Home Care U - What Marketing Should You Handle In-House And What Should You Outsource? (corecubed pt. 1)

Episode Date: September 17, 2023

"Marketing" is a broad term in home care that includes everything from community networking to web design to Google Ads. Every agency owner faces the decision of what to do themselves, what to hire an employee to do, and what to outsource completely to a contractor. The marketing experts from corecubed are here to talk about how to make 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 CareSwitch. Enjoy the session. Welcome to Home Care U. I'm really excited for today's class. Before we introduce the topic and get into that and the guests, let me just go through a few housekeeping items. So as you might

know, this is both a live Zoom class and a podcast. If you are wanting to listen afterward or you're finding us through the podcast, know that you can join future live classes at HomeCareU. That's usenuniversity.careswitch.com. Or you can find the recordings as a podcast wherever you get your podcasts. It's just called HomeCareU. Had some great guests and topics so far and have a lot more really good ones lined up. We'll go ahead and get into today's episode. So I'm excited to bring on both the vice president and the CEO and president of Core Cubed, which is a leading

marketing agency for home care agencies and other senior care businesses. So we have Amy Selle and Marissa Snook. If you both just want to take a minute here and introduce yourselves, what your role is at Core Cubed and kind of how you came to be there, what your background is in home care. Let's go ahead and do that. Sure. So my name is Amy Selle and I'm the vice president of Core Cubed. We are a full

service marketing firm for the care industry and we specialize in providing marketing support for home care agencies. And prior to coming to Core Cubed, I worked for a Chicago organization that had both residential senior living and in-home care as their director of marketing. And we were actually a CoreCubed client and loved their services. And when an opportunity opened up to join the CoreC Cubed team, I was super excited because it meant I got to do more with more home care agencies across the nation. Awesome. Thanks, Amy. I'm Marissa Snook, President and CEO at Core Cubed. I've been here for 20 years now and working in home care pretty much that entire time. Prior to that, I worked at a PR firm in Seattle. I'm now

in the Chicago area, have been for many years. And yeah, welcome, everybody. Well, thank you and excited to have you on. So today's topic, I think, is a really important one. We'll talk about various aspects of a solid marketing and sales strategy for home care agency, what good looks like in each of those aspects, but also how to decide what you should do yourself versus what you should outsource to a partner like an agency. So we brought on the experts for that. And we did choose them very deliberately. The Cora Cube team is a group that I've looked up to for a long time. I've interacted with them for years. They know their stuff. They're great to work with and they say it like it is. And so I think this will be a really great

episode. So the topics we'll go through kind of high level here. We'll talk about brand building. We'll talk about your website, how to get found on Google, both SEO and Google ads, social media, lead generation websites, referral networking, internal and community events, other community facing marketing, and then sales training. We probably won't spend a ton of time on all of those. And some will kind of go more in depth than other ones because, you know, we can't give all the details on everything in one 60 minute episode. We'll talk about what good looks like for each of those, which parts of them are conducive to being done in-house by the agency's employees, which parts are probably more conducive to being done by outside

help who specializes in that function, and what criteria like the owner's background or the size of the agency would be helpful in deciding that. Since we do kind of have agencies of all sizes, both listening and joining us live, we'll kind of speak to all sizes of agencies. So you may need to adapt some of what's said here to the circumstances of you and your agency. But I think this will be super valuable for everyone. One last thing to add before we get into it is that a big part of talking about this is thinking how much should you spend in each of these areas? We won't be addressing that too much today.

Next week, we're bringing CoreCube back to talk about the same topics, but from the lens of how should you allocate your marketing and sales dollars for each of these things. And so we'll hit that as the part two for today's episode. So without further ado, let's get into it. Let's talk about brand building. What does good look like there? How can agencies decide of the things that go into that? What should they do? And what might be better outsourced? Whether you are a new agency or an established agency, it's okay to revisit your brand identity. And so usually when I mentioned that people think logo and logo is part of it. For new agencies, there are some crowdsourcing ways to create a logo. One of the services that we recommend is called Design Crowd. So if you

are a brand new agency and you've never done a logo, what's nice about that service is that you can ask several different graphic designers to weigh in, create a logo. They ask you to input some good information about your brand. And then you only pay for the one that you choose. For more established agencies, sometimes what we find is that their logos are maybe dated looking. And that would be something that you could bring to CoreCubed to have us modernize, et cetera. So it sounds like for kind of starting off as an agency for a basic logo or branding, it can make more sense just to hire someone online to do it.

