe that there's a lot more to that story, so we do it by hand. And, of course, your brand matters. So those are some of the key elements.
Speaker 1:Here's some interesting results for speed. So if you look at these three pictures on this page, what you can see is that this is a desktop, so you see how it's a big picture. So this desktop speed was an A. This is one we just redid for a client who's been with us for many, many years and we always send them their speed grade. And if you look at this one, this is a little picture. This means we were looking at the mobile speed. Your speed on mobile should be an A. Your speed on desktop should be an A. And then here's another one right here. Your speed on mobile needs to be an A, which just means fast. One to two seconds, 1.8 seconds, 1.3 seconds. Your website needs to load super fast and the reason that matters is that Google says well, first of all, since 2018, we really just focus on mobile results. We love mobile results because everybody's on a mobile device.
Speaker 1:So when your website, when someone clicks on a Google search result, and if it's your website, if your website takes five seconds to load, that's a bad user experience. No one's going to stick around, believe it or not, for five seconds for the rest of your website to load so they can see what it looks like. There's lots of things behind making the speed of a website really fast, but if your website is slow, google's going to say you know what? I'm not going to rank, put you on the first page of Google if your speed is terrible, we're just not going to do it. It's a bad user experience, so why would we care? So make sure your speed is great.
Speaker 1:All right, here's the slide you want for SEO. Top keyword phrases for home care agencies. I just went down the row and put some of the ones that are really important here. Home care gets 27,000 searches per month nationwide. So just keep this in mind whatever small town or big town you might be in, there's 27,000 searches per month for home care and 27,000 for home health care. Now, not all of you can say home health care on your website. If you're non-medical, it depends on the state you're in, county, you're in all kinds of things but they're both getting about 27,000 searches per month nationwide, which, narrowed down, could mean that your website or your town is only getting like 50 or 2 or 10, depending on how big your service area is. So keep that in mind as you look at these numbers. This is everybody.
Speaker 1:Senior care Now for me, I would not SEO a website for the word senior care because you're now competing with every nursing home assisted living facility and every other senior care service that exists. You really want to focus on the words that have some kind of home care in them. So home care services 18,000. Home care agencies near me 14,000. Home care agency 12,000. In-home care 9,000. Home care assistance 5,000. Senior home care, which would be my preference 5,000. 24-hour home care 3,600.
Speaker 1:Dementia personal care, live-in, companion and at-home. I put a few you know some smaller ones in there so you could just see what those reaches, what that reaches as well. Now, companion home care, at-home personal care these are long-tail keyword phrases. So they're worth worrying about, for sure, they're worth doing, they're worth SEOing for or having incorporated into your website. But these are the top up here. But all of these are worth considering, all right.
Speaker 1:And then let's talk about brand again. We talked about that a minute ago. These are all national brands. So this is how many searches per month nationwide they get. I can tell you, over the years, home Instead used to be number one. Now they're number two. So Visiting Angels 74,000. And I think everybody probably. Well, I don't know if everybody does, but if you're in the home care business and you watch TV or you're, you know the Visiting Angels jingle. I think it's embedded in my brain, but that's because we're. We do this all day. Um home instead 49 000 ride at home, 27 000 comfort keepers. You can see all the way down.
Speaker 1:So I want you to notice something interesting the key, the key gets 9 900 searches, and that's not. That's nothing to. That's nothing to. That's great, I mean, I would like 9,900 searches a month. However, they used to be called home care assistants. Right, and home care assistants used to be right up there with visiting angels at home instead. And now the key that branding change has dropped them down a bit. Synergy, home care, first Light, always Best Home Helpers, home Watch. So you can kind of see all the way down to the bottom there. Griswold recently updated their branding from Griswold Home Care, I think, to Griswold Care Pairing, and I don't think that's caught on yet. You can see that at the very bottom, but Griswold Home Care still gets 4,000 searches a month.
Speaker 1:So if you are wondering why I put this up here, yes, these are national brands and you're probably not a national brand. You might be, but if you're not, brand matters so much to these companies, because they know that if they're branded well, nationwide and locally, local matters. You only serve a 20, 30, 40, 50 mile radius of your office location. Maybe you're bigger than that, but for a single office home care agency you can't go much further than that with all your caregivers. So brand in that 30 mile radius is so important for you. You might not get 74,000 visits a month or searches a month, but if you got 100 visits a month and 100 people needed care and 10 of them per month chose you, that's great. Who's going to pass that up right? 10 leads per month that come from your website. So brand really does matter a lot. Keep that in mind.
Speaker 1:Okay, any questions before I keep going we good, nope, we're good, okay, great. So if you have questions about brand SEO, let me know. Here's some results for you. Population of 545,000. People often ask us are these big towns that you're showing us or little towns that you're showing us? I'm going to show you the big towns. So half a million people in Fresno, california. These people are.
