888-404-1513, Home Care Leads, Assisted Living Leads, Elder Care and Senior Service Leads

National Alzheimer’s Project Act Petition

valerie — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:30:04 +0000

Dear Friends,

I just signed a petition to President Obama asking him to fulfill the potential of the National Alzheimer's Project Act. Now it's your turn to make a difference. It's easy and only takes a few moments.

http://www.alz.org/petition

Alzheimer's is devastating to families from every walk of life. It is the 6th leading cause of death in the U.S., and there is no way to cure, prevent or even slow its progress. The economic cost in this country is staggering: $183 billion a year and this will skyrocket to $1 trillion by 2050. We need a commitment from the government to help us end Alzheimer's.

With your help, our message will be heard that Alzheimer's can't wait.

Thank you!

Regards,

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN

Owner/ Managing Partner

LTC Expert Publications
Phone: 888-404-1513
Email: valerie@ltcep.com

See our client samples: http://MySeniorService.com
Register for our webinars and marketing videos: http://LTCSocialMark.com

Stop What You’re Doing, And Go See What Google Thinks It Knows About You

valerie — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:32:21 +0000

Stop What You're Doing, And Go See What Google Thinks It Knows About You

Want to know what Google thinks of you?

Log in to your Google account and click on this link see all the demographic information Google has inferred about you based on your web-surfing habits. (Via Casey Johnston at Ars Technica)

How good is it at guessing?

Regards,

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN

Owner/ Managing Partner

LTC Expert Publications
Phone: 888-404-1513
Email: valerie@ltcep.com

See our client samples: http://MySeniorService.com
Register for our webinars and marketing videos: http://LTCSocialMark.com

Home Care Leads Webinar, Video Replay

valerie — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 04:25:37 +0000

Hi all, here is the much anticipated video replay of this week's "Home Care Leads Webinar"
I had to re-record it, so it's down to 20 minutes.
Enjoy!

Regards,

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN

Owner/ Managing Partner

LTC Expert Publications
Phone: 888-404-1513
Email: valerie@ltcep.com

See our client samples: http://MySeniorService.com
Register for our webinars and marketing videos: http://LTCSocialMark.com

Home Care Leads Webinar- You’ve Gotta See This!

valerie — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:22:02 +0000

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/471064234

Join us for an enlightening presentation that shows you exactly how our team develops and delivers leads for home care agencies using some of our latest proprietary programs and information!

Every home care agency owner and marketer should get a glimpse at the possibilities for their organization.

Lots of Q/A time with Valerie VanBooven and George Novoson!

Join US!!!

Title:	Home Care Leads Webinar!
Date:	Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Time:	2:00 PM – 3:00 PM CST

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

System Requirements
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server

Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.5 or newer

Regards,

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN

Owner/ Managing Partner

LTC Expert Publications
Phone: 888-404-1513
Email: valerie@ltcep.com

See our client samples: http://MySeniorService.com
Register for our webinars and marketing videos: http://LTCSocialMark.com

How to Create Your Home Care Landing Page – The Crucial Role Of Psychology-Driven SEO

valerie — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 02:52:32 +0000

The original version of this article can be found at http://searchengineland.com/what-comes-before-the-landing-page-the-crucial-role-of-psychology-driven-seo-105792

Your ‘landing page’ is the first step a visitor takes into your online universe. But that page is actually the last step in your strategic plan to attract those visitors.

You see, a lot more goes into the planning process of your Web traffic strategy than just the design of your landing page. And while it is certainly true that you don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression, it’s practically worthless to impress the wrong audience!

That’s why what comes before the landing page matters more than what’s on it.

Can You Read Your Prospect’s Mind?

Let’s say you own a home care agency and are looking for clients like Martha, a busy 40 year old daughter with an aging Mom (Judy age 75) whom she's been helping more and more lately because of Judy's inability to get around after a recent fall. Martha also has a 15 year old daughter and a 17 year old son who are very busy with soccer, gymnastics and more. Martha works a full time job, as does her husband Bob. They have very little time to devote to Judy and they know she needs more attention at home.

How can you make your home care agency's landing page appeal to her?

Obviously not by showcasing your home care agency's history, the new custom painted/wrapped van for caregivers, or even your recent certification status. And most definitely not by using words like ‘cheap’ or ‘economy’ – terms that are singularly don't seem good (because she might get what she pays for!)!

By reading your ideal home care prospect’s mind, you can tailor your landing page to speak directly to his or her deepest desires and needs. A great SEO strategy for your business would factor in keyword research and analysis, but be driven by buyer psychology.

You’ll figure out your audience’s needs and urges, challenges and problems, and their heartfelt wishes that your home care business can help solve. You’ll also understand buying cycles and how potential buyers research things. You will analyze the intent and motivation centered around solving a problem that is inherent in every keyword and search phrase they use while looking for your business.

When you get this right, you’ll be able to skyrocket your conversion rates.

Speak Their Language, Feel Their Pain

Martha feels guilty. She's been totally divided between her own family needs, her job, and her Mom. She knows he must make some changes and get some help so that her Mom is safe in her own home. So she’s on the Web, searching for an answer.

Will she find your home care agency?
Will your landing page convert her into a customer?
Will you answer her biggest home care questions of the moment?

It all depends upon your SEO strategy.

If you rightly concluded that keyword phrases like “home care” and “senior care” (with high search volumes) are what you must target to appeal to clients like Martha, then you’ll plan your landing page to focus on people looking for ideas on how to make their loved safe and happy in their own home.

You may reinforce Martha's guilty conscience and easily convince her that your "starter" home care package is a great way to gently ease Mom into some companion care services.

By explaining your home care agency services in terms that make Martha feel good about herself, you shift the decision making from a perspective of price or quality to one of emotional fulfillment, subtly shifting things to a higher plane on the Maslowian hierarchy of needs.

Interestingly enough, it also makes it easier to