How Social Media Works in Home Care [CASE STUDY]
Posted by Brian Geyser on Fri, Jul 02, 2010 @ 09:19 AM
Back in September 2009, I interviewed Noelle Kurth, Corporate Communications Director (and social media marketing machine) for At Home Personal Care based out of Salt Lake City, Utah. The article, "Home Care Company Uses Twitter to Build Brand Awareness and More," is one of our most popular posts. At that time, Noelle was helping the company design and build a new website and social media hub to replace their traditional brochure-style website.
Recently I decided to check in with Noelle to see how the new site was serving her and the company. Here's what she had to say:
Thanks for checking in! Wow, our new site has definitely served us well over the last 4-5 months!
When creating the new site, I knew we had to utilize a “contact form” in order to capture data for our leads. This has been the biggest difference. Users can fill out our specific form to include fields like who is in need of care, care level, location, email, phone, etc. Then I can distribute the leads based on location and our care managers can follow up on them. Most recently, our Utah office turned a web lead into a $5,000 a month client!
I have been working diligently at driving traffic to our site and keeping our content “fresh” with new articles, videos, etc. We have seen definite improvements in our Utah and Texas market as far as SEO. I use Google Analytics to track progress. In 4 ½ months, we have had 16,015 page views with an average of 4:23 seconds time on site. 76.63% are new visitors and we have a nice mix of traffic coming from direct, search engines, and referring sites. I use link building tactics, social media, and our email campaigns to help promote the site. I have also redesigned most of our promotional items and print material to include our web address. Some of our material did not have it included previously.
I also implemented some online web “contests." We partnered with a National Gift Basket Company and hold different contests depending on the holiday or time of year. During our Mothers Day Contest, we saw a 700% spike in traffic during the course of the contest, which was about a month. Each market promotes the contest with press releases, social media, and general networking. The Gift Company also promotes the contest on their site and social media outlets, so it’s a win-win. We do other fun things like “Caregiver of the month” etc. and promote with social media.
Not only have our patients and families commented on how well designed the site is, but also our referring partners and community alliances. I have even had competitors comment on our site. Its all very exciting and we are happy with the results thus far.
- Noelle
Now for a look at the new site compared to the old one...
OLD SITE
NEW SITE
The new AHPC website incorporates a search engine, contact forms, social bookmarking and sharing capability, a blog, and ample opportunity to engage visitors on various social outposts like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Hats off to Noelle and the AHPC team for designing a great site that serves as both a resource destination and a social media hub for visitors and a lead generator and relationship builder for the company. As you can see from Noelle's note, positive results do not come easy. She spends a ton of time nurturing the hub and it's various outposts, creating content, building partnerships, monitoring for comments and inquiries, and designing engaging campaigns that - like gravity - pull people into the site's orbit. So, if you think you're simply going to launch a Facebook page and have a volunteer or intern manage it for one hour per week and suddenly get results, think again. Noelle is a skilled social media practitioner with all of the qualities necessary to help her company succeed in this socially networked world.
If you don't have a social media rock star like Noelle Kurth at your senior living, home care, or LTC company, but you want to leverage social media for your business, contact us, we may be able to help. And yes, that is a call to action;-)
Kudos to Colby Wright of CW Design for his work on AHPC site.
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