Home Care U - A Detailed Look At Building Your Marketing Budget (corecubed pt. 2)

Episode Date: September 25, 2023

How much should you pay a marketer? How much should you put into community advertising? How about online leads? Google ads? With all these decisions, it can be tough to decide where to put your marketing dollars. In part 2 of our series with the marketing experts from corecubed, we'll discuss how to go about making these decisions. Enjoying the show? Send me a text and let me know!Learn more about Careswitch at: careswitch.comConnect with the host on LinkedIn: Miriam Allred This episode was produced by parkerkane.co

Hey, welcome to Home Care U, a podcast made by the team at Care Switch. Nobody went to school to learn how to run a home care agency, so we're bringing the education to you. Join our live audience by going to careswitch.com slash homecareu or listen on your own time wherever you get your podcasts. Home Care U is hosted by myself, Miriam Allred, and Connor Koons of Care Switch. Enjoy the session. Welcome to Home Care U is hosted by myself, Miriam Allred, and Connor Koons of CareSwitch. Enjoy the session. Welcome to Home Care U.

As always, I'm really excited for today's class and episode. I'll go through a few housekeeping things. We'll talk about what to expect out of today's class. We'll talk about our guests, recap a little bit from last week, and then we'll get started. So today's topic is how to set your marketing budget. This is a big topic. There's a lot to go through here, and there are lots of ways to look at this. And I do kind of want to preface by saying that there are some guidelines for specific percentages and numbers and things like that. That being said, it's largely based on the circumstances of your agency. And so a lot of our

focus today will be on how to go about thinking about these things, what principles you can use to guide you in making the decisions so that you can figure out what's best for the individual circumstances of your agency in your market. So a few reminders. This is both a live Zoom class every Wednesday and a podcast. If you would like to join live and ask your questions and be part of the conversation, you can sign up free at careswitch.com slash homecareu. Like I said, that's every Wednesday, or you can listen afterward on your own time while you're working or driving or whatever as homecareu wherever you get your podcasts. All that being said, I want to introduce our guests who are back for week two.

So we have the Core Cube team, specifically the president and CEO, Marissa Snook, and the VP, Amy Selle. They are both experts, both in care-based marketing and also just in the home care sphere in general. So if you want to each take a few seconds and introduce yourselves, how you got to be here today, what's your role as a Cork Cubed and anything else that may be interesting about you for our listeners to hear. Sure. My name is Amy Selle and I am the vice president of COREcubed. We are a marketing firm that serves care providers. And I actually, before working for COREcubed, worked for a Chicago area organization that had residential senior living and a home care division.

Came to COREcubed after that role and have been here for about 10 years. And I'm Marissa Snook, the president and CEO at Corkute. I have been doing care marketing for over 20 years, but have been in the marketing industry in general for much longer than that. We'll just say that or I'm going to end up saying how old I am. And came originally started marketing out in Seattle, Washington. So that Washington person that joined, I see you. It's beautiful out there. Okay. Well, thanks again for being here today, sharing your wisdom, your experience with us. If you haven't checked out the last episode, I would

highly encourage you to do so. We talked about from a marketing and sales perspective, how to decide what to do yourself, what to have an employee on your team do and what to outsource entirely. I think every home care agency is faced with these decisions of what can you as the owner spare time for and what it's best to hire a pro to do. And so we went through all the different types of sales and marketing that home care agencies engage in and talked about what typically makes sense to do in-house and how to outsource and things like that. So very important episode, really useful. Definitely go listen to that. So for today's, let's talk about how much to spend on your sales and marketing. So I think the first thing to do

here is kind of lay out some of the baseline data that is available before we get into more of the criteria that we can use to make the decisions of how much to spend in different parts of your sales and marketing. So some of the best resources we have for this come from Home Care Pulse. And it's known as the HCP Benchmarking Report now. It used to be the Home Care Benchmarking Study. Many of you might be familiar with this. For those who aren't, you can check it out and learn more at homecarepulse.com slash benchmarking.

