The Ultimate Guide to Online Lead Generation for Home Care, Assisted Living and Senior Service Businesses

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1 The Ultimate Guide to Online Lead Generation for Home Care, Assisted Living and Senior Service Businesses Defining a Home Care Lead, Assisted Living Lead or Senior Service Business Lead A name and an address does not make a person a lead. It is important that you understand what a lead really is. A lead is a person who has demonstrated true interest in the products or services that your senior service or home care business has to offer. In terms of online businesses, a lead is generally considered a visitor to your site that has completed a landing page form. This landing page is a specific web page that contains a form a visitor populates with contact or business information in exchange for information provided by the business. This information could be in the form of an ebook, product demonstration, webinar or product consultation, or phone call to discuss the services you provide. Keep in mind that having a person s address does not truly make that person a lead for your home care or senior service business. Instead, providing this information makes that person your contact. Providing their address, possibly by subscribing to an newsletter, RSS feed or blog, the contact is giving you the opportunity to use targeted marketing efforts that will convert the contact into a legitimate elder care lead. What is Enough Information? Since the gathering of information through landing pages is a critical step in generating elder care leads, one of the first considerations by many online marketers is how much information a person should be asked to provide on a landing page. The answer to this is not necessarily straight forward. Asking for too little information could make it difficult or even impossible for you to properly target that person with marketing efforts, but asking for too much information, particularly sensitive information such as address or other personal details, may turn the prospect off and stop them from completing the form. Many home care and senior service businesses automatically think that they should only ask for a few very basic pieces of information such as name and address. This is too little information to really build a targeted marketing process or prioritize individual leads. You will need to compromise in order to solve this issue. When building your lead generation strategy identify the information that is necessary in order to develop a smooth and beneficial sales process. If it does not seem that certain information would be actively used by either the marketing department or the sales process, don t include it in your contact form. Creating a careful balance of information will help you to generate a high conversion rate and gather the information that your sales team needs in order to close transactions. Inbound Lead Generation for Home Care, Assisted Living and Senior Service Businesses

2 Home Care and senior service businesses love inbound leads. Inbound marketing generates leads that are already invested in your business and have demonstrated this interest by visiting your site and willingly provided contact information. This type of elder care lead makes the job much easier for a sales and marketing team. A lead that already has some information about your senior care business or what is has to offer will already have a sense of trust in your company and perceive your company and credible much more quickly. This also means that the customer will be properly educated and have expectations that are well defined prior to making a purchase decision. In order to truly generate senior care leads, businesses need to utilize three essential elements for productive inbound lead generation: Landing Pages Landing pages are specialized web pages (or your home page ) that are created with the distinct purpose of generating leads. These pages feature contact forms that allow visitors to provide information in exchange for a valuable offer such as an ebook or report, or in some cases the simple opportunity to speak with a caring professional. Offer In the context of lead generation activities, an offer is content, a product or service that is perceived as valuable by the visitor and will encourage that visitor to provide contact information in order to access the offer. These generally include product demonstrations, ebooks, reports, whitepapers or free consultations. Call-to-Action Regardless of how well your landing page is crafted or the value of the offer, they are both useless of no one can find them. A call-to-action is a piece of text, a button, a link or an image that brings a visitor directly to your landing page. The Call-To-Action TELLS the visitor what to do next. Lead Generation Scenario A visitor comes to your homepage and sees a call-to-action. The visitor clicks the call-to-action and is brought to your landing page where they find information about your company and details of an offer. He sees a contact form that he can fill out in order to access the offer. He provides the information, submits the form and receives the offer. The contact information that has been provided is then used to contact the visitor and encourage conversion into a customer. Generating Leads within Your Site Of course, if you are going to generate leads, you will need to first generate traffic. To make your calls to action, landing pages and offers actually work to generate leads for your business, you have to have people find them. The first thing to remember is that every page needs to have a relevant and