But if you kind of already have an established brand and you want to preserve the good things about it, but refresh it a little bit, sometimes that's where it can make more sense to bring on a full partner like Core Cubed. Is that accurate? Yeah, I would say that's accurate. I think it's important to use a graphic designer. I second that. Yeah, Yeah. And, you know, I think people can dabble in graphic design,

but a graphic designer will be able to provide you with the files that you need to put in the right places. So sometimes people don't realize that, you know, they need several different types of design files, a different file for online use, a different file for when you're creating promotional materials or promotional goods. You know, if you want to put your logo on a coffee cup or a uniform, et cetera. That's where it helps to work with a professional graphic designer because they can provide those kinds of file options to you. And I think it's important just to ask people to look at your logo and to get some feedback on what they think of it. Whether you're creating a new one or you have an existing logo, to get that kind of feedback and go to a graphic designer with that feedback. Yeah. And I think it's important to note, and Amy, you alluded to this

earlier, that your brand work isn't just your logo though. And a lot of people don't realize that. Amy, do you want to get into what the whole package of branding really is? So your logo is part of your branding. But I think the bigger part of it is your brand story. And some people are just naturally good at either, you know, telling their brand story or putting it onto paper. Other people are not good at that. So if you're not someone who feels confident with putting that onto paper or in writing, you may want to reach out to a company to help you do that. And with a service that is as personal as home care, and by personal, I mean, you're inviting someone into your loved one's home to provide very, you know, to get to know them well and provide them with services that they need. It's super important to be able to articulate how your company brings care to the home and

what your purpose is in your clients' lives. And all home care services for the most part provide the same services, but why you got into that service is important and being able to articulate that well. If you're not good at articulating that, then you might want help. If you are good at articulating that, then that's something that you want to get onto paper. So that kind of starts to answer the question that I have in my head here. But like, I think it's easy to look at a home care agency and be like, well, it's pretty self-explanatory what we do. Why do I need a brand story? What is a brand story in context of a home care agency and why is it helpful? Yeah. So a brand story is typically why you got into, why you were interested in starting a business that provides home care. So many times we see commonalities in why people get into home care, because they want to do something that makes a difference.

They want to provide service to others. But kind of digging deeper into what does aging look like in our country? And how do you want to make that better is an even bigger brand question. And answering that question allows you to build richer language about your company. In the end, what you get is something that's completely unique to your agency, even though you may offer the same services as the agency down the street, your story and exactly what message that you're trying to put out into the world with your company should be shouted loud from the rooftops and helps make you stand above everybody else. Love it. I think there are too many agencies where the entire brand message is simply we give great care, which yes, should be a component of it. But when

everyone is saying that and is capable of saying it, you definitely need something above and beyond that. Are there any more aspects of brand building we should talk about before we move on to talking about websites? So in a perfect scenario, brand building should be the first thing that you do. And the language building part of it ideally would come before the logo building part of it or the logo refinement part of it, because from that language building comes ideas about how to translate that language into imagery, if that makes sense. Yeah. And a brand can evolve over time. We've had agencies that have come to us, very established agencies, and they're like, you know, we want to change how we talk about our business. We really want to focus on, you know, the caregivers as being the cornerstone

of who we are and what we do. And then we rework their brand from that perspective. Love that. The very first time I hired a graphic designer years and years ago for a totally different organization, I hadn't really thought about this stuff before. And so I was really surprised when I first started talking with the designer because I guess I was expecting a conversation

where they're like, what do you think looks cool? And like, what should it look like? And that kind of thing. And the first questions they wanted to ask were all about the identity and the message and stuff like that. And it kind of took me a minute to be like, oh, this is why that's important because those are the first questions. And that understanding that the identity and the message and everything will lead you to answering some of those other questions about how should it look and what colors do you use and that kind of thing was really interesting to me. So I love how you've described it. Let's talk about websites. So for a home care agency, what does good generally look like for a website?