I actually used to work for them and work on this report specifically. And so I have a lot of confidence and an appreciation for the data here. So there's a section in the report that goes through basically the profit and loss for a typical agency and split out by different sizes. And so I'm going to read off some of the percentages of the overall revenue that agencies at different sizes are spending on their sales and marketing expenses. And that will just kind of give us a good baseline of like, here's the ballpark of what agencies at different stages of growth are spending on their sales and marketing. And then with the help of Amy and Marissa, we will go into how you can make the decisions in each different section of your sales and

marketing and how to kind of decide on that overall number of like, what's the percentage of your revenue that you're going to dedicate to putting back into sales and marketing to grow your business. So in the report here, they have it split up by annual revenue ranges. So for agencies making less than $800,000 a year, they are typically spending 10.3% of their revenue on sales and marketing. For agencies that are making $800,000 to $1.6 million in annual revenue each year, they're spending 7.1% of their annual revenue on sales and marketing expenses. For agencies that are $1.6 million to $3 million in annual revenue, they're spending 4.2% of their annual revenue on sales and marketing expenses. Agencies, and just so you know what to expect, there's only a couple more categories.

The whole episode isn't going to be this. For agencies that are making $2.8 million to $5 million in revenue, they're spending 3.2% of their revenue on sales and marketing. And then the last category here, agencies making more than 5 million in annual revenue, they're spending just 2.3% of their annual revenue on sales and marketing. So something that's good to point out here is that the larger the agency gets, the more likely they are to be able to spend a smaller percentage of their overall revenue

on sales and marketing. So it's important to recognize the kind of upfront needs and costs here of like what you have to sacrifice to get through the initial growth stages. So I'll kind of pause there and see if you two have any responses to all that. Amy and Marissa. I think that data is so important because we have a lot of new agencies that come to us and they say, I don't have much to spend on sales and marketing. And it's evident from this data that as a new agency, you do have to spend a lot on sales and marketing. And a big part of that reason is because nobody knows who you are and you need to get that. We call it brand recognition, which is an industry marketing term. But basically, it just means you've got to get your name out there. People need to get to know you. And that marketing budget is going to help with that.

I, again, would highlight that, right, the percentage is higher for lower revenue agencies because they don't have that brand recognition, like Marissa said. And I do think it's really helpful just to have a ballpark total number of dollars that you should be spending on sales and marketing. And then how you decide to parse that out to different marketing efforts is going to depend on your agency and your market. That makes sense. Let's kind of talk about that a little bit. So in terms of settling on that overall target percentage of your sales that you are repurposing back into sales and marketing, how should agencies go about deciding how much to budget to that?

I know it's a big question. Yeah, that's a really, really big question. Well, I mean, I think in that study, you know, it will also show you what other agencies are doing in terms of marketing and sales efforts and what percentage of that overall number they are spending. So again, I think that is a good guide. I think, though, that on the level of your agency in your market and what your company is good at and who's doing what in your company is very unique for each agency. So, you know, if you take something like sales and marketing or, you know, referral networking, sales outreach, it might be that you're doing that as an owner at this point in your growth. And so you're not paying a marketer to do that for you. And then you have more budget to allocate towards other things. So it's really weighing, you know, what am I able to do? And then it's also weighing like,

what is getting the most traction for me at this younger stage of my business? That makes sense. So obviously a big part of that decision is what are you skilled at yourself as the owner? What should you delegate to someone? That's probably like most relevant in terms of hiring a marketer or not hiring a marketer specifically, I would say. What else? And not just in terms of smaller agencies, but kind of across the board? I mean, what are the key factors that agencies should use to decide how much is worth it to allocate to sales and marketing? Well, more than how much, I think it's more about, okay, you've got this pot of dollars, what are the most important things that you should be spending that on? Or what should

you think about using those dollars towards first? And I would argue that it would be your brand and your website and your digital marketing. That would be your SEO and PPC, search engine optimization, getting found online. And PPC is pay-per-click. That's the Google ads because those are going to be foundational and are going to be important at any stage of growth. I would add referral networking to that group. Just because we are a marketing agency doesn't mean that all we promote that you do is website and SEO and social media, Google Ads, et cetera. You should never leave referral networking behind. Home care is a very relatable business.

