Your phone calls hold the key to increasing care home occupancy: Here’s how to uncover crucial insights

Care home occupancy can fluctuate at a moment’s notice, often based on factors outside of marketers’ control.

For example, occupancy in CQC-registered care homes fell by 3% between February 2020 and July 2022, and they’re only just recovering. This unpredictability makes a consistent pipeline of enquiries crucial.

But maintaining that pipeline – and encouraging enquiries in that pipeline to move in – can be difficult without the right information on your prospective residents and those seeking care for their relatives. Many care home marketers don’t know the platforms these enquiries use, the content they’re engaging with, or who will make the final move-in decision.

That’s where the phone channel becomes essential. The telephone plays an important role in every step of the move-in process – from the initial engagement to the final agreement – with dozens of calls for every enquiry.

This is good news for marketers, because these calls all contain incredibly valuable information about your enquiries that can help you generate more engagement, encourage more move-ins, and deliver more attentive service.

Below, we’ll reveal exactly what data you can capture, how to capture it from your phone calls, and how to use it to inform your marketing strategy.

Phone calls hold all the answers for care home marketers

Unlike in many other sectors, the telephone is often the first port of call for care home enquiries. When you’re offering a sensitive, life-altering service, potential residents and their family members often want the human touch that comes with a phone call.

“In many commodity-based sectors – such as retail – transactions are often simpler and don’t require a lot of back-and-forth between a brand and the lead. For instance, you don’t need to ask many questions when purchasing a book,” explains Faye Thomassen, Head of Marketing at Mediahawk. “But in the care home market, enquiries require much more engagement – they have dozens more questions, and want to feel confident in the service they’re choosing.”

These calls might include initial questions about your services, follow-up conversations about the move-in process, or even conversations about the resident’s care after they’ve moved in. And crucially, a single resident might have multiple family members calling about their care, giving you even more touchpoints to learn about your enquiries.

All of these conversations can provide valuable information about what your enquiries need, as well as what tactics are working in your overall campaign to engage them.

By capturing the right data – such as their journey through your website, the ads they interacted with, and the page that encouraged their call – you can see what’s helping enquiries convert to move-ins and what you might be able to do in the future to optimise your strategy.

And with the right tools, capturing this data from your calls can be easy.

How to get the most from your phone calls with call tracking

Insights like these will become especially important in future. As user awareness around data privacy and personal data collection increases, the harder it becomes to capture insights to improve your campaign targeting. While you can still gather general insights on platforms like Google Analytics 4 (GA4), the more granular – and most valuable – data won’t be as easy to capture.

Using the right call tracking and marketing attribution platform, you can fill these data gaps and understand what campaigns and channels drive your phone calls.

Our own platform, Mediahawk, assigns and tracks a different number for each campaign to tell you the PPC ads your enquiries clicked on, the keywords that encouraged them, and much more.

Tracked numbers can be used across digital sources such as directories, Google Business Profiles, and social media posts, as well as offline sources like door-drop leaflets and print advertising. They’re especially valuable when placed alongside QR codes with UTM tags in printed flyers, as no matter how your enquiry engaged, you’ll be able to tell the campaign they came from.

When enquiries call using tracked numbers, you can capture valuable data such as call durations, your caller’s approximate location, and your move-ins.

“Caller location is especially important in the care home market, as relevant calls can come from areas outside a care home’s location,” adds Natalie Sawford Smith, Client Success Manager at Mediahawk. “For example, a family member might be calling from London while looking for a care home for their parent in Sheffield. Without call tracking, this would be easy to dismiss as an irrelevant call.”

Also, on platforms like GA4, you’ll often have to wait a period of time to review data like this and judge the performance of your campaigns – but on Mediahawk, you can see the results immediately.

That’s especially useful when you need to make changes to a campaign that’s not working. You’ll immediately have access to insights that can show what tactics work well, and how you can pivot campaigns to generate more engagement.

Unlocking new insights with call tracking

Dormy Care Communities, a leading care provider in the UK, uses dynamic call tracking to identify where its visitors come from, what they interact with, and even what keywords they type into search engines.

“Mediahawk has helped us improve the overall attention to detail we pay to the calls and enquiries coming into our care homes. We’re always trying to express that we’re a premium brand, where quality counts in everything we do. The tools in Mediahawk help us know as much as possible about our potential customers, so we can provide the best possible service at all times.”
– Director of Sales and Marketing, Dormy Care Communities

Turn your data into actionable insights

Getting the information from your phone calls is just half the challenge – you also need to know how to apply it.

Mediahawk’s reporting features make it easy to view, understand, and manage your data. They can help you map an enquiry’s entire journey and generate the insights you need to inform future campaigns.

Some of the most helpful reports in Mediahawk include:

• The ‘source flow’ report – This report shows all the marketing sources that contributed to a move-in, and the channel the enquiry converted on. In the same report, with Sales Matching enabled, you can also see sources that contributed to the revenue, and the optimum visitor journey for move-ins.
• The ‘visitors’ report – Here you’ll see the entire visitor journey for everyone who visits your website. It offers granular insights you can’t get from GA4, including how the enquiry found you, what content they interacted with on your website and, when paired with Sales Matching, which marketing sources contributed to move-ins.
• The ‘paid campaigns’ report – This report allows you to compare PPC campaigns across Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising (Bing), and Facebook Ads on one screen. From here, you can easily compare data like calls, visits, ad spend, and return across all three platforms to see which perform best.

Victoria Markianos, Google PPC Specialist at Springup PR – an agency specialising in care home marketing – says: “[Mediahawk] has been nothing short of transformative for us. Being able to pinpoint which keywords are driving conversions not only helps us optimise our ad spend but also informs our broader marketing strategy for our clients. We now have a comprehensive understanding of our Google Ads call performance, allowing us to make data-driven decisions with confidence. It’s not just about saving time and resources; it’s about unlocking the full potential of our advertising efforts.”

With multiple ways to dig into your data, it becomes much easier to spot patterns across your campaigns that tell you how well your efforts are working.

“Another feature that’s particularly useful in Mediahawk is Parameter Connect – it allows you to pivot data in any way you want,” adds Faye. “It’s a great way to compare PPC performance on big ad platforms like Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, and Facebook Ads with other paid channels, such as LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and TikTok.”

Summary

Having the right foundation of marketing data can help you build an accurate understanding of what tactics generate enquiries and encourage move-ins – and what’s wasting your budget.

Book your free demo of Mediahawk, where we’ll show you how to unlock new insights around your enquiries and take your first step toward increasing occupancy.