Essential 5

from Care Home Magazine May 2023

Make a splash

In line with our focus on marketing, we share five key elements of your care home which should be at the forefront of your promotional campaigns in order to boost occupancy rates.

Reviews

Using reviews in a marketing campaign can be a powerful strategy to increase the credibility and trustworthiness of your care home. To ensure you make the most of this, you should identify the most positive and compelling reviews and feature them prominently on your website, social media channels and other marketing platforms. In any industry, people appreciate ‘hearing it from the horse’s mouth’, so, using real customer testimonials from residents’ families goes a long way.

Chefs

Good nutrition and hydration are key to remaining healthy and care home chefs hold the incredibly important role of ensuring residents receive nutritious and delicious meals three times a day without fail. Along with providing healthy food, the work of a chef provides a range of other benefits such as increased quality of life and enhanced socialisation at meal times. Having an in-home chef should be a firm point in your marketing strategy to ensure potential residents and their families know that wellness and nutrition are of great significance to you. Along with this, if you have chefs who have undergone specific training courses, perhaps to enable them to cater more efficiently to vegan diets, make sure you include this.

Outdoor areas

Outdoor areas create a sense of wellbeing and happiness amongst residents and should therefore feature in a prime position within your marketing campaign. Using high-quality photos and videos of the grounds from a range of angles can ensure you capture all of the garden’s features. Including a walkthrough of each area and the emotions/effects it can ignite goes deeper than simply sharing a photo. When doing this, it’s important to showcase not only the beauty of the outdoors, but also the safety and security as these are important considerations for seniors and their families.

In-home activities

Care homes can sometimes be lonely places, especially for residents who don’t have visitors, so in-home activities are a great way to boost self-esteem and reduce isolation. Whether you hire a singing teacher, hold a crafts workshop or introduce dance classes; you must make a song and dance about it on your website and social channels to capture the attention of potential residents and their families. This shows that you are a home willing to go above and beyond to provoke feelings of happiness amongst those who stay with you.

Additional facilities

More recently, we have seen care homes introduce additional facilities such as on-site salons and cinemas for the use of their residents. As these extra amenities are quite rare, it’s important that they are made known it could massively help you to appeal to a broader audience. More frequently now, families of senior individuals are reluctant to put their relatives in care as they spend time weighing up the pros and cons of their current lifestyle, but by having additional points of interest, it could increase occupancy rates.