And, you know, what should you do yourself? What should you outsource? And how do you decide? Well, I would argue it is the most important marketing piece of your business, especially in today's day and age. So I would not skimp on it. Now, if you're a brand new agency, and you have, you know, obviously very limited funds, you can still build a high quality website, you know, use a template service that helps you with the design perspective so that things are nicely spaced and things like that. There's plenty of options out there for that. And then when you are able to upgrade that site to something even more professional, it's what you want to avoid is, you know, having the neighbor down the street who kind of knows

how to develop a website, sort of throw something together with paragraphs and paragraphs of text and, you know, images that have watermarks on them that you've stolen across the internet. That's going to reflect on what sort of service you provide. You have like something like two seconds when somebody looks at a website for them to make a snap judgment as to whether or not they want to dig deeper into what your agency does. So you've got to wow them right from the very beginning. So when you talk about wowing them from the very beginning. So when you talk about wowing them from the beginning, that kind of makes me think that that's an argument for outsourcing it earlier rather than later. Am I understanding that right? Yeah. I mean, with it being your most important marketing tool, I would hope that you put an appropriate amount of funds towards that

website so that you can have a professional do that. Having said that, I would much rather have an agency use a tool like, you know, some of those, what I call plug and play website options. Wix.com or Squarespace or something like that. Exactly. Where at least, you know, you're getting the foundation of a decent design and you're just putting in the text and the images. But of course, I would always argue for, you know, do as much as you could possibly afford because that is going to be a real cornerstone of your marketing from that website. So a couple follow-ups here. Is there a point where as a stage of growth in the agency or something that they really should have a professionally built

website by this time or any kind of guidelines like that? This is really loose, but I always say as soon as you could possibly afford an upgrade. Because one thing about those plug and play websites is that they're not as lean and mean for SEO as a WordPress website that doesn't have a lot of that, what I call junkie code on the back end. So once you can upgrade to a WordPress website that has, you know, really fast speed, fantastic mobile responsiveness, things like that, you're going to be found easier in search results than, I mean, that's not to say that you can't rank well on a Wix website. It's just a lot easier to do on a WordPress website or one that is, you know, built more professionally, shall we say. That makes sense. And I think it's really

good that you mentioned mobile responsiveness because, I mean, I don't know the data on this. You might, but you know, what percentage of people are searching for home care on their phones versus computers? It's probably a majority. It is. Yes. And I don't have the exact percentage, but it is the vast majority. And I mean, so much so that Google is now ranking your website from your mobile view before they rank it from a desktop view. So it's I mean, it's important in the eyes of Google as well. Makes sense. For someone who might be trying to build their first website themselves, you know, on Wix or Squarespace or something. What are some of the pitfalls or mistakes they should watch out for? I think you mentioned like having long paragraphs of text. What would some of the

other things be? Using imagery that every other agency uses. Ideally, you could hire a professional photographer and have your own images with caregivers wearing logos on their shirts. That's your logo. We've even had clients who themselves are great photographers and they've taken their own pictures. Just make sure, I always say, to have plenty of space around it, nothing really tightly cropped. Because again, the mobile responsiveness. So don't use stock photos if you can avoid it. If you can avoid it, or at least use ones that you don't see on, you know, the

neighbor's website down the street, check out your competitors. I think that's an important part of building a website is, you know, what are the competitors doing that, that looks good. It's okay to, you know, take ideas from other people. Yeah. And I, I would throw in there, one of the tips that we give to our clients is to choose imagery that is reflective of how people feel when they use your service versus choosing imagery that is so literal. shows how the family member and the senior feel relieved and happy because now that they have home care services, their time together is improved because the, you know, the daughter maybe isn't running around doing a million things. Instead, she's enjoying that time with her mom. So think about, you know, not being so literal in your imagery, but making your imagery project, you know, what it feels like when you've got home care services