It is relationship building. And you can't do that entirely online. So that is going to be a very important. But again, it's about with that big bucket of dollars, how are you going to make decisions about spending it on these different categories. And that will vary based on what stage you are in your business, what you're doing internally, again, what you need to outsource. So I think it is very individual per agency, but there are general guidelines out there. So there's several things you both mentioned that I want to talk about more. So you both mentioned kind of general guidelines for these things. And then second of all, I think specifically how it evolves at the stage of growth. Can you both tell me more about

how the decision making for where to put your marketing dollars typically unfolds as agencies grow? Are there different stages where different types of marketing are usually more valuable or things like that? Kind of going back to what Amy was saying about referral marketing, sometimes when you're brand new, you may as the owner be doing that on your own. And then as you grow, be able to hire those sales marketers to go out and do that work for you. Same with your website. You may start with a simple website. I've had agencies that have started with one-page websites, but they were being more focused on quality rather than, I need to have a blog and videos and et cetera, et cetera. If you have a one-page website, as long as it's

high quality and it gives people the basic information as your phone number and contact information, you can start with something as simple as that. And then as you grow, spend more money on a bigger website, something with more bells and whistles. Yeah. We've even had, we've had an agency start out with just a landing page, you know, just a simple one page website, with a contact form and a phone number and, and invest in a Google Ads campaign to that landing page. You know, it's about building the business so that you have more to spend on marketing, making decisions about what's working.

You know, they were able to get clients through that and through going out and doing referral networking, build their business, you know, then happy clients give word of mouth and you get more business and you're able to do more things. I think the guide that Home Care Pulse provides is under that big bucket of marketing dollars, then they do list specific categories, which generally match up to what we talked about last week, you know, kind of what are the categories of marketing that you should be working on? Should we get into some of those specific ones? Is that a good time? Or should we kind of stay talking about the overall guidelines for the

larger marketing budget percentage? No, I think we can get into the individual efforts. Okay. Sounds good. So first, let me real fast, just kind of read off the line items as they're listed in the HCP benchmark report. And then I won't do it for like all five revenue ranges, but just kind of so people have a ballpark here. And then we'll talk about how we kind of group them last week, and then we'll go through those. So for those who are listening for this part of it, how the sales and marketing expenses are split out in the data as tracked by Home Care Pulse and the benchmark report. So I'll just kind of give these for like the average sized agency, which is about 1.6 million. So of that 4.2% that those agencies are spending on sales and marketing, there are, let's see, it looks like eight different like sections that split into.

So they have traditional advertising, which is like radio, print, et cetera. That's 0.2% of revenue. They have traditional advertising, which is like radio, print, et cetera. That's 0.2% of revenue. They have online advertising, Google ads, paid ads on Facebook, et cetera. That's 0.4%. Networking and events. So this would include community stuff, gifts, conventions, et cetera. That's 0.1%.

Search engine optimization is 0.1 percent uh search engine optimization um is 0.4 percent sales rep salaries is 2.1 percent sales rep bonuses and perks is 0.3 percent lead generation websites so this is like caring.com or a place for mom, um, are 0.2%. And then all the rest of marketing expenses that might not fit into one of those are at 0.4%. So that's kind of our baseline here. And that's one potential way to think of, of the different types of expenses in here. Now, in terms of how we talked about these last week, and like how to think about these to decide, you know, what's worth it and what's not and how much effort to put into different parts of your marketing, how we had talked to on how we had talked about these last week, brand building, their website, Google, and this includes both local SEO and Google ads, social media, lead generation websites, referral networking,

both internal and community events, other community facing or consumer facing marketing within your community, and then sales training. So I think like, as we go through these, let's kind of think about this from a lens of how relevant are each of these to agencies at different stages of growth or other circumstances? What might an agency think about to decide if each of these are relevant to them and how much they want to put into it you know how what kind of results they might look for how they might track that and just kind of what role it might play in their overall success so let's start specifically with brand building which last time we'd kind of defined as not just logo but everything to do with your brand story, how it looks, how it presents to people, you know, how does the importance of that change as you grow? And what should agencies use to decide

