Many organizations throw away marketing dollars on campaigns that don't pay off! Is your home care agency one of them?

Every home care franchise invests time, money, and effort into driving website traffic that is hopefully high-quality. Traffic without conversions wastes time and resources. Focusing on traffic only as an ROI of digital marketing campaigns is the wrong approach. How your home care agency measures digital marketing campaigns can make or break your ability to optimize strategies towards success. It is crucial to invest resources into sources that will put your brand in front of the right audience and personas that have the need for your service offering. A report by Small Business Trends recommends that organizations invest at least 1% of their revenues into marketing.

The goal of investing this 1% is to continue to reach more people and potential prospects. Home care agencies should be wary of marketing agencies that promise to deliver brand awareness but do not promise to deliver quality leads. Brand awareness without conversions will not drive short-term gains for an organization. Here are a few ways to drive targeted, high-quality traffic to your home care website without breaking the bank or risking too much of your resources.

Focus on Understand Your Traffic Behavior

Before an organization focuses on driving quality traffic to their website it is important to understand what visitors are doing on their site and what is prompting them to convert. Increasing website traffic without first optimizing for lead generation may cause an home care agency to lose valuable opportunities. There are lots of tools, many that are free, that can help an agency track, analyze, and optimize conversion paths.

Here are a few for consideration:

Hotjar: Hotjar offers a suite of tools that allow an organization to create heat maps, conversion funnels, traffic surveys, and more.

HubSpot: HubSpot is a marketing automation platform that can help an organization understand what pieces of their marketing strategy influenced prospects the most in the conversion funnel.

Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a free tool that can help an organization review traffic channels, visitor behavior, funnel visualization, and user behavior.

Optimize for Organic Traffic

Many organizations today jump into spending marketing dollars on paid advertising without considering organic SEO as a long-term strategy. Yes, driving organic traffic takes time, effort, and a strategic plan but the payoff is worth it considering the cost per lead obtained.

Home care agencies that want to start optimizing for organic traffic should complete an audit of their site, identify search terms that deliver value (search quality, search quality) and put a plan in place for which pages will be optimized for each term. Creating a landing page that is relevant to the most valuable key terms in the best way to obtain organic SEO success.

Here are a few additional tips organizations should consider:

Keep local business listings updated and optimized

Create an maintain an internal and external link strategy

Encourage customers to provide business reviews (develop a plan on how to obtain)

Promote content regularly on social media

Always host unique, localized, valuable content on site.

Have a Time Management Strategy Before Spending on PPC

PPC can be a great resource for some home care agencies and a disaster for others. Without having a strategy for pay-per-click and the time to manage, maintain, and optimize an organization could be throwing money down the drain and not even know it. In fact, according to a study, performed by Wordstream, small businesses waste around 25% of their PPC budget each month. In an organization spends $500 a month on PPC the estimated loss per year would be about $1500 :(.

Neil Patel, one of the top marketers in the world, says that most PPC campaigns fail for one of the following six reasons:

An organization stopped bidding on broad match keywords

An organization has not eliminated low-value keywords from their strategy

An organization does not double ad spend on high performing terms and ads

An organization strictly focuses on collecting leads and not on profitability

An organization’s budget is too small eliminating the visibility of ads.

An organization does not have the time to effectively manage PPC initiative.

Time is probably the most important component of running a successful PPC campaign. It does not matter what platform an organization is using for paid ads (Google, Bing, Facebook) if they do not have time to actively manage, it will fail. Home care agencies should consider time management when developing a strategy for their paid ad initiatives. Who is going to run the campaign? How many hours does that person or agency have to devote to the campaign each month? What are the KPI’s of each campaign?

Invest in Marketing Automation

Over the last few years, marketing technology and capabilities have become more and more advanced. It is now possible to automate, test, and optimize the way an organization engages its audience and converts prospects to opportunities and hopefully revenue. Home care agencies can use marketing automation to guide visitors through a conversion funnel, send emails based on behavior, and automate the chat experience with visitors.

Automation also makes it possible to test different campaigns against each other in order to understand what will work and what will not work.

Here are a few additional resources about marketing automation:

Five Marketing Automation Tips for Small Businesses

Quick Guide to Getting Started with Marketing Automation

Evaluating Marketing Automation Success

Failure is a Doorway to Opportunity

It is not possible to be a successful marketer without some level of failure. Organizations can spend time understanding their audience, their behavior, and creating campaigns that leverage this knowledge but success is not guaranteed.

How an organization responds to campaign failure will either push them towards success or limit their potential. Marketing is all about testing, making adjustments, and testing again. Successful organizations know when to pull the plug and move their marketing spend to another avenue if current initiatives are not delivering value.

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