Speaker 1:This business is number three on the maps. I just want to point out that that little symbol there is a map symbol, so that's why I circled it. And site links on SERP is this little link. I didn't put the slide in here to talk about what those two things mean. But basically, you know you want to be on the map, right? You want to be in the map, right, you want to be in the three-pack on the map if you can. And then site links on SERP means that when you see your business show up in a Google search result, you also have some links underneath it, like about us caregivers, you know services, you see other things underneath it. It makes you more visible. So it's a good thing to have. All right, let's.
Speaker 1:This is a population of 136,000. This is Elizabeth, new Jersey. So you can just kind of see that how they're number one. This is where they do have an office location. Here, office location matters. So if your office is in Elizabeth, new Jersey, but you don't serve that area or you don't really want to serve that area, you're still going to rank better in the town where your office resides than any other town that you're in that you want to be in. So where your office is does matter. A lot of people will put their office in a place. That's really, you know, the rent is a lot cheaper, which I totally understand, but they really want to serve the high-end clients over here. Just keep in mind you're always going to rank better for the place where your office is located. So if you want a more high-end clientele, you might consider maybe a Regis or some kind of virtual office where people can actually walk in in a location closer to those clientele, in a location closer to those clientele. But this just kind of gives you an idea of 136,000.
Speaker 1:Here is Houston with 2.3 million. We have our client that's been with us forever and ever and ever ranking number one for a lot of or in the top I don't know five for a lot of keyword phrases, and on the maps Houston is 2.3 million people. That is not easy. It's a huge market, so they're doing great. And then we have San Diego 1.3 million, and we have our client for Home Care, san Diego number two on the maps, and 24-hour Home Care San Diego number three on the maps. So these are really great.
Speaker 1:This stuff takes a long time and a lot of hard work. This is not overnight success. This is work, work, work. Aurora, colorado, 395,000. You can see August 16th where they were. They had all the little dashes mean they had no presence. And then October 16th, you can see where they were and they were doing really great. And then Honolulu, hawaii. This is a 30-day result. They've been around for a long time. We SEOed their website, but they have been in Honolulu for a very long time. So, although their original website wasn't done very well as far as SEO the keywords were wrong it didn't take much to get them to where they needed to be. So and those ranks will come up even more. All right, any questions about SEO. I'm going to move on. I think we're good. Right, I don't see any. Okay, great.
Speaker 1:Maximizing social media for organic engagement. I'm going to show you this picture, these two pictures, a couple of times. So everybody wants to know what do we need to do to get more attention on social media? You don't have to be an influencer on social media to get more attention, but this one man I don't know if she's one man. There might be a couple of people involved in this business. Nicole Pasden she is not our client. I do not know her personally. I just like her content. And this is from LinkedIn, by the way, if you're not on LinkedIn or you haven't optimized your personal profile and have a business page on LinkedIn, you need to get in there, because that's where everybody is. So LinkedIn is your friend now. It used to be kind of, but it is good, so get in there.
Speaker 1:She does these videos quite often and you can see she's in different places, and this time she's with a client even, and this is important. This is it. This is what it is right. Here I'm going to tell you video is what will get you more attention. You may not like being on video, but it will get you more attention. I am no, you know nobody's chomping at the bit to see my videos, but I'll still do them. And people I get a lot more comments, a lot more information transpiring to people. I saw you on YouTube. I saw you on TikTok. We get a lot of folks that saw us on YouTube. I saw you on LinkedIn. So those are the things that really matter, and video really, really, if you haven't considered it, it is now almost mandatory to consider it. Video is where it's at. I'm going to talk about that at the end, though.
Speaker 1:Here is more video. This is a couple of folks. This is Christina and Cindy. They are physical therapists and they do videos all the time, and this person reposted their video. They actually are help professional. They help caregivers family caregivers with tips, but I think they're physical therapists by trade and they're always doing videos and they're so good. And then this is a video that we created for one of our clients, and the person who does the videos for us is a registered nurse and she's got easily 250, 300 titles and she does these amazing videos for our clients.
Speaker 1:This is not the only kind of video you can do. I mean, if you're gonna do video, these are great, but you really need to do some with a real human talking in it, not just the stock imagery in it. Okay, so video again. This is the Alzheimer's Association of San Diego. Of course, they had a drone flying over and they had all this professional videography done.
Speaker 1:You're probably never going to do that, but if you look at Rick Stein, he did a video. I don't know Rick Stein, he's not our client, but what he did was he's actually looking for caregivers, so he created a video. This is, I guess, the owner and president of Palliative Personal Care. Don't know this man, but he got on this video and talked about their company and talked about hiring. You know who they're looking for and this is a great way to get more caregivers to come to work for you. He's articulate, he's looking at the camera and he did a wonderful job of talking about the vision and the mission of the company and who they're looking for when it comes to CNAs and HHAs. Very compelling reason to watch his video and go to work for him. And then Assisting Hands. I believe they had this done professionally not sure, but it's a really good video that helps with their brand. We understand families, so I really liked that one.
