Managing your Home Care Referral Source marketing activities
Posted by
Tom Voiles on Tue, Jan 17, 2012 @ 09:45 AM
Designated Marketer
Having a designated marketer for your agency has been suggested by many of our successful customers as being an essential component in developing and managing a healthy marketing program and growing business. Established Home Care agencies may already have one or more marketer in place, while in a smaller agency, the marketing activities may be just another hat the owner wears.
A good marketer should be knowledgeable about your business, home care services generally and be a pleasant and energetic person that can put a great face on your agency. That is so important for growing your business and maintaining your good reputation in the community. A marketer is really an extension of you, serving as your ambassador to the community when you are unable to be there. This will enable the human interaction component to thrive and keep your agency in the forefront of the minds of the people who can really feed your agency with new business.
Giving them the right tools and training (and utilizing the tools yourself) can keep things organized and fluid. A marketer should be able to access any necessary information as well as adding new
information to your agency's records in order to keep the process efficient and organized.
This also ensures that you can get in there and see what's going on. You certainly don't want to micromanage, but it's important to have visibility on the processes.
Some agency owners prefer to keep roles segregated so that marketers aren't wandering into client & caregiver information. Others prefer an "open book" approach, even after they get larger. To some extent this is a matter of personal preference, style and corporate culture. In any case, it's good to know what options the homecare ssheduling software you are using give you, so you have the freedom to change course as things develop.
Get the Right Tools
A good homecare agency management system will provide tools for managing your referrals and marketing activities. Here are some basic things to keep in mind when choosing software for this job:
- Can it record and track all marketing activities?
- Does it have any customizable options?
- Can it associate Client(s) with a Referral Source?
- Can it track people within an organization (e.g. individual staff persons in a hospital)?
- How is the data backed up and secured?
I hope this has given you some helpful perspectives if you are considering improvements in marketing your home care services. If you have comments or thoughts about any of this, I'd love to hear from you!
The Rosemark Scheduling System has an area designed specifically to manage the referrer relationships. View our demo video that shows you how Rosemark can help your designated marketer manage relationships to generate business.