in place. Love that. We have a question here from somebody in the chat that I think is good. So Rose is asking, I thought WordPress was starting to be obsolete due to all of the code required. Is that not the case? It is the most popular platform in the world. Yeah. And actually they are, they tend to, WordPress sites tend to have less code if you're building a new one. I think one part of the answer also is just there is like this like rise of no code platforms like Webflow and things like that that are great. But I think part of what you mentioned is that WordPress is so much more robust than a lot of the options that the more important your website is, the more traffic you're getting, the more things that you need it to do. There's just so much that WordPress does a better job of than a lot of those other platforms that

a lot of times you eventually graduate to it. Is that kind of safe to say? Yes. Yeah. And I think WordPress is also easy to edit for people who don't know code. So if you like to add content to your own website, WordPress is a nice way to go because it's pretty easy to edit on your own. Great. Anything else about websites before we continue on? Just don't kitchen sink it. Remember that most of the people who are contacting you are already a little overwhelmed. And so their experience using your site should be simplified. Don't overwhelm them with information. Awesome. Yeah. And think about your text from the user's perspective. I see a lot of agencies that say, we do, we do, we're the best.

Think of it more of what problems are you solving for the person reading this on the other end and write your content from that perspective. Love it. So to recap on websites and tell me if I have anything wrong here. I mean, basically the answer is you should outsource to a professional as soon as you can.

But if you have to, you can build it yourself on something like Wix or Squarespace. Just if you do, be mindful of not having too much text. Think about who you're trying to write it for and appeal to them. Try to avoid using stock photos and think in terms of mobile responsiveness and use the tools in the website builder to check up on that. Is that a decent recap? I think that's a good recap. I think new home care startups need to consider their budgets. And if they have to build a website on their own, that that's something that's okay to do, but just know that you probably want to upgrade that in the future. Sounds good. So let's talk about search engines

and we'll talk specifically in terms of Google, because that's the biggest, most important one, but this can also apply to Bing and other ones. So real quick, because like I've said, we kind of get listeners of all levels of knowledge on here. We'll refer to SEO a lot. What that stands for is search engine optimization, which is basically like how to make sure that you are being found first on search engines. So let's talk about both like being found through paid search and ads and also just being found organically on search engines. What does good look like as far as your efforts there? And same question as before, what does it make sense to do yourself?

What might it make sense to get someone to help with? What factors do you use to make that decision? Well, let's talk about SEO first because paid search or PPC, which you'll sometimes hear it called, is kind of its own little beast. But SEO is the longer haul. It's how you can be seen without paying for advertising. Just to set apart PPC, it's a faster turnaround as far as results. But once you stop paying Google for those ads, everything goes away. SEO kind of drifts along with you. But there's a lot more involved with SEO because the end result is that Google is trying to judge your website for how high of a quality is it?

Should I send people to this website? Are they going to find the answers to what they're looking for? And how they determine what a quality website is just a litany of different things. And that could be whether you've got a lot of broken links on your website. Whether your site is mobile responsive, whether it's fast, whether you have a lot of other high quality websites linking back to your website. What sort of keywords are you using in your website? And does that match up well with the content on the pages of your website? So I could go on and on and on about all of these

different things. And the problem with choosing an SEO vendor, because it's so technical, I would never say do this on your own. This is something you have to outsource. You really have to look at an apples to apples comparison of what these agencies are providing when you do a search for, you know, what agency am I going to choose to help me with this? Just because there are so many different things. And some agencies will say, oh, we provide SEO services and all they do is put blogs on your website versus another agency will, you know, try and touch as many of those different things that Google looks at for quality as possible. So it really is an important task when choosing an SEO vendor to look at apples to apples comparisons. Yeah, I think, you know, you can learn how to do a lot of things with research, but the cons are that that can be very time consuming.

Learning, there's a huge learning curve, you may also experience a lack of results because with learning, you know, there's trial and error. And I think if you want to go faster and not experience that learning curve, or if you don't have time to experience that learning curve, you definitely want to hire an agency because like Marissa said, there are so many quality indicators that search engines are measuring to decide what agency to show and in what order when someone searches for care services that you want to make sure that you're, you know, you really understand that well. I have a handful of follow-up questions here because this consistently ranks as one of the top, especially consumer facing sources of marketing.