Speaker 2:Valerie, we had a question. Sure, they'd be posting video on their personal LinkedIn or business LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:Both, and so I would say both. When it comes to LinkedIn, people want to do business with you as the professional. However, you also need to have a really good business presence there. So post it on your own personal one, because that's where you're connecting with folks, and on your business, do it there too. So if you looked at our LinkedIn, you would notice that I post on my personal LinkedIn, but I also go over and post the same information on my business one, because I know there's two different audiences. I have 15,000, I guess contacts, because I've been doing this for a long time, and nationwide, so some of them will see my way. Post personally, but a lot of people follow which a much smaller number follow our, our page, and I know that if I post it on our page, we'll also get more people's eyeballs. You also have to work on your company page. You need to go there and invite people to follow your company page and you need to connect with people. If you don't work on those things on LinkedIn, you're leaving money on the table every day.
Speaker 1:These are really important, okay, so here we have some that are not videos, but look how these are real people in these and, of course, you have to have permission to take pictures of other humans. Have their permission or the permission of their loved ones, however. You need to do that, but these are pictures of real people doing real things. And look how long that post is. And look at how they're tagging other communities or they're hashtagging. Those are the things that you should be doing with your post. You need to tag other people. If you're doing something with Bethesda Senior Living Communities, you want to make sure you tag Bethesda Living Senior Communities so that they know that you talked about them. You want to make sure that, if you're having training, you look at these girls are having a fun time and they're goofing around and doing some training. This is a perfect picture for not just for caregivers, but for other professionals and for potentially consumers who need care. Your staff gets along, they're doing great, they're doing training. These are great things to show.
Speaker 1:And then this down here on the final, on the right-hand side, is an event that somebody went to and it just it struck me because I remember when Sally Faith this happens to be local to me and I remember when Sally Faith was the mayor here and I had no idea that she has. I mean, it's been years ago that she was a mayor, but I didn't know she wrote a book and I didn't know she had dementia. So stuff like this is really impactful. It's a book, it's just a recommending a book and of course they went and saw her. But if you go to a book signing or if there's just a book you recommend to people you know, talk about that book. So these are. These are the kinds of posts that are really going to get you noticed and more visibility. This one is a great idea too. So I put on ideas for you to copy off of as you go about your social media marketing, having events or sponsoring events. So you can see that this is from driving to passenger transitions for older adults, february 20th at 630. It's a free educational opportunity and look at the bottom you can see all the different people in that local area who are sponsoring that and that's a great thing. For you to sponsor events like this, you don't have to put the whole event on like this. You don't have to put the whole event on. You don't have to be the big organizer of the event, but you can easily sponsor it and make a big splash with the event by sponsoring CareSmarts is doing is highlighting other professionals.
Speaker 1:So they're not highlighting themselves, but they're going around. They interviewed Don Fiala not too long ago. They're going around interviewing other professionals home care agency owners. You can do the same thing. You can interview someone who's giving you a tour of an assisted living facility, if they'll let you, because you want to highlight their business and talk about them and thank them for letting you take a tour, or whatever the event might be. And then caregiver spotlight so caregiver of the month, employee of the month, whatever you want to call it those are. That's the right thing to do, absolutely the right thing to do. So if these give you any ideas for things you could be working on for your social media and this applies to Facebook, linkedin.
Speaker 1:If you're doing video, you should have it on all the video platforms, but these are just really good ideas for you to get more visibility. Home Instead, just do a, and a lot of others do too. But there's several caregiver competitions, care Pro of the Year nomination I know HCOA does one. This is actually a video and they go through and they show all the nominees' faces. This is a lovely video. So anytime you can, you can use Canva and easily do all of this stuff.
Speaker 1:I know that everybody's thinking I don't have time for this. You can also outsource this and have somebody else you know tell them what you're looking for and have someone else easily put together these videos for you, and then this is not a video, it's just a simple statement. Kindness is contagious, that's it. That's all this is, and it's from Senior Helpers. You can see it. It's bold and bright and it's a simple message.
Speaker 1:So these are the kinds of things that definitely attract more attention, and I would be remiss if I didn't show you the Facebook queen herself, christina Ramos. She is the daughter and I'm sure she's part owner. I don't know what her title is there, but she does everything. So Touching Hearts at Home of Gainesville, florida, florida. Christina and her parents are right here on the left-hand side. Christina's in the red dress and her mom and dad are right next to her and they do all kinds of stuff. I don't think there's anybody in the senior community in Gainesville, florida, or in the entire panhandle of Florida that doesn't know Christina is at Touching Hearts at home of Gainesville.