how much money and resources to put into that? Sure. So I mean, I think for agencies that are just starting out, brand building can be more of a self-guided exercise where you are asking yourself, you know, why did I decide to get into this business? How do I feel about the way aging care is provided now? How could it change to be better? Generally, within American society, how are people who are aging viewed? How can I make that better? You know, really answering those questions and being able to tell people why you do what you do is super important because it helps you to align with them. And that alignment is what kind of turns the light on for them that they might want to do business with you or refer business to you. I think we talked

about last week, for some people, you know, that comes naturally for others, it does not. So in those initial stages, I think it can be very simple, as long as it resonates with the audience. As time goes on, I think it's important to measure whether or not that is resonating with the audience or if you've added other things to your brand that are worth adding to that story. So for businesses that have been in business longer, they've done more, they've achieved more, they may have gotten a certain credential or level of customer satisfaction. And you want to make sure that's all working together. You also want to make sure that you're living up to what you say you do. Customer satisfaction is a good measure of that. That's actually what I was wanting to ask about. So you mentioned that one important factor in your efforts to build your brand is to track

or measure the impact and how it's resonating with people? How should agencies do that? I think using a customer satisfaction management firm is important because I think that uncovers places where you're failing. Your brand might say that we're extremely responsive. And then when people call you, you're really hard to get a hold of. That is hurting your brand. And so whatever you say about yourself, you want to make sure that that is happening and that you're living up to that, what you've said about your company. And I think customer satisfaction is going to bring about information on where you're not living up to what you say about yourself. Okay. I really like that. So what I'm hearing is that there's this particular need to not just track customer satisfaction for the sake of knowing how you can improve care, but also

for the sake of making sure that there's not like a difference between your brand and how you say it is and what you tell people to expect and what's actually happening. I really like that. And I think that's probably not done nearly as often as it should be. Anything you'd add to this, Marissa? Oh, I think that that was well said and pretty thorough. It is something that a lot of agencies overlook. They just, oh, we're doing a great job. I know we're doing a great job. Yeah. I think there's a general disconnect between, and that's one of the things to really understand about marketing is that all of these efforts are connected together. And so, I think when people think about writing for advertising, it's almost like they're writing a fairy tale. And it shouldn't be a fairy tale. It should be what you really believe.

But then it should also, the people that you do business with, your employees, your referral sources, your clients, everybody that you come in contact with should be able to say, yeah, what they say about themselves matches what they do, how they act, how they treat people, what I feel like when I interact with them. So in terms of your time and your spend, it sounds like, well, and how the amount of time and money that you should spend on your brand kind of changes the agency grows. It sounds like basically there's always like this upfront cost of like, okay, like you need to like put in the time and work and cash even to make the right brand, you know, at least to start, you know, so it's probably not going to be the last evolution of your website. It's probably not the last, like the final look of

your logo and colors and everything, but it's like, let's get something that will work and we can start to market with. And then at some point in the agency's growth, it often becomes necessary to revisit your brand, revisit your website, and make sure they're still sending the right messages and ask if there's a higher level of design quality or anything like that, that it's time to implement there. Do you find that there's a typical point maybe it's revenue maybe it's some other marker of growth that agencies hit that it's kind of like this is when it's time to revisit the brand and make sure it's still doing the work for us we want it to from our experience um we get very very different types of startup home care companies. We get some that come to us with

a nice budget to spend on initial marketing efforts. And then we also get people that are kind of really just starting from grassroots. And so it's hard to answer that because I think it's more about whether or not it's resonating and working and the messages are good and make sense and you can deliver on those messages. When the agencies are ready to revisit their brand or their website, it's usually because they've hit a certain level of revenue and they're ready to spend some more on marketing dollars, spend more marketing dollars on marketing efforts, I should say. It's interesting because we will get some agencies that come to us, they're a startup and they've got a budget for marketing and brand building, and they want to start with that.

We get other agencies that are highly successful, well-established agencies that just feel like it's time to kind of go back to that and see what's changed about the brand and bring more cohesiveness to it or bring it, kind of bring it in to a more bite-sized messaging. You know, maybe it's grown over time and they want everyone to be able to have repeatable messages about the company. Yeah. I think the important message there is don't be afraid to revisit your brand and have it grow with your agency. Love that. I think that's a good way to put that.