3 compelling call to action. (Like a form in the sidebar, and a telephone number in LARGE font in the header of each web page) Home Page: Your home page should have a call-to-action that is focused on your general products and services. This is because a wide variety of visitors will visit your home page and this is your primary opportunity to direct lead generation. Services Pages: calls-to-action on service pages should be devised to apply to that particular service because visitors to that page are already interested in that particular service or service category. Blog: your blog should not be intensely promotional. Instead you should offer fresh content that is helpful and offers solutions to problems or questions that consumers may have in regards to your market. This content should appeal to a wide range of consumers who utilize social media, search engine inquiries and other sources to find information about these topics. On your blog, a call-to-action that is less product-focused would be the most appropriate tactic. These calls to action are generally forms and phone numbers. They should be present on EVERY blog post. 19 Tips for Lead Generation for Home Care, Assisted Living and Senior Service Businesses 1. Ideal Positioning of Calls to Action-the portion of your webpage that is readily visible to the viewer without having to use the scroll bar is referred to as being above the fold. This is the portion of your page that around half of your visitors to view and then stop looking. Calls-to-action should be positioned in this area of the page, which can result in doubling your clicks. 2. Clearly Say What You Are Offering-make sure that you are very clear about what your call to action offer is. If you are offering a free guide, make sure that you state this clearly. Clearly convey the benefit of what you are offering so that your visitors will understand exactly what it is and why they should want it. 3. Utilize Images-images catch the attention of visitors much more than just blocks of text. The image will be able to show off your offer in a more compelling and faster way than just words. 4. Use Contrasting Colors-color is very important to the overall impression of your page, but if you let your calls to action blend in with the rest of your color scheme some of your visitors will simply miss them. Use colors that stand out so that they are obvious. 5. Correspond Your CTA and Your Landing Page- calls to action should be links. Every call-to-action should be clickable and lead directly to a related landing page. If you are not providing a hyperlink for the CTA your visitors are not going to understand how to find the offer that they want. This will just result in them giving up and moving on to another page. 6. Use Relevant Pages for CTAs-your CTAs do not all have to be alike. In fact, you should create several different ones that link to relevant pages so your visitor will find information that is relevant to the offer that interested him in the first place.

4 7. Every Blog Post Should Be a Call-to-Action- blogs are the ideal opportunity to share your company message and discuss particular products or offers. Adding a CTA to the bottom of each post directs readers to find out more. 8. Keep the Message Consistent- make sure that the message that is conveyed on the landing page is the same as the message that is conveyed in your CTA. Do not suddenly mention some sort of catch or change the message behind the offer on the page because it will lead to confusion, aggravation and a sense of distrust in the consumer. 9. Be Crystal Clear About Your Offers-your offer is not the time to try to be clever. Be absolutely clear about what you are offering so that your visitors will know what they are signing up for and are more likely to be interested. Use simple, straightforward wording to describe the offer. 10. Position the Form Above the Fold-just like your call-to-action should be above the fold, the contact form should be there as well. This will mean that more visitors will see it and be compelled to fill it out. 11. Be Simple but Thorough-don t make your contact form complicated, but make sure that you are asking everything that your sales team needs to properly target the lead. Do not ask more than you need, but do not ask too little either. 12. Use Brief and Easy to Consume Text-your visitor will likely not have a lot of time to devote to reading about your offer. Offer brief text that can be easily scanned through and rely on the offer content itself to provide more thorough information. 13. Emphasize the Benefits-make sure that your visitors understand the benefits of the offer so they will be even more interested in providing their contact information. 14. Less Navigation-landing pages should not feature links and other navigation that may distract your visitors from providing their contact information. Keep your pages focused and direct your visitors right to the contact form so you can gather their information rather than losing them to other pages. 15. Thank Your Visitors-once your visitors have filled in the contact form they should be directed automatically to a thank you page. Here is where you can put your navigation to your blog, other pages or other products. 16. Make Your Offers Compelling-every visitor will want to know what you have to offer them and why they should give you their information. Your offer should be something that is compelling and of value to the visitor. There is a major difference between offering promotional materials and pricing details and offering an informational ebook or access to a webinar. 17. Provide a Link to Your Page within Your Offer-you want your leads to be able to get back to you without having to rely on s. Provide a link back to your page within the offer so that when your lead is finished enjoying the offer content he will be able to revisit your site. 18. Remember Each Phase of the Cycle-create different offers that will appeal to consumers at various stages within the buying cycle. Remember that consumer needs change the further through the process they get so you will want to provide offers that appeal to these needs. 19. Reiterate Your Clarity-reinforce your explanation of your offer and be exceptionally clear about not only the offer, but the benefits that the offer gives your consumer. Be straight to the point about your offer and don t get bogged down in trying to give too much information leading up to your offer. Make sure that your follow up contains reminders of these benefits.

5 Don t Let Your Senior Care Leads Go to Waste As a home care marketer it is critical to remember that lead generation isn t your end goal. Your work does not stop when the lead submits his information. Rather, your end goal is generating revenue. You have specific goals once your lead provides his information. At the top of your priority list should be getting the lead to your sales team as quickly as possible. Next is helping your sales team convert that lead into an actual customer. This is best accomplished through a process referred to as lead nurturing. This involves communicating through automated marketing messages (like a monthly newsletter) that are customized to the specific service you provide, allowing them to continue their engagement with your site. This nurturing helps to encourage the sales process and make the entire process more condensed. Conclusion: We Love Lead Generation! Inbound marketing to generate home care leads can truly transform your sales and marketing efforts to support greater revenue generation. Combining calls-to-action, landing pages and offers can reduce your cost-per-lead while also increasing the value of each lead by offering a higher level of consumer education at the front end of interaction. Don t hesitate! Get started now to let lead generation support your ever-increasing success. Get a plan and a website that makes sense , talk to George or Valerie at LTC Expert Publications.