Free marketing tools for your home care business

Marketing is an essential part of growing your home care agency, but how do you know which marketing tools will give you the best return on your investment?

Luckily, there are plenty of free options to try, and even a free tool can make a significant impact if you have a clear marketing strategy to follow. 

Following on from our popular 7 Ways to Improve Your Home Care Marketing in 2022 blog, in partnership with Smooth Digital, we’re going to take a closer look at some of the best free marketing tools to help you level up your agency.

Google Analytics

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Google Analytics is a powerful tool that tracks and analyses your website performance and traffic.

Insights include:

• Where online visitors came from: did they click through from a social media post, find you in a Google search, follow a link from another website, or something else? 

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• What they did on your site: for example, did they have a look around, book a call, fill in a form or click off straight away? This data can help you tweak your website to get visitors to take the action you want them to.

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• Audience demographics: who is visiting your website? Are they local? What age and sex are they? Understanding these key insights can help you tailor your content to appeal specifically to your audience. For example, clients looking for care themselves may want to see different information than adult children looking on their parents’ behalf.

Social Media Schedulers

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Staying consistent on social media is challenging, particularly if you’re on multiple channels. The key is to organise and publish content in advance with a scheduling tool. Some of the most popular schedulers on the market are Buffer, Later and Tweetdeck (automatically linked to your Twitter account). 

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Design Tools

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Business owners with no design background can create their own designs and graphics using a simple, free design tool called Canva. It takes some practice to get going, but you can make professional-looking designs suitable for digital and print. Once you get the hang of it, you might even decide to upgrade to the paid version to unlock more features and options.

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Hotjar

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Hotjar is a free online tool that analyses website performance and user behaviours. This clever software generates a heatmap that visually represents where users click on your site. You can also track other on-site activity, create user surveys to gather feedback from visitors, and then use the data to improve your site performance.

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Email Service Providers

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Email marketing is considered an integral part of a good marketing plan. You can nurture new leads, make sales and stay in touch with existing customers, all through one marketing channel. We’d strongly suggest using a business service provider, as they’ll help you build and manage your email list and comply with email privacy laws. 

Many of the most popular email service providers offer a free plan until you reach a set number of subscribers. You’ve probably heard of Mailchimp, but Mailerlite and Zoho are worth considering, too.

Website Content Management System

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WordPress is a market leader in offering free content management systems (CMS). You can select a website template (called a theme) and use the simple drag-and-drop system to populate it with your content, using brand colours and design to make it your own. There are hundreds of free themes to choose from (although you can choose a paid one if you prefer). 

However, we’d recommend opting for a paid web hosting provider, as this is an area you really don’t want to risk getting wrong. Read more about web hosting here.

SEO Tools

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SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of trying to improve your website’s position in search engine results. For example, if your agency is based in Manchester, you want it to feature in the results when someone types ‘home care in Manchester’ into a search engine. The more effective your SEO, the higher you’ll appear in the list. 

Yoast is a popular tool, as it integrates with your WordPress website to automatically vet your content and make suggestions to improve its SEO impact. Google’s own high performing SEO tool, Google Search Console, is also worth a mention, and it offers multiple different features alongside SEO.

Advanced SEO has lots of moving parts and can be pretty complex. However, some great, free SEO tools can make an impact, even for people with no prior knowledge or expertise. 

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Summary

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Using the right digital technology will transform the way you run your home care agency. Software tools can streamline several parts of your business: marketing, compliance, billing, staff management, care planning, call monitoring and more.

A recent survey revealed that technology tools like Birdie save social care providers up to 7 hours a week, equivalent to 30 hours a month. The time you save is time you can use to grow your business. 

To see Birdie in action, book a free demo.