Speaker 1:So they just did the Heart Ball. Welcome to the 39th Annual Gainesville Heart Ball. Now I don't know if I think they were just attendees or maybe they were sponsors, but look at that, they're always doing stuff. And let's see, members of our leadership team had the joy of passing out fresh roses with the residents at the Magnolia Ridge Rehab Center Memory Care on Valentine's Day. So they went and passed out roses to nursing home and skilled nursing facility residents or not residents, but patients. I mean, what a great way to be present during Valentine's Day. And then they did a prom. Did you guys see this? They did a senior prom.
Speaker 2:Oh my God. I posted it in our forum that they were going to do this.
Speaker 1:Our they do it every year, 2025, touching hearts at home. Prom king and queen oh my goodness, they do this every year. I it's uh, the benefit, elder care, I don't know what prez by the village, but they do it as a fundraiser and people get dressed up and they come to it and they help them. It looks like their daughter helping her mom who ended up being prom queen. I mean what? How nice is that? They have a photo area set up. I mean they do all, they go all out. So this is a big event and Christina's really good at organizing big events. She does this. You know four or five really big ones every year. She's an organizer, she gets TV attention, she gets all kinds of stuff and they all are fundraisers for something. Yes, her business does get a lot of notoriety and they get attention and visibility, but, honestly, she's doing fundraisers for other organizations in her area and she just benefits from all of that.
Speaker 2:She's really she's really good at like gathering the troops, so she'll get her referral sources to join her, and so all their logos are on the flyers that she leave, you know, hands out everywhere too. So I think that that's really that also is a really good idea is to get your referral sources to join with you and work together on these big, big projects. Also, we just had two people ask if they're going to get copies of the slides, and then someone else that are going to copy the recording, and I think the answer is yes to both.
Speaker 1:Recording. Yes, slides I don't tend to give out, but maybe we'll do it in a PDF, but I'm not sure about that. I usually don't give out my slides, but everybody will get the recording so you can fast forward to the parts you really love or take a screenshot. All right, I only have 15 minutes left, okay. So here we go, moving on Crafting email marketing campaigns that drive results. So this is actually a newsletter, but I divided it up into three parts because it's kind of a long newsletter and I wanted you to see what it looks like. So this is Abington Caregivers newsletter and if you were to stack these pieces on top of each other, the left-hand side is the top of the newsletter and the middle is the middle of the newsletter and the bottom is the bottom of the or. The right-hand side is the bottom of the newsletter, so you can see where they have plenty of advertisements for their stuff, their phone number. Visit our website. They even have a video they had created that we put in there. And then there's two blog posts, there's some testimonials and then another blip about them at the very bottom. Visit our website. All the unsubscribed stuff is there.
Speaker 1:This is a beautiful newsletter and this comes with our services and the CRM that we give to everybody who is in our service programs has the capability of creating these gorgeous newsletters like this. It's just like you know, picmonkey, not PicMonkey, oh, what's the name? I don't know. There's a bunch of newsletter creation chip monkey mailchimp, mailchimp that's what I'm thinking of. Pig monkey mailchimp, uh, so, uh, yeah, it's just like that. It's drag and drop super easy and these are beautiful and they're all matched with their colors. Um, so, anyway, I love these and and this is it People say oh well, newsletters, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:Well, let me tell you something. If somebody is in the market or this is on their mind and they happen to be on your newsletter list, they're going to open the newsletter. If elder care issues or their mother or their father or whatever is on their mind and they know they shouldn't be living at home alone, maybe, or they know they've been having trouble lately, they are going to open your newsletter. The people that need services are going to be thinking about this for a good six months before they ever pull the trigger. And so your newsletter coming to them one time per month. You're not overdoing it, you're not spamming them every day, once a month, having a newsletter come to them that gives them actionable tips, maybe a video, blog posts that come from your website. These are the things that they're looking for, and your business will be top of mind every month. When they get this. They will not consider it spam, especially if they enrolled or filled out a form on your website, or if you ask them would you like to receive our monthly newsletter? And everything should be in your newsletter not just generic blog posts, but also all these community events that you're attending. All of those are in our clients' newsletters. So this is one way that we create a marketing campaign that drives results, and the open rates are really good for these, better than your national average.
Speaker 1:Okay, then we talk about drip campaigns. So when somebody comes to your website and they fill out a form on your website, if they do that, do you know what happens after they receive that form? Do you call them you probably do or email them and say, hey, I received your information and just wanted to reach out to you. All that's fine, but do they ever hear from you again after that? What we do is we have our clients work with us to put together and we write it and they edit it, so you don't have to you know they don't have to write the whole thing.
Speaker 1:We put together a series of 10 emails. This is called a drip campaign. So when someone fills out a form on your website, yes, you have to call them and yes, you should email them and text them and do whatever you need to do to get a hold of them right away. However, in the interim, if you're having trouble getting a hold of them or whatever, the emails start going out to them that talk about your services, talk about the things that are, you know are important to that person who filled out that form. Over the course of 30 days, they received 10 emails, so one every three days or so, and this is and so on the right hand side, you'll see sort of like a consumer version of that. We have a giant word document that goes through a series of 10 emails and our clients work with. We work with them, they work with us and we make sure it's modified to meet their needs. So these are all just examples.
