Your brand messaging defines your home care company. It gives consumers a gut feeling about what your company believes in and stands for. It is the specific values and benefits that your company promises that causes consumers and job seekers align with your company instead of the competition. It’s critical to do the hard work of developing your brand messaging, but once you’ve done so, do you know how and where to effectively communicate your brand message?

Where to Share Brand Messaging

Establishing a brand and solid brand messaging makes it easier for your business to communicate authentically with potential clients, referral sources and job seekers. So where you share that messaging is vitally important.

1. Your website: Your agency’s website is the most obvious place to showcase your brand messaging. Because it is your business’s home online, it’s essential to highlight for potential clients, referral sources and job seekers what you care about and stand for. Your brand should shine through immediately on your site’s home page, as well as be woven throughout your site. But when it comes to sharing your values, your site provides other specific opportunities, including:
   • A values or about us page: Tell your agency’s unique story on your website. How did the agency begin? Was its founding out of a personal or community need? What does your company stand for? What is your mission? What makes you unique from your competitors? We recommend that our clients always share images and backgrounds of leadership and staff so that visitors to the website get a good understanding of who they are considering working with.
   • Your blog: Your agency’s blog offers a great opportunity to share your brand promise. Blog content should be informational and helpful to those seeking care, but additionally, give readers a glimpse into how your agency uniquely helps to solve the problems or meet the needs that the particular blog post is discussing. For instance, if a blog post is explaining the signs that a loved one may need home care, it should also include how your agency goes about working with families to initiate care. Or, if a blog post is explaining a particular condition or disease, it should include information about the training that your agency’s caregivers receive to help clients deal with that issue.
2. Social media: Sharing about your agency on social media is something that should be done regularly to ensure connection with your community and establish your agency as an expert in the area of home care. We suggest that agencies share any new blog posts on their social media accounts, as well as other resources that may be helpful to people looking for home care. Using social media to share agency celebrations and wins, such as awards, birthdays and work anniversaries, can humanize your agency and make followers want to work with you. Sharing positive client and caregiver testimonies (with permission, of course) can also help reinforce your brand promise with those on social media.

Also, don’t neglect the About and Additional Information sections of your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google My Business profiles. These areas allow you to give social media users and potential clients a taste of your brand to entice them to learn more.

3. Email: Email is yet another place to share your brand with clients. Use email to develop nurture campaigns with potential clients and job seekers in order to keep your agency and its unique brand promise top of mind. Regular e-newsletters allow you to educate not just about your services, but about who you are as a company. Include events you’ve sponsored or participated in, local charities or organizations you support, and other aspects that give people a better understanding of your values and how your agency doesn’t just talk the talk, but actually walks the walk.
4. Job ads: Now more than ever, employees are angling to work for companies that align with their values. Including brand messaging in your job ads can help you attract caregivers who match well with your mission – which is a win-win for both you and the job seeker.
5. Pay per click advertising: If you are advertising with Google, your ad content, both the visual and written word, should reflect your brand identity, as well as a strong call to action.
6. Print materials: The non-digital side of your marketing should likewise maintain consistent design and brand messaging. Flyers, whitepapers, brochures, etc. should all reflect the same brand messaging as your website, social media accounts and more.

Consistency Is Key

All of your marketing should be on brand. Your website, blog posts, social media, and print marketing materials should all convey a consistent message, in both content and design elements. We often see that agency’s will make the mistake of updating their website (and even their logo), but not carry through the updated visuals to their social media accounts and print materials.

Going off-message or having inconsistent graphics can generate confusion and breed distrust among potential clients. Home care is an industry that requires a high degree of trust building. Jeopardizing the trust of potential clients with an inconsistent brand identity can be a costly mistake.

Of course, where things are shared makes a difference in tone. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter each have a different audience and style for posting. Still the content and overall tone of your brand should come through no matter where that message is found. Consistency in your messaging helps to grow trust for your brand which increases overall sales.

The Proof Is in the Reviews

How can you tell if your brand messaging is working? The proof will almost always be in your online reviews. Monitor them regularly to ensure that they reflect and defend your message. If your agency has promoted itself as a provider of quality care that offers families peace of mind, your reviews should reflect this in the way of clients professing how much more at ease they feel since they found your services for their loved ones.

If, however, you’re seeing reviews about how caregivers are unreliable, care shifts are often canceled, or seniors do not feel comfortable with their caregivers, you’ve got some serious work to do in terms of getting your services aligned with your brand messaging.

Defining and Conveying Your Brand

Brand and how it is shared within your marketing campaigns is extremely important to the health and growth of your agency. At corecubed, our home care marketing experts have decades of experience helping agencies create unique brand platforms, develop mission and vision statements, and ensuring the consistency of these messages across all platforms. We can also help agencies with established logos and taglines modernize and improve their existing image and language to ensure your brand stays both relevant and consistent. Contact us today to learn how we can help bring your brand to life throughout all of your marketing efforts.