And I think this is a really important one for agencies to get right. So first, just kind of laying this out for listeners, like there's both the, the like location based results that show up, Google listings with like ratings and hours and stuff. If you search something like home care near me, and then once you scroll past those results, then there's just the actual kind of more traditional search results where websites will show up. And I mean, those are basically linked, you know, slash like related, but separate forms of SEO, right? Like there's like the SEO for your local Google listing, and there is also the SEO for your website. Am I correct on that? And does what you've said kind of apply to both of those?

Yeah, it's all tied together because it's all things that Google takes into account when judging your website. So if you are choosing a search marketing vendor, make sure that they touch all of those things would be my recommendation. One thing that you can do that positively will affect your SEO is try and get more Google reviews. Something else you mentioned that I have been wanting to ask someone with your expertise about, because I genuinely am like not sure on this, even, you know, with my background in marketing is I hear like not as much as I used to, but I still hear lots of talk about how home care agencies should have blogs for the sake of their SEO and getting web traffic and stuff. My question there is that, I mean, isn't trying to compete like for keywords

by like writing lots of blogs and stuff, isn't that going to have you competing less on a location-based basis and more just kind of competing with everybody on the internet? And of the people who find you through those blogs, how much of that is going to be people in your area versus just like somebody on the internet searching for something about home care? Well, certainly there'll be some people looking for, you know, just answers to a question, but keep in mind, Google is delivering results based on where they see you're located. So, you know, the chances of me in the Chicago market typing a

random, what we call long tail keyword question, let's say, how do I communicate better with my parent with dementia? They're going to serve me results that are closer to my market than say, California. I do still think writing blogs is important because you're adding, anytime you add fresh content to your website, you're giving Google a new excuse to re-crawl your website, re-rank your website. And every one of those blogs should have information about where you service and link to other pages on your website. Think of it as a portal for them to view more information about your services. Not just, I'm here to answer a question, but we're answering your question and here's how we can help you with that. And here's where we

service. Take a look at some of our services. Take a look at why we're better than the guy down the street. Yeah. I think it really comes down to how the blog is optimized with your location information. And, well, what I want to say is we work with clients in a variety of ways. So we may create blogs for them. And obviously, if that's the case, we're, you know, making sure all the right optimization is there so that it is localized and found locally. But we can also, if a client wants to write a blog, we can, they can then turn it over to us and we can do those optimizations if they don't know how to do that the correct way. Or we can train them how to do it. So there's a variety of ways to get the blog optimized in the right way so that it's doing the right things for the company. Gotcha. So what I'm kind of hearing in all of the discussion

on your SEO is that of the various things that you need to do to build a website and get found through your website, the SEO side is not only often more difficult than things like the design decisions, but harder to do yourself and often more urgent too. So these are all reasons to potentially have somebody else be at least helping on your website sooner than later. Yeah. I can't tell you how many, how many new agencies, they get their website up and then they come to me and they go, well, I don't understand why no one's calling.

Why, why am I not being seen in search results? You do have to do those SEO things in order to start climbing the search. It's not just I put a website up and magically everyone will come. Yeah, it's an ongoing process. I think that's the biggest misunderstanding, right? It's not like hanging a sign outside your office and you're done. It is an ongoing dynamic issue where it's also a competition. So people are doing things to their websites to make sure they get seen first. And you have to be aware of that competition that's going on and participate if you want to be seen. Let's switch to the ad side of things.

So if I want to run Google ads, how difficult would those be to do myself for an agency versus, you know, should I just outsource those? I mean, I would argue again to outsource it just because of how technical it is. Some clients, you know, they come from a technical background and they think they understand how to do PPC and they try it on their own and they get a lot of non-qualified results or they spend a ton of money and all they're getting are applicants looking for work. So it really does, I call it, you know, throwing your money down a black hole. So it really does matter to use somebody who really understands pay-per-click and all of the different things you can do to get the most out of them, you know, get the best bang out of your buck, but also understands the industry. Because I've heard a lot of clients who have chosen to work with, you know, big agencies that don't understand the home care industry, and they fall into a lot of pitfalls and drive a lot of non-qualified traffic to somebody's website because they don't understand the industry.