Speaker 1:And then on the left-hand side, you see a drip campaign that might be for a referral source. So every time you have somebody out in the field who stops by and does a face-to-face meeting, or maybe they just dropped some things off. You wanna make sure you have something ready to send that referral source to let them know you were there. You should be texting them, calling them, leaving them a message and sending them an email, so we write it up for you and that sits in your CRM and on your app on your phone and you can just fire off that email to whoever it is you need to on that day. So these are called drip campaigns and they're part of every service that we sell, and so that's something that you can do. Though, if you have forms on your website and nothing happens after someone fills out that form, you need to fix that and make sure you have a series of emails going out. Okay, any questions about drip campaigns?
Speaker 2:Are we good? Nope, I think we're good. Someone asked over what period of time, but then you said it right after 30 days. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's talk about reviews.
Speaker 1:These are hard. Reviews are hard and I get it, we totally get it. But but you need more reviews on your Google business profile, on carecom, caringcom, whatever it iscom. You need to be getting more reviews. I am not a fan of Yelp, but if Yelp's the way, you want to go get some more reviews on Yelp, whatever it is.
Speaker 1:You need more reviews and not just your yes, caregivers who love working for you. It's great to pepper a few of those in, but it shouldn't be all caregivers. You definitely want to have some very nicely written reviews that come in from real clients. So you can see, I put on the left-hand side. This is a recent review for Incredicare and it's a very nicely written, long one. You're not going to always get that. Sometimes you just get the five stars and nothing right. That's okay too. You want to answer every single review that comes in, bad or good, and sometimes we have to coach our clients through the bad ones. So you know that disgruntled caregivers are going to leave a bad review once in a while. They'll get their friends to gang up and do all kinds of crazy stuff. Don't worry about that. First of all, we've gotten it down to a science to report them and we report them as a conflict of interest and we have multiple people and like on your team, on our team, report them. Usually they get taken down not always, but a lot of times they'll get taken down.
Speaker 1:Having said that, you need to have positive reviews. This is great for SEO, this is great for your visibility and you really want to see this so you can see our reviews. I didn't really label these very well and Credit Care is on the left-hand side and Approved Senior Network us. We are on the right-hand side there and just kind of an illustration that you need to make sure you answer every single review. So we have a review program that's built into our CRM. We show you how to use it. You can send one review request at a time. You just got off the phone with Mary. She's super happy with your services. Boom fire off a review request to her right now. She's happy, so I send her a review request right away. So we have all of that built into our services so you can get more reviews. Highly recommend it. Lisa Marcella is the queen of getting reviews on our team. She gets everybody to review us.
Speaker 1:All right, let's talk about automation. This is a back-end, technical little picture that you will never want to see again. It means nothing to you, but what I'll tell you is that we set up all of these automations so that when someone sends in a client survey or get a form, or they chat with you live, or they chat with you or they fill out something on your website this is what automation looks like A tag is added, an email is fired off internally, your people are notified. We set all of this up so that you never miss a lead. You're texted, you're emailed.
Speaker 1:We do everything in our power to uh, to Bing you or or knock on your door and say hey, you need to pay attention to this so you never miss the lead. Uh, you are notified by about everything and that lead never misses the opportunity to connect with you further because they're being emailed, they're being texted, at least right in the immediacy. We don't go overboard on texting, but you want to make sure that somebody, that something or someone follows up with them right now and says we got your information, we'll be calling you very soon. Says we got your information, we'll be calling you very soon, so you don't have to worry about how fast people are being followed up with. It's automated and it's automatic.
Speaker 2:So many times, valerie, from my experience in home care, they land in spam. The leads you know I get and I would see it like two weeks later and it was a 24 or it was long term care insurance or it was just going to be a really good job, and by the time I saw it and called them it was too late. So I love that we text our clients when they get a lead and all the information you need is in the body of the text. You can go from that text. I mean it's immediate and call and that's what you have to do in this industry. I mean the adult child's in crisis. They, they need your help now, not a week from now, not three days from now. Whoever they can talk to first, many times, is who they pick if you do it right. So I love it.
Speaker 1:Yep, absolutely. You need to make sure you're following up within just a few minutes so they get a text. You get a text. Everybody's notified on both sides about everything. So there's no doubt that that the connection has been made, and it's 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It doesn't matter if it's a Sunday night at nine o'clock. If the person fills out the form on your website, bam, you're going to be notified. So let's talk a little bit about it. Yeah, and that's one of the biggest things you can't miss leads. You can't miss them. So let's talk about AI. Now.