And that's probably a good segue to the next part of this. So we kind of talked about website in with brand. If there's anything else we want to touch on as far as how much time and resources to put into your website, we can do that. If not, let's move on to Google. As far as how much you're spending, and that's not just like your income, but also time and resources and energy and that kind of thing, on both being found on Google and advertising on Google. Talk me through how you would go about deciding how much to put into that and how that might evolve as the circumstances of an agency evolve.

A lot of people ask, should I start with PPC or should I start with SEO? And it's sort of the chicken or the egg question. I mean, you can come at it from either direction and be successful. But what I will say about PPC or Google ads are that it's typically a little bit faster to get results because you are bidding on keywords. You're basically paying Google to show your website higher up in the search results versus SEO is more of a popularity contest. And Google is judging how popular, how beneficial your website is for search queries that people are entering. And it's a longer process. It's maybe two to three months to really start seeing a PPC campaign work for you and bring quality leads. It's probably closer to four to six months to really solidly evaluate how an SEO campaign is working for you. That said, Google ads can be very

expensive. If you're in a very competitive market and there's a lot of people who are basically bidding on the same keywords, it's going to take more dollars to get results i think you should budget at least 500 a month at a minimum for what you spend on google ads and then you will want to pay somebody to manage those ads for you i i have companies that try to do it themselves or they worse, try and let Google run those ads. And I feel like it's throwing money down a dark hole when you do that, because there's just so many pitfalls that, and you can lose money so quickly. It's like gambling a little bit if you don't know what you're doing. And having someone with experience who knows things like negative keywords and ad extensions and how to see when your ads are showing the, getting the most results, it's really worth paying an agency to manage.

Yeah. I think what is fascinating about Google ads is what Google understands about what home care is, and what they don't understand about what home care is, which is kind of a reflection of our society. We don't like to think about aging. We don't want to think about our parents aging. You know, when they need help, it's usually we've waited too long. Now we're looking for care. We don't really know what we're looking for. And you can see that when you're optimizing Google ads by looking at what search terms Google is showing those ads for.

So you really want somebody who understands what Google shouldn't be showing those ads for. So you really want somebody who understands what Google shouldn't be showing those ads for and can really hone in on what the customer is looking for. So I want to come back to a couple things that Marissa said here really quick. So I like the guideline of at least $500 a month for Google ads. Is that kind of a safe guideline generally for the entire life cycle of an agency? Or is that kind of like upfront to get started? Like how might that change or does it change as you grow? It depends on how many territories that you're targeting. Obviously, if you want to hit a very large area with your ads,

then you're going to want to spend more money. Google does its best to sort of spread your monthly spend out throughout the month. A lot of times clients will say, I did a search and my ads aren't showing. Well, your ads won't show all of the time. Google is going to spread that out based on how little or big your budget is and what keywords that you're bidding on in your ads. So if you pay less money, your ads will be shown less often throughout the month. That makes sense. Like if I'm about to start an agency today, you know, and so I'm hearing this and I'm like, hey, I need to plan to spend, you know, $500 a month on Google ads. Is there a point when I should plan to up that spend or like a signal I might look for of like when it's time to up that spend? Or is that basically going to be a pretty good thing to do as long as I don't expand territories? A good marketing agency will be able to tell you that you can rely on them because

Google will give you signals. It will say things like, well, Google will always try to get you to spend more money, but there are things that you can do first to lengthen that spend. But there are things that you can do first to lengthen that spend. But there are certain indicators that a good marketing agency will be able to see, okay, it really is time to increase your budget. And then Google will spit out projections. If you spend X amount of dollars per month, this is what they project you will get as far as conversions, meaning clicks to call from your website or filling out your contact form. That's what a conversion is. And you can make an informed decision based on the data.