Absolutely second that. I'm just going to kind of throw my own opinion in here. And I'm not the expert on this. That's why I have you two on here. But my opinion is that if there are two things that you should pay a professional to do for you as soon as possible in your home care agency, it is your website and your google ads i just think that there are two things that are really really important um they're easy to think that you can do them by yourself and even easier to get wrong and they're things that are almost never like in the core competency of a home care agency owner so hey yeah i I think it's like I said before that you absolutely can do it yourself. But what you have to factor in is the learning curve. And

that learning curve can cost you a lot of money and a lack of results in the beginning until you have done your own trial and error that we've already done. So, you know, it's balancing, you know, do I want to go through that and learn it? Or do I want to pay somebody who already understands the industry and understands how Google Ads works. I completely agree. I like that. I want to move ahead here because we have a lot more to get through. And we spent a lot of time on these really good topics, but there's so much more. I'd say really fast, let's talk about lead generation websites and social media I think those are both things that it makes sense there's a lot that you can do yourself lead generation websites by nature are already kind of pre-outsourced but like so are there any like major aspects of either lead

generation websites such as caring.com or place for mom or social media that agencies should strongly consider hiring someone to do for them professionally at some point? I think with lead generation websites, you really have to be very responsive. Depending on the type of service it is, they're sharing those inquiries with your agency and potentially other agencies. So you need to be very responsive. And for social media, it's really a mixed bag. So I think regular content that is helpful to people who are helping elderly loved ones, you know, live and be independent and stay in their own homes. Usually the long form of that content is the hardest for a home care agency owner to produce. You know it, but getting it into words and then getting it up on the website and getting it optimized the right way is the hard thing.

So typically, leaning on a marketing partner for that and generating that into social media is something that you want to do. The more like community networking type of social media posts are more easily done by the agency. So if you're visiting with a referral partner, and they're agreeable to taking a picture to show that these two companies partner together to help, you know, people in the community. That's something that an owner or a marketer for the agency can do. That doesn't necessarily need to be outsourced. We have some clients that they wanna send us those pictures and have us post them,

but that's something that you can do very organically on your own as you're out and about making those connections. That makes sense. That's a good breakdown. you know, that you can do very organically on your own as you're out and about, you know, making those connections. That makes sense. That's a good breakdown. Is there anything you would add to that, Marissa? I think social media used to be thought of as quantity versus over quality. Nowadays, it's much more about getting the conversations going. And that means quality to these social media posts. So if you want your social media posts to be seen more often by more people, then you have to get conversations going

on those. You have to get people liking and sharing them. So that may determine what type of content you are posting on those social media platforms. That makes sense. I like that you kind of break it down by the type of content is possibly the main thing that determines whether or not you need to get outsourced professional help on social media. Let's go to referral networking. And I think maybe kind of tied in with this is events, both internal and community. This is obviously a huge topic. We could do lots of episodes on just this, but high level here in a few minutes, what does good look like for a referral networking program for an agency? And what parts of it should you do yourself? Are there parts of it that you should outsource? What are they? When should you do that? Yeah, I was just gonna say with referral networking, I mean, really, that's your

feet on the street. So if you are in the growth stage where you can't afford a sales rep yet, then it really has to be done by the owner of the business. And it is, you know, connecting with other people in the community that might refer business to your agency. The part of it that you can do, so the part of it that I think is important is to have a really solid reason to connect with that person, a good story around how you can help their customers. A marketing agency might be able to help you develop that story, but you have to be able to deliver that in person with networking. You know, the icing on the cake is that while you're together, you could say, you know, hey, could we take a picture and then you could translate some of why you're meeting into a social media post. A marketing company can also help with crafting like what could you go back to them with?

