Home Health & Hospice Week

Networking, direct sales top the list of most effective marketing practices.

Are you spending your valuable marketing resources in the right places? If not, you could be throwing your marketing budget down the drain.
 
Smart home care organizations will heed a survey of 177 home care marketing executives when deciding where to spend their marketing dollars, says Jason Tweed with Leading Home Care ...a Tweed Jeffries company.
 
Leading Home Care asked the executives to evaluate the frequency and effectiveness of various marketing techniques, and these 10 came out on top:

 1. Networking and community relations
 2. Direct sales to referral sources (hospital discharge planners, physicians, etc.)
 3. Public relations
 4. Continuing education for nurses and other professionals
 5. Broadcast television
 6. Public speaking
 7. Health fairs and other special events
 8. Newspaper advertising
 9. Involvement in service organizations
 10. Print newsletters

"Seasoned home care executives believe that the most effective and most frequently used techniques are ones that build the long-term brand awareness of their companies," Leading Home Care observes.
 
And right at the top of the list is networking. But this concept can be a confusing one for agencies building their marketing programs.
 
Stephen Tweed offered this definition of networking in a Leading Home Care 2004 marketing teleseminar: "An organized method of making links from the people you know to the people they know and gaining and using an ever expanding base of contacts."
 
The key to making networking work for you is making it an organized process, Tweed added.
 
One way to network is to volunteer with community organizations. Jason Tweed, who is physically disabled and lives in a wheelchair, is often asked to volunteer. "If I simply said 'yes' to every group that asks, I would be a professional volunteer," he noted in the seminar.
 
Try this: Here's the question Jason Tweed uses to decide where to spend time: "With this group, would I be a Teacher or a Learner, or neither?"
 
Teaching something to a group leads to a valuable networking experience, he explained. And "if I find I'm learning from this group, it's often valuable, sometimes from a networking standpoint and sometimes simply from a personal or professional growth point of view."
 
But if he can't teach the group or learn from its membership, "I've never found the group to be a valuable use of networking time," he says.
 
"Fish where the big fish live," Stephen Tweed counsels. "Just being out there and meeting people is good, but being out there in the right places at the right time and meeting the right people is what networking is all about." 
 
Editor's Note: Information on the Leading Home Care teleseminar, "Building your Brand Awareness with Public Relations, Public Speaking, and Networking," is at www.leadinghomecare.com/teleseminars/marketing20041007.html.