That makes sense. I love that. That's probably a good segue to the next section here. We talked about social media. And I think for the context of this conversation, like let's say we're talking more about paid social, probably going to be most relevant to Facebook, I assume. But I'm curious if there's anything you would add to that. Yeah, let's start with that. Like what are the main paid social platforms that would be relevant to a home care agency? Definitely Facebook.

Yes. And LinkedIn. Yeah. Facebook and LinkedIn are the two big ones. And for paid social, really LinkedIn is, I'm sorry, Facebook is really the leader. We have clients that for whom we run consumer facing ads on Facebook as well as recruitment. Yeah, LinkedIn is good for brand recognition and getting your name out to referral sources. That makes sense. Facebook is more geared towards the consumers and getting them to know who you are, what your personality is. And I think you hit the nail on the head, Connor, by saying that it's more paid. I think people immediately think social media, that they're going to get business from it by posting cute little pictures or little snippets of articles. And having a mix of posts on your social media is great because it's all about establishing

relationships on social media. But are you going to see that somebody calls you and says, I called you because I saw you on Facebook? Probably not. But is it possible that seeing your posts on Facebook was a part of their decision in giving your agency a call? Absolutely. Love that. And there's a question there I want to come back to that will recap some of this. But first, maybe a more specific thing here.

So I find it really interesting that you talk about how Facebook is really effective with marketing directly to the potential consumers and LinkedIn, like paid LinkedIn even, is more useful at reaching referral sources, which makes sense. What I kind of get from that though, is that that means they're basically two entirely separate decisions on how much to spend on them because you're marketing to different groups and you're marketing on platforms that have drastically different costs. LinkedIn is usually much more expensive to advertise than Facebook, from my understanding. How do you decide between those two?

Like, let's say that you've decided how much you want to spend on paid social. How do you decide how much to put into Facebook and how much into LinkedIn? It depends on your goals. If your main goal is to really get your personality out there to the consumers, I would spend more money on Facebook. I don't have a lot of agencies who are advertising on LinkedIn because as you said, it is more expensive, but I do have agencies that have a fair amount of success with it. So the biggest thing is to determine your goals and then measure for results. Do more of what works, less of what doesn't. I think that measuring for results is that mantra in marketing that a lot of agencies overlook.

They just sort of throw it out there. And if the phone rings, then they think it's working, but they haven't asked why that phone is ringing. How are people coming to your agency and giving your agency a call? I really like that. And that's probably a good response to most of these questions, which is to understand what result you're going for, how to measure that, and then measure it to see what's working and what's not. If I can put you on the spot one more time here a little bit as far as LinkedIn goes specifically, cause I think it's really interesting this idea of,

you know, using paid LinkedIn to market to referral sources and recognizing that that's not a new concept, but it's something a lot of agencies aren't doing. In terms of understanding what your goal would be and tracking that, do you mind walking me through an example of what a goal might be that you would use paid LinkedIn for as a home care agency and then what you would track to see if it's working? We have had agencies who create ads that are geared towards a specific product that they're pushing that they think the referral sources clients are going to utilize or be interested in. We have agencies that literally are just putting ads out there that says, you know, here we are, and this is why you should give us a call or you should give us a second look.

And even just follow us campaigns so that they connect with you and you can continue to reach them through your non-paid posts. So again, it's really dependent on your end goal and being aware of what each type of ad is going to bring you. Don't expect it's going to be a referral source calling you right away saying, I saw your ad on LinkedIn. I think that the goal for social marketing is not necessarily that you're going to capture that person whose mom is, when mom is being discharged from the hospital, you know, uh, three, six months from now that they think of you and they think of you as the go-to in their community. So it's that it's, it's not like, um, Google ads or organic search where, you know, when people are searching on the internet,

they are most of the time searching with an immediate need and you're wanting to capture those people. For social, it's really about building that recognition of your agency as a partner, as an expert, as the one that people look to for information. And that can be repetitive and constant. Any relationship requires work. This is something that I hope you two would touch on because I think it's maybe not fully understood by every agency. And it's a really important concept within marketing. So feel free to stop or correct me if I'm getting something wrong here, but let me explain my thought process and then like what the questions are from this. So like something to keep in mind

