Care Home Marketing

We help care homes, both large and small, to drive their self-funding occupancy rates. Our support covers public relations, media coverage, reputation management, social media, SEO and multimedia production.

As a care home, your reputation and how you're perceived by your local community can give you an edge over your competitors. Positive awareness of your home and how residents and their families perceive you is crucial to your commercial success.

Your care home's profile both online and offline informs that perception. Our research shows that care homes that can demonstrate that they provide innovative, person centred care in a stimulating environment with creative activities and excellent cuisine are able to command higher self-funding occupancy and staff recruitment rates.

Services for care homes

We provide a full range of marketing services to care groups and their homes to give you the momentum you need to take your care homes forward. These include:

• Key messaging. We work with you to identify the unique values and points of information that you want to communicate to your core audiences. We will then take care to weave these through all subsequent press releases, statements, and marketing material that we produce.

• Activities and events calendar. We work with relevant team members at your home(s) to agree a programme of notable events that will showcase the ethos of your homes while also being noteworthy to relevant local media.

• Securing media coverage for your care home. We secure you coverage with the most relevant media. This will include coverage at a local, regional broadcast, and national level.

• Producing multimedia content. We help to market your home with high-impact photography and engaging videos that put your homes ethos and values on show.

• Building social media for care homes. We build your following on social media through crafting positive, engaging posts that help to portray your homes in a positive light. Key platforms include: Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok.

• Crisis Communications and Reputation Management. Every home can be susceptible to events that risk undermining the profile and reputation of a home. When these events do occur they can have considerable impact on your reputation and how your perceived. We are experts in stakeholder management. We will put the systems in place to help mitigate the impact on your reputation. In the event that a crisis does occur, we will manage your media and stakeholder engagement.

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). We make sure your website is optimised for key search terms, such as care homes in your local area, and that it ranks above your competitors on Google.

We understand care homes

We have worked with care homes of varying sizes and with different specialisms.

We're as comfortable working with a large care group with 100 homes to smaller individual homes.

We are passionate about the care homes. Our Managing Director, Will, writes a monthly column for leading care sector publication, Caring Times. We keep abreast of key changes taking place in the sector, including the CQC's new assessment framework and how this impacts on the day-to-day operations at a care home.

One stop for care home marketing

To give you a better understanding, our care home marketing experience can include:

Key messaging • Multimedia strategy • Photography • Video production • Media training • Press release writing • Press release distribution • Interview pitching • Journalist outreach • Crisis Communications • Reputation Management • Media tracking • Social media branding • LinkedIn Management • Facebook Management • Social media writing • SEO

We're passionate about care homes and the care sector

We've worked for some of the leading care homes and home care providers in the country. Below are two of our most recent case studies:

• Berkley Care Group - With 12 care homes located across the West Midlands and South of England, Berkley engaged Bridgehead to promote the group and its homes as providers of all-inclusive luxury care among the local and regional media. The primary objective was to drive occupancy rates, while also boosting recruitment and retention of staff by showcasing Berkley’s homes as positive work environments characterised by a strong team spirit. Read more.

• GoodOaks Homecare - GoodOaks Homecare engaged Bridgehead to work on the execution and promotion of their new campaign, ‘You Are Not Alone’. The campaign is targeted at the country’s unpaid carers, which some estimates put at more than 10 million. GoodOaks wanted to celebrate and support the quiet, unseen, unheralded commitment that these individuals make to those they love. It sought to address the lack of information, resources and assistance for those needing some extra help to remain independent, and for those caring for them. Read more.

Further reading about the importance of effective marketing to care homes

• Forbes - Marketing Matters Now More Than Ever

  • This Forbes piece urges companies to reclaim marketing as an essential tool for business success. Harvard Business Review notes leaders can innovate but struggle to commercialise, highlighting the need for strong marketing. Read more.

• Search Engine Journal - 15 Reasons Why Your Business Absolutely Needs SEO

  • The need for quality SEO is growing due to several key factors including increased web traffic and that it remains a cost-effective way to reach customers and build trust over time. Given that organic search is the primary source of website traffic, SEO creates new opportunities to ensure your brand remains discoverable. Read more.

• Forbes - 10 Marketing Trends That Will Dominate In 2024

  • The marketing landscape is evolving due to particularly to technological innovation through AI marketing automation whilst providing user-generated content, social commerce, data privacy, and sustainability are all crucial in the modern world. Adapting to these trends will help businesses stay competitive and succeed. Read more.