When it comes to marketing a hospice or home health business, word of mouth among consumers may be more critical than many realize — generating as much as 36% of revenue.
Word of mouth reached the pinnacle on a list of the top 10 home health and hospice marketing sources at 30%, according to the 2023 HCP Benchmarking Report for Home Care, Home Health, and Hospice. Government programs, internet search engines, assisted living operations and hospital discharge planners rounded out the top five with percentages ranging from 7.5% to 10%.
For the research, survey respondents were asked to select their top five revenue-generating sales and marketing sources in 2022. Providers can leverage data like these to inform their marketing strategies, according to Amanda Sternklar, director of marketing for HCP.
“Accruing patient and family testimonials is a good first step, but hospice marketers should also be analyzing the feedback they receive,” Sternklar told Hospice News in an email. “What are your most satisfied patients/family members most likely to mention? What are the common phrases they use? Don’t just share their testimonials; ensure you truly understand the feedback so you can then market using words that will resonate with other potential patients.”
Hospices can yield the greatest benefit by benchmarking their own information against the data in the report to determine where they are exceeding the baseline and where they may be falling short, according to Sternklar.
“Tracking trends in your data is important, but without a comparison, it’s nearly impossible to understand your key differentiators and opportunities,” she said.
To maximize the potential of word-of-mouth marketing, hospices should strive to identify what matters most to their patients.
Among home-based care organizations, hospices were the most likely to say that all goals of their plan of care were met — 39% which is 15% or more higher than home care or home health providers, according to Sternklar.
Hospices also were the most likely to include family members in their plan of care and had the second lowest patient turnover rate at 38.6%, she indicated.
“This suggests that they already have happy patients and families willing to help spread the word,” Sternklar said. “It may be as simple as implementing a review program to capture and promote that feedback.”
Newspaper advertising and provider employees came in at the 9th and 10th spots on the list of marketing sources, both at 2.5%.
But to capitalize on any of these strategies, providers need to have sufficient staff to keep up with the volume.
Workforce pressures and associated costs are overwhelmingly the industry’s most damaging headwind, including the associated wage hikes, enhanced benefits and bonus programs. During the past three years, a number of providers have shut down, sold or scaled back their operations due to labor shortages.
The shortages also have reduced clinical capacity, which has contributed to drops in patient census and length of stay for many providers.
Among the respondents to the HCP survey, close to 50% identified staffing shortages as the most significant threat to their businesses, followed by the challenge of attracting enough referrals at 41% and employee turnover at 21.2%.
More than 75% indicated that they refused referrals during 2022 as a result of industry-wide labor pressures, and nearly 55% had done so on a consistent basis.
“This is likely due to high turnover [among home-based care providers], which spiked 12% in the last year after staying steady for the last 3 years, reaching a staggering 77.1% annual turnover rate,” the report indicated.
As harrowing as these numbers seem, they actually represent a degree of improvement. The total number of providers that refused one or more referrals dropped by 9% compared to 2021. The number that had done so consistently fell by close to 6%.
In tandem with these data, about 22% indicated that recruitment and retention would be their greatest opportunity when it comes to fostering growth, followed by customer referrals at 19%.
The need to build up the hospice workforce has providers of all stripes losing sleep. Hospices have increasingly sought ways to boost staffing recruitment and retention.
Providers identified online job ads at websites like Indeed.com as their most successful recruitment strategy, followed by employee referral programs.