here is that there are certain types of marketing and advertising that can and should result in a direct conversion that becomes a paying client and it should be trackable. And you should have the ability to say, I put in X dollars and that produced X leads that translated to Y number of clients or whatever. And then there also are types of marketing and advertising that are just brand awareness that are like, you're probably not going to have a great way to track, does this map directly to this number of clients and this number of dollars in revenue, but it's a good thing to have. And so you kind of have two buckets of marketing, which is like your direct response, this should convert marketing and your brand building. This is kind of a long-term thing that helps all your efforts, but it's kind of a little bit hard to track the impact marketing. Is that a safe way

to explain and look at this? Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And I think that's what you're seeing with the HCP benchmarking report is that as a new agency, a newer agency, that brand recognition is not there and you need to spend more on that. But I do think agencies tend to lean toward, well, I'm not going to do Facebook because it doesn't result in a phone call that goes to business. But when you look at people who are doing marketing well, usually what people say as a consumer is, oh, I see them or hear about them everywhere in my community. And to get to that, that status means you have to kind of be everywhere, you have to be engaging in social media and conversations and engaging, you know, in other community marketing efforts so that they're, they're seeing you participate in the community and build those relationships. those signals that your brand has already reached people, because that's one of the big things that helps you determine if you should put more into direct response, like

high conversion marketing that should get clients immediately that you can track to it or into more brand awareness marketing. So if you're, if you're talking to people and you're hearing lots of people say that they've already heard of you, that's a good sign that your brand is working and you need to put more dollars into things that should directly convert to clients like, you know, say lead generation websites. But if you're talking to people and like just every referral source and every consumer you talk to hasn't heard of you before, that's a sign to maybe ease off some of the direct client acquisition marketing and put more into your brand. Am I accurate here? I think it's a balance. I think you always

have to be doing some of both. But I think what you're saying is correct. You might be able to ease off some of the brand recognition marketing and put a little bit more into the direct response. But I think there should always be a component of both. And I think that's what gets hard is that I think that once you start participating in brand recognition, building activities, you get asked to do more and more. And you have to make decisions about what is appropriate and what is not. You can't do it all. And I think that's one of the best things about social media that people maybe overlook is that it should be a conversation, not, you know, you telling people over and

over again, who you are and what you do, you should be building a relationship with partners in your community and with your community as a whole. As far as that challenge you mentioned of having more and more opportunities and invitations to do more brand building stuff, are there any guidelines or tips you would give as to how to decide which ones are worth it and which ones aren't? Yeah. I mean, I think if you can participate, the greater the exposure is, and the greater the impact is. So if it is supporting something that all of the community gets behind,

and you can be a sponsor of that, you know, I think you have to measure like, what is the impact on the market? How many people support this? How many people are going to be at this event? Who else is going to be there? Yeah, be very intentional in what you choose. And like Amy said, understand all of the basics of, you know, is my target audience even going to see this or be at this event? That makes sense. And I think that kind of highlights the importance of making sure you understand who really are your ideal target referral sources and target clients and things like that. So I'm glad you highlight that. So we somehow already only have 10 minutes left. There's still lots that we had talked about going through and haven't quite gotten to yet. To answer several people in our questions here, yes, this is recorded. You can access the replay within four or five days as HomeCareU,

wherever you get your podcast. That's HomeCareU as in university. And then it's also on our website soon at careswitch.com slash HomeCareU. So you can hear all the numbers again and go back through and hear some of these more detailed discussions again if you want um so in our in our uh remaining like nine minutes or so here um i guess i always have more questions but i want to make sure we touch on the things that are the most important in your opinions um are there any questions that i should have asked you to by this point that I haven't yet that we should go through? I think one thing we didn't talk about is local advertising. It's sometimes hard to measure results on some of those unless you have like a specific phone number on your print ads or your television ads or radio ads that you can track results from. But I would just caution you to be really intentional about why

you're doing that local advertising. And if your target audience is going to see those ads and measure, measure, measure for results as much as possible. Yeah. Something that is really near and dear to my heart is if you're going to do SEO or Google ads to use a call listening service, we typically recommend one to our clients because they let you, they give you the ability to track exactly where the call came from. So as you're looking at the call listening dashboard, you can see how many calls came in from Google ads, how many came in as a result of people searching organically. So that would be your, you know, how well your SEO is working. Did they come from your Facebook page? Did they come from your Google business profile? But the, so then you can see like, is this working? And if it's not working, let's talk to my provider.