Speaker 1:Some people love AI. Some people say, oh my gosh, it's. You know we're all going to be taken over by machines. I would recommend this. Understand it and use it to your advantage. That's what you need to do. There's all kinds of negativity and positivity going on with AI. You know we're going to probably find cures for cancers with AI or diseases, but also kids shouldn't be using AI to write papers. I get it, but let's talk about what you can do. That makes a difference.
Speaker 1:Create engaging texts that accompany your social media posts. Boy, I wrote that weird. So when you're getting ready to post that new video or those pictures of you at this event and you're thinking I don't know what to write at the top of this. We were at the blah blah. All you have to do is go to a free version of ChatGPT and say I need to write a post on LinkedIn about this event I went to. Can you write it for me? Use emojis and boom, it'll write the whole thing for you. It you know, and it'll put emojis in, it'll put all this cutesy stuff in there, and then you can modify it and then boom post. So you don't have to think about what you're going to write as much You're. It's going to give you the great idea or the great text that can go along with it. That's fun, but also you can modify it and make it your own. So that's one way you can use AI almost immediately and for free. It'll also write great press releases for you in a press release format easy stuff. It'll give you ideas for videos. It'll give you ideas for articles and it'll give you ideas for activities you can do. It'll give you tons of ideas for all of this. You could ask it to write a script for a video. It'll do it. You can modify it, but it'll give you a script for a three-minute video if you really need one. So those things are super easy.
Speaker 1:Now what I do see sometimes is that content is written, never edited, never looked at, and it's put out there as if it were written by a human, and that's kind of. Not everybody catches it, but more and more people are catching on that boy. That's AI right now. So be careful with how you use it, but certainly it's worth understanding that it can work for you and help you be much faster in a lot of these things. So the other things I put on here are I want you to see that AI knows something about you, probably if you've been out there for a while and if you have a social media footprint or an online footprint.
Speaker 1:So I asked it what do you know about Valerie Van Boeven? It was kind of it was. It was okay, it was good. It was a little off. It had some old information, some stuff I probably wouldn't write or bother with, but it's okay.
Speaker 1:I think it took most of it from LinkedIn. And then I also asked ChatGPT in particular where do you get your information? And just so you all know, it's getting its information from Bing, which is another reason why you should probably make sure your Bing profile for your business is up to date and live and optimized, because if someone asks chat GPT for information on home care agencies in the blah blah area, it's going to pull it from Bing, so you definitely want to make sure you're recognized there. And then I asked it to go to the web and tell me what you find about Approved Senior Network, and so it did. It did pull the right stuff and I think it used our website for that, but you probably would like to put that in there and see what does it know about me? What does it know about me? What does it say about me? Because more and more people are going to be relying on AI recommendations and AI descriptions for search, so that's something that you definitely want to keep in mind.
Speaker 1:All right, let's just talk a little bit about creating impactful videos, so I just wanted to show you. Let's go back to video for a minute. I talked about video in your social media. It's where it's at. It's what you should do. A lot of people are either either don't want to be on camera or they don't feel like they have time, and I think that we can fix that, so you do have time. Brand awareness 96% of brands report that video has enhanced their brand recognition. I guarantee you it will enhance your brand recognition. Sales growth 84% of video marketers have observed a direct increase when they're using video content. Better return on investment, consumer engagement and purchase influence doesn't necessarily apply to us. They're talking more about e-commerce, but if I get to see your face and you're talking to me about how much you care about your clients and why you started this business, I am going to love what you have to say right there and that's probably half the sale. So please think about doing the video stuff.
Speaker 1:I'm also going to talk a little bit about face versus faceless video here. Faceless videos let's just skip to that. Faceless videos this is a face video. This means your face is in the video, or someone from your organization's face, and they're talking to the camera. That's a face in video. People love face in video. They want to hear from you. I get more engagement and more information from people when I put my goofy face in the video and talk to them than I do from anything else that I post. So face in video is really important. But you can also do faceless video and that's the kind of video that we already create for our clients are the faceless videos. This is just an example of a faceless video from the Alzheimer's Association.
Speaker 1:Nobody has time to do these big giant professionally. You know done ones, but these are easy to do and we do them for our clients. The problem is we need your face in more videos. So the last thing I'll tell you is that to help our clients do more video or understand how to be more present in video without that anxiousness and that you know I hate looking at myself on video or I hate my voice Without feeling that way there are some ways that we can help.
Speaker 1:So we're doing a home care video lab on March 7th, if anybody's interested. You will walk away with 12 fully edited high quality short videos you can use Pretty much. We're going to go for evergreen, not event specific necessarily. Maybe a few of them might be event specific but after four weeks you'll be able to look at those 12 fully edited high quality videos and use them anytime you want. It does cost money for us to do this because somebody has to edit all those videos and and I'm teaching the class myself it's over four weeks. It's one Zoom call per week for four weeks and by the time that four weeks is over, we'll have everything we need to make your finish up your videos for you, and you have to do very little.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to give away my secret, but you definitely have to give me a little bit of video, but not nearly as much as you think.