Because if the only thing that you're ever coming back with is a cup of coffee and the same brochure over and over again, they might not be interested in that. They already heard that from you. If you can't come to them with another reason why they should be referring to you, then you might want help with kind of crafting out what is that plan for meeting with different referral sources and what can I bring them? How do I talk about my company in of why you can continue going back to referral sources. I mean, that could be a specialty program that you offer, that could be special training you have, that could be a guarantee that you have. Are there things that I'm kind of missing here of other types? Yeah, it could be, you know, a story about a client, you know, and kind of like a testimonial

about how they're, how quickly you were able to serve them and what that, you know, what outcomes that led to for their general wellness. Educational resources. I don't want to forget to mention those because that is something, I mean, you'd be, probably wouldn't be surprised, some of you, that a lot of people in the medical field don't know the difference between home care and home health care and hospice and what they do and don't do and what does Medicaid pay for, what does Medicare pay for. There's so many questions surrounding home care and caring for older adults that if you can bring them materials that are branded for your agency that help answer some

of those questions, it's a softer sales approach. If they feel good handing that material out because it makes them look good as the referral partner. They're answering their clients' questions, but then your contact information is on the bottom of that material or inside that material. So it's going to be a natural next step for that customer to contact you to provide services to them. And it sounds like that type of content, depending on the skillset of the people in the agency, might be a prime opportunity to have a professional do it with your help or guidance or whatever. Is that safe to say? Yes. Yes, it would be because you've got that graphic designer involved. Let's talk about the role of sales training and marketing training in referral networking. And also, I mean,

I think this would kind of be useful in the intake process too. This is something that I, of all the different parts of the marketing, like referral marketing process, this is probably the aspect that I hear about agencies most often relying on outside help because you often need someone to train you and coach you and show you what to do. Tell me about the role of hiring outsourced help for sales coaching and training. Well, they always say you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink, right? So the sales training is teaching your reps how to get people to that next step. And that can come in a variety of different ways. One of the tools that

we use for training is internal mystery shopping, where we have people call your agency and see how your reps do on the phone call and the follow-ups. And that has been a great tool. We also have recorded phone conversations between clients and hopeful clients and the care agencies and listen to those and give them tips on how they might have done better with that conversation. Yeah. Those are wonderful ways to train people. It kind of goes back to one of the things we mentioned earlier that when, when people call a home care agency to, you know, arrange for care for a loved one or to inquire about that, there, it's usually because, you know, something's going on that is emotional to them.

And, and so that I think that you can't discount that home care intake, when you get a new caller is really an art. And it's a little bit of social work because you really have to be very present and really kind of guide them through what is going on and then not tell them everything you do, but tell them what you do that can help them specifically with what they're experiencing. And, you know, it, it might sound easy, it is not easy. And it can be tiring, because you're, you're listening to a lot of stories in one day. And, you know, there's, there are tips to how to manage that, how to guide people through that, and how to really be present for that caller. It's a relational type of selling. So you want to support them and not just say,

here's the services we offer and here are the costs. There are kind of two things you mentioned in there that I think are really important. So first, the fact that it can seem simple or easy, but is often not. I think this kind of falls in that bucket of things we talked about before that are easy to think that you can do a great job of yourself, but there's a huge potential benefit to making sure you're doing it the right way. And you don't always know what you don't know. So for instance, with the intake process, I think it could seem fairly straightforward. And I think there's a decent percentage of agency owners who come from a sales background who feel confident in doing it themselves. But at the same time, like let's say that you can learn a few things and improve your methodology to the point

where you're bringing in like 25%, like you convert at like a 25% higher rate even. That translates to revenue really, really quickly. And so there's kind of an easy case to be made there for making sure you're doing it right, for bringing in someone who knows how to do it. You said something else there that was key, but I've forgotten what it was. So Marissa, was there anything you were going to add to that? I think you made a good point of not seeing the forest through the trees. Sometimes you think you're doing a great job, but it isn't until you get someone from the outside to weigh in that you realize there are different ways that I can improve this. And if you've spent so much money and time on your website,

on your SEO, on your PPC, you want to make sure that that final step, you've done everything you can to make it easier for people to sign up for your services. Love it. We're kind of almost already at the end of our time here. So a few final questions before we start to wrap up. First, if someone is listening to this and they're inspired and they're like, yeah, I need to get some help on some of these aspects of my marketing. How can they vet potential marketing partners? I think we've all experienced that there's some really good agencies out there to help. And there are also ones that really don't do good work. Like how can they vet them? How can they make sure they're choosing a good partner? I think it's important to realize that sometimes the old adage of you get what you pay for is true.

