Marketing is all about connecting with people and explaining how your services can make life easier for them. Personalised care marketing means making those interactions more relevant and valuable for your audience. It helps you to:
- capture people’s attention
- increase engagement
- build loyalty
- stand apart from your competitors.
If you think about your inbox, it’s easy to see how this works. Unsolicited email from a company you’ve never heard of and have no interest in? Bin it. Email from a trusted brand running a promotion on products you use every day? You’ll probably take a look.
So, how does personalisation work in care? It starts with knowing your audience.
Connecting with the right people on the right channels
When we create brand books for our clients, we include a section on buyer personas. These are tailored for each company and describe who its ideal clients are. Once you know this, you have a rough idea of who you’re targeting with your marketing campaigns.
For example, while some people look for care for themselves, the majority of website traffic comes from adults in middle age looking for care for a parent. Knowing this means you can connect with these individuals through the right channels and use a relatable tone of voice.
Once you understand your clients’ pain points, you can begin to tailor how you respond to them in specific ways. You can connect with them by sounding reassuring, and offering clear, comprehensive information so they don’t have to work hard to understand if you’re the right fit. Looking for care can be a stressful time for prospects, they might be juggling responsibilities, pushed for time and feeling overwhelmed so make sure you sound as compassionate in marketing materials as you do in person.
Personalise your service pages
Care businesses of all sizes can benefit from tailoring content for different audiences. You can do this on your website with service pages focused on different conditions. People looking for dementia care won’t be interested in how you support individuals with learning disabilities. Rather than having one page listing your services, create separate pages and SEO-optimise them so people can easily find what they’re looking for.
If you offer supported living, you’re more likely to be communicating with local authorities or social workers than the person receiving care. Adapt the webcopy on your supported living service page to speak specifically to this audience.
Scaling up your personalisation strategy
For larger businesses with multiple locations and thousands of clients, you need a more advanced personalisation strategy. Think segmentation, automated email marketing, and trigger-based marketing.
Before you start, make sure you’ve captured consent to send marketing communications to your contacts.
Segmentation: use the data in your CRM system to create email lists to target different segments, i.e. based on their location, the type of care they’re interested in, or any specialist requirements they have. You can then create tailored messages for each segment.
Automated email marketing: it’s far more efficient to empower your marketing team with a digital email marketing platform than it is to have them send bulk messages manually. The right tool will allow you to create, schedule and send emails, and can provide insights into click-through and engagement rates so you can continuously optimise your campaigns.
Trigger-based marketing: send follow-up emails based on how your audience interacts with your website. For example, if you have a members’ area on your website, you can capture which pages each user views once they’ve logged in. This will tell you what they’re interested in. A more basic option is to send trigger-based emails when someone interacts with gated content on a particular subject.
Care is personal – so keep it human
Care is a deeply personal, intimate service. It’s an integral part of society and the backbone of local communities. Never lose sight of the fact that you’re engaging with real people at a time when they’re feeling emotional and vulnerable.
The more you personalise your content, the more deeply connected they’ll feel to your company. This helps to build trust and makes your business more memorable than companies that don’t prioritise sounding human. Nurturing ongoing, personalised relationships will also keep you front of mind if your contacts are looking for care again in the future.
If you want to know more about how to connect with your audience, get in touch to book a discovery call.
