Marketing Your Hospice or Homecare Agency 101

The only way to sustain new growth in this increasingly competitive market is for hospices, homecare and skilled nursing facilities to begin educating physicians and medical facilities about the services offered and the quality of those services.

To effectively market the services of your agency, you need:

  • A clear understanding of who your competitors are; their strengths, weaknesses and client lists.
  • A marketing plan that includes a unique value proposition—a sentence or two that explains, briefly, what sets you apart from your competition, such as the services you offer, the quality of those services, accreditation or staffing ratios.  Anything that you offer that your competitor does not or cannot.
  • A strategic plan that outlines your plans for growth and how you’re going to get there.
  • A software solution that helps your marketing team track accounts, activity, team communications and patient-level detailed information.  The right tool can help your representatives communicate clearly with management, each other, and most importantly, your referral sources.

Understanding your competitors

If you haven’t done a competitor analysis, you really can’t do it soon enough.  A good competitive analysis will include:

Names of all competitors for your services: whether they are similar facilities or just facilities that provide similar services, they are competitors if they can lower your census. Understand as much as possible about them. Are they doing marketing of their services?  What are they saying? How are they reaching the market and referral sources?

If you haven’t got the inside scoop on a competitor, study their Website. It will contain valuable information about their strategy and marketing tactics and possibly even a client list.

Strategic Plan

If you do not have a strategic plan in place that 1) includes marketing and 2) addresses plans for growth, it’s time for revision. In addition, the key points of your plan should be communicated to your employees. For example, if you want to achieve more growth with rehabilitation patients, your staff should know that and be well-prepared to accept those patients.

Marketing Plan

A good marketing plan includes:

  • Your company’s strategic goals and objectives: this is important because your marketing efforts should align with these goals.
  • Financial goals plus the estimated budget available for marketing and sales efforts.
  • Product plan: your plan for service offerings that will need to be marketed.
  • Your value proposition: you need a clear Understanding and statement of your organization’s unique value proposition, or what it is that sets you apart from competitors. It may be your staff-to-patient ratio, the quality of your care, your partnership with a rehabilitation agency…anything that will help physicians and other referral sources understand your strengths.
  • A complete competitive analysis: this analysis should include your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, an estimate of the market share (how much of the census for your area they control), your competitor’s marketing strategy and as many client lists or referral sources as possible.
  • Methods you will use to communicate your strengths to physicians and other referral sources. This may include mailers with educational information about your organization, billboards to educate both referrers and patients, radio or TV advertising, and more.
  • Critical to success is the implementation of software designed to support all of your marketing efforts. A plan for fully implementing Amplicare’s Net-Trac and Mobile companion solutions throughout your organization and with referral sources meets the needs of the marketing team and referral sources.  Amplicare solutions:
  • Consolidate business information—including emails, calendars and notes—to streamline the analysis, tracking and management of data
  • Provide secure access to the application based on roles (e.g., marketing representative, marketing manager, management team, physicians, etc.)
  • Customize the user interface to match your organization’s business processes and terminology
  • Deliver patient-level information to those whom you give access; for example, you can give access to patient information to your marketing representatives so that they may discuss specific cases with physicians and other referral sources when they visit
  • Provide access to tasks and corporate content for enhanced collaboration, workflow, knowledge management and visibility
  • Provide all of this information and functionality via the Web or your smartphone, iPad or laptop in a mobile format
  • Performance Analyses: The following components are also part of a good marketing plan.
  • Sales Analysis
  • Market Share Analysis
  • Expense Analysis
  • Financial Analysis
  • Plan for use of marketing tools

These last analyses are really tools to look back at past performance to find out what needs to be changed in the current marketing cycle.

More How-Tos

For more  information about building your marketing plan, check out the following Websites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_plan#Performance_analysis (simple definitions)

http://www.entrepreneur.com/marketing/marketingbasics/marketingplan/article43018.html (great how-to)

http://wsd.dli.mt.gov/local/kalispell/bdkv7/pdf/createmp.pdf (another great how-to explained in simple terms)