And you really do have to think about how do I want this to reflect on my agency? Or do I want to take the cheap route because I think I'm going to get okay results, but I may have to go back around and redo it? Or should I just spring for the you know, the pricier service that I can already see as a higher quality? I think those are questions that you have to kick around in your mind when choosing an agency. And certainly make sure that you're, you know, apples to apples comparison when you're looking at what one agency does versus another. I would encourage home care companies to ask for references. We get asked for references from current clients all the time. I would read the

reviews about their service. And I would suggest starting with one service so that you can vet the relationship. And what you're vetting for is how responsive are they? How, you know, how much time do they dedicate to answering your questions or educating you on what they're doing? So that, you know, you have confidence in the service that they're providing and their ability to provide that, their expertise in providing that to you. Marissa, what were you going to say? If you are going with an agency that doesn't understand the care industry, just realize that you're going to spend a lot of time educating them. So of course, I would always say go with an agency that understands care marketing.

That's what I was going to say is that, in my opinion, the most important answer to this question is find an agency who specializes in the care industry, because there are tons of agencies out there who specialize in like small businesses or something maybe and like that's good. But there are so many nuances to the industry specifically that they need to understand and you're much more likely to get a good solid partner who knows their stuff and is specialized and are well trained and like they can give you the knowledge you need if they specialize in your industry um so i would definitely second that um for someone who's listening to this and is like, hey, that's great, but I think I just want to go with Core Cubed. How can they get a hold of you?

They can go to our website. It's corecubed.com. We're on all the social media as well, and we have those linked on our website. You can email us at info at corecubed.com or our phone number is 800-370-6580. Awesome. Thank you. And I should clarify there, for those listening, they do specialize in care marketing specifically. If someone is like not wanting to shop around and it's just like, they sound like they know what they're talking about, you know, GovCore Cube. So yes, definitely. In the last like two minutes here, we do have like one or two questions that came in kind of last minute that if we can maybe just try and answer these as best as possible in like one or two sentences. Tips on hiring a good sales rep. In one to two sentences?

We're really testing your knowledge here. Yeah. Well, I guess my advice would be to hire someone who has experience in the industry and who understands that you'll be, you know, measuring their success based on real data and expecting them to, you know, be able to produce that, those results. The last question that we had here, and I think I can probably answer this, but feel free to chime in if you have anything to add. So someone was asking if there is data to support what we are saying about like not using stock photos on your website. And I think my answer to that is there probably is data. It's pretty hard to get because it's measuring something that

is like psychological and kind of an overall effect that there's not like one easy way to track that. However, it is very much the best practice within the website and marketing and design community to avoid using stock photos where possible, or to be very selective about the ones that you choose. So I'm not sure about the data there, but it's definitely not something that CoreCubed made up right here. Yeah. Yeah. I would, I would agree with that. And I would also add that if you're looking for guidelines to give a photographer for creating photography for a home care website, that's, you know, that's something we have provided clients with before as well. Good to know. Okay. Well, that about wraps it up for today. So just as a

couple of reminders here, we will be bringing the CoreCube team back on next week to talk about a lot of the same topics, but from a lens of how should you allocate your marketing dollars to each of these areas? How much should you be spending on different things and how do you go about making that decision? So that should be a really great class. Please join us again for it. As a reminder, this is both a live class and a podcast. You can sign up for the live class free at homecareu.careswitch.com or you can always listen to it afterward, wherever you get your podcasts as Home Care U that's used in university. So thank you to Amy and Marissa.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge and wisdom and experience with us. And please join us again next week when we break these down even more. Have a great rest of your day, everyone. 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.