Speaker 1:All I need is a little bit of information from you. We'll make it happen and we're going to teach everybody how to capture B-roll footage, which is just generic footage that you can use in videos, and give you all the ideas for topics for future video creation. So at the end of this, I just wanted you to know that video is really important for all of your marketing. It's no longer something I think people should avoid. I really think you should dive in and ask somebody in your office to be in charge of that. There are just some hysterical and very touching videos out there that we have seen that have been created by home care agencies that are just amazing. And you don't have to be super great at video. You don't have to hire someone professionally to do it, it's all on your phone. So that is the conclusion of our webinar. I am going to go over some of these questions and answers that a lot of people ask. Do we have anything that I need to answer?
Speaker 2:There's just somebody asking what services would be good for her, so I'll reach out to her.
Speaker 1:Okay, all right, if you want to know more about the services we provide, I recommend that you go to ASN homecaremarketingcom. It's the first website listed there. Go to ASNhomecaremarketingcom it's the first website listed there. We also run homecaremarketingnewscom. You can reach out to us at support, at ASN support, or you can call us at 888-404-1513. Any of those will get you in touch with the right people.
Speaker 1:Do you outsource your work overseas? We get asked that, or I get asked that, and the answer is no, we do not, and I mentioned a couple of reasons why we don't. I don't have any problem with people doing that. It's just in our position with content and the things that we write. We really need writers that understand the healthcare market in the United States, because it's so complicated and the words we use are different the acronyms and you guys know all that. So we want to make sure we're using the right words and we have to follow the right rules, especially for non-medical home care versus medical home care.
Speaker 1:How much do your services cost? Well, I'm not allowed to answer that question, but no, we don't talk about our pricing online, on the web, in a text, in a chat, because you really need to talk to somebody first. You may not need every service we provide. You may not need any of the services or you may need all the services. I have no idea until someone sits down and has a conversation and says here's where I am, here's what I've tried, here's what I'm looking for and here's what I wish, here's what's on my wish list. And once those questions are answered and you have a good business discussion with Don Fiala here or Lisa, then you can know what the pricing is. But you really how much it costs is important to know. But really, what do you need first? Do I own my own website and content? So we create websites for home care agencies all day long? Yes, you own your website and your content 100%. Can I move my website to another service provider? Absolutely, you can, and we'll give them two different options on how to get the file so they can move it to another provider. We don't hold your website hostage.
Speaker 1:Do you have reviews? Do you serve startup businesses? Yes, we have reviews. There are about 30 reviews on our Google my Business. You can also go to our website at asnhomecaremarketingcom and look at all the video testimonials. There's a million of them, I think. No, there's about 30. And then there's also written testimonials on there. Do you serve startup businesses? I think that's supposed to be a separate question on there. Do you serve startup businesses? I think that's supposed to be a separate question. It depends. We do sometimes. We don't always serve startups. I really would encourage you to talk to Dawn and Lisa about that, because serving if you just started your business, you might not be in a position where you want to spend a whole bunch of money on some of the things that you know that we just talked about today. You might want to take it. Do it, really be budget conscious at first and they'll point you in the right direction.
Speaker 2:For all that, usually, valerie the startups that I talk to, I suggest is the live Zoom training, the sales training that we teach, the in-field sales training. Yes, you need a client base to pay for the website, to pay for the things that you need to do online, and that is the fastest, quickest way is to go out in the field or have somebody go out in the field for you and get those referral sources to start sending their discharge patients to you. So that's usually what that's usually. My recommendation is that they take that sales training class with us so that I mean by week six it's 12 weeks long by week six, most people are getting referrals from skilled nursing facilities and then you have clients and then you, you have the money to invest in your online stuff.
Speaker 1:So I, you know, and we did this this webinar is all about online. But honestly, having that sales training and having a person in the field actually going out with consistency not when they have time with consistency out in the field building their audience and their referral sources that's really the first place you should start. So we do have sales training, and in various ways. So I would highly recommend you go to our website and look at the sales training. If you really need a place to start, the website and all the online stuff will come. But you got to start somewhere and you need to have feet on the ground in your community. Do you recommend Google Ads? It depends.
Speaker 1:I'm not a big fan of Google Ads. We do it, but the reason I'm not a fan is because it's very it depends. I'm not a big fan of Google ads we do it, but the reason I'm not a fan is because it's very, very expensive. You cannot just spend $300 a month on Google ads and think that anything's going to happen anymore. It just doesn't work that way. So if you are someone who's experienced with Google ads and you understand the budget requirements, then we're happy to talk to you. Budget requirements, then we're happy to talk to you, but it's definitely not going to save your life. It's really technical and it's really confusing, and so it's expensive. So, yes, we'll talk to you about it. It wouldn't be my first place I would send you. Do you recommend buying leads? And for Google ads, for buying leads, for any of the paid advertising, I will say this you really need to make sure that a person is designated to answer the phone or to make the call as soon as the lead comes in. If you're waiting hours to call somebody back for any lead service, you're going to lose them. So, really, if you're going to commit to buying or paying for leads, then it's really important that you have someone right there ready to call that person.