Let's see what we can do differently to get it to work better. But the most awesome part of it is that you get to hear those calls and you've, you know, you've got your efforts worked, people have called, are those calls being handled well, because you've put on all this, all these resources into getting those people to call, and and guide someone through something that's a really sensitive topic. And it's just so important to hear how that is going. And to understand, you know, when it goes to business, you know, who does that? What's the example of a good call? Use that to train other people on how to handle a call well. You mentioned that you have a specific service

you recommend to clients. Do you mind sharing which one it is that you recommend? Yeah, we recommend CallRail. CallRail. Okay, cool. Thanks for that. And yeah, I would second the importance of having something like that to measure um the impact of all these different advertising channels that's really important i guess my question would be um because we talked about kind of the difference between brand awareness you know focused marketing and then marketing that you expect to get client inquiries from. When it comes to advertising in your community, how should you decide how much of those outcomes to expect from it? Should you be focusing more on one than the other one? And how can you decide that,

if that question makes sense? Yeah, it makes sense. I think I'm, I'm thinking about like, you know, are you talking about print advertising? Are you talking about going and speaking, you know, to a church group, a parish nurse group, that kind of thing. I, you know, I think that relationship building is very impactful. And I think it's for those kinds of community things. I mean, I think it could be very beneficial to go speak to a group at a church, if they will let you do that. Because it's very, you know, they care about their members, they care about the elders in the church. They know about people who are maybe shut-ins who might benefit from some extra help. They know about people who are, you know, caring for their parents. So things like that, I think are,

I mean, they're just, it's a wonderful community service to teach them more about caregiving and to make that connection. I don't know that the, you know, the ad in the church bulletin does as much as the impact of being there in person. I would agree with that. That makes sense. I would agree with that. That makes sense. And I would agree to our, so we're almost at the end of our time here. One question I want to make sure and ask while we still have people on is if someone is listening to this and they want to potentially hire core cubes to help with their marketing, how should they get a hold of you?

They can reach us at our website, corecubed.com. And all of our social handles and phone numbers and everything is on there. Our email address is info at corecubed.com. And there's several of us that get those. And we're pretty highly responsive to phone calls and email inquiries. And do you mind just briefly sharing, I guess, the bullet points of the different things that you can help agencies with? Sure. So we're a full service marketing agency, so we can do it all. We help with brand building. We build websites. We provide SEO services, Google advertising services.

We can help with press releases, brochures. We've done car wraps. Billboards. Yeah. Mystery shopping of your agency, if you want to see how they're doing, or really important one. Yeah, competitor agencies. I think call listening is kind of becoming a replacement for mystery shopping. Because if you've got that implemented, you can listen to your calls on your own. But then you might decide you want inquiry training. We do have some sales trainings that we offer. And a really popular one is teaching people how to go through that inquiry process

with a new caller. Okay. Awesome. Thanks for that. And I highly recommend CoreCube. They do a lot of great work. I've heard a lot of really good things about them. So definitely look them up if you are in need of help with any of those things. Are there any final thoughts you have you want to leave us with before we close out? I think it's worth reiterating to try different things for at least six months at a time and measure for results, do more of what works and less of what doesn't. Thank you. And well said. Okay. We'll go ahead and close up here. Just as a reminder for those joining or listening, this is both a live class and a podcast. You can register free and join us to ask your questions at careswitch.com slash homecareu. You can also listen to the episodes there or wherever you get your podcasts at homecareu,

U as in university. So thanks again for joining us, Amy and Marissa. Thanks to everyone who joined live and asked your questions. And we will see you all again later. Thanks again. Thank you. That's a wrap. This podcast was made by the team at CareSwitch,

the first AI-powered management software for home care agencies. If you want to automate away the menial of your day-to-day with AI so that you and your team can focus on giving great care, check us out at CareSwitch.com.