Speaker 1:Does your CRM connect with other software? It does. We have seen that some of our competitors talk about oh, we can connect with all these things, and that is true to a certain extent. We use the same CRM that a lot of our competitors use. However, what they don't tell you is that there's a cost on your side too. From your other, like a WellSky connection to our CRM is possible, but it's very expensive for you to do that, so you may not want to do that. So there's some things that we would talk about with you, but it does connect with other software. Will someone teach us how to use the CRM? Yes, we have a CRM that is loaded with all the things that I just showed you Reviews, drip campaigns, all the things and, yes, we do an onboarding call and show you how to use it, and we're always available via support.
Speaker 1:Do you recommend Wix, squarespace, godaddy, do-it-yourself websites? No, I will never. I will never, ever, ever, recommend any of those websites. I understand that you're on a budget. You might have to go with what you can afford at first, but those websites Wix, squarespace, godaddy and any of the other ones they will never serve you the way your website should serve you. So an investment in your business is an investment in a professionally built WordPress website that serves your needs for several years. I would also say that if your website is over three years old two years old even that you consider getting an uplift, upgrade, you know, do over, rebrand, whatever you want to call it, and get that website up to 2025 standards so that it's not working off of old junk in the background and it looks like it was built not by Cousin Eddie, you saw my slide of ugly websites.
Speaker 1:Do you develop websites with WordPress?
Speaker 1:Yes, we only use WordPress.
Speaker 1:We have always done that for 17 years.
Speaker 1:We understand the good, the bad and the ugly with WordPress, but when a client comes to us and builds a website, we are responsible for making sure that website works, that it's up to date, that it doesn't have malware, that it's not hijacked or hacked or whatever.
Speaker 1:And I can say in 17, 18 years, I mean rarely, maybe one or two times has a website ever been completely hacked, and that's been years ago. Sometimes malware sneaks in in other ways. We just no one ever knows it, but we know it and so we resolve it. It's little things that most people don't notice, but we work really closely with our host, our servers, the people who manage our servers, and we're on top of it really fast. So, yes, we use WordPress for our websites. Does anybody else have any questions? Anything else I can do? Answer about online marketing. Focus on LinkedIn, facebook, video and let AI help you with some of those things, and we're going to talk a lot about video marketing in the month of March, so if you want to come with us, sign up and we'll make sure that you are a whiz at all of that.
Speaker 2:What do you think about Facebook and Instagram ads?
Speaker 1:Facebook and Instagram ads will work for caregivers, if you're recruiting, but it will not work for clients.
Speaker 1:For clients, you can build your newsletter list by using Facebook and Instagram ads to give away free guide to home care in Fairfax, virginia or wherever you are located, and write the free guide up and do all the things. We've done that for clients several times and they seem to like it. What it does is it grows their newsletter list so that person opts in for that free guide to home care and then boom, they're on the newsletter list and they receive a few other little emails because obviously they're looking. But Facebook and Instagram do not work. Just running an ad. Hey, do you need home care? Here we are, we're the best. It's not going to work.
Speaker 1:Google and Facebook are completely different in the way that you know, when someone Googles home care, here we are, we're the best. It's not gonna work. Google and Facebook are completely different in the way that when someone Googles home care for my mom in Fairfax Virginia, then they are needing that right now. They need some answers right now, and that is what Google is about. It's a search engine. It's that's how you get leads from Google. But in Facebook, we're there looking at pictures of the kids, the grandkids, or family events or events that we've been to or whatever. And if we've been talking about mentioning looking up stuff about elder care, then the ads just kind of trickle in. Like you know, you talk to your husband about needing a new mattress and then suddenly everything in your Facebook feed is about mattresses, because every electronic device you have is listening to you. So that's kind of how those those ads come. It's more of a discovery engine, not a search engine.
Speaker 1:So no, unless you want to just grow your newsletter list, which is totally fine, I think the person with the biggest newsletter list, the biggest email list, is the winner here. Fine, I think the person with the biggest newsletter list, the biggest email list, is the winner here. So the more contacts you have in your email list, the better. I hope that answers it. Any other questions for anybody Online websites, email, ai, video, no, all good, okay, well, thank you everybody. Thanks for joining us. I hope you got some information. I will be sending out this replay. You can fast forward to any particular place you want and we're happy to help you with anything you need. Thank you so much, everybody. Bye. Thanks for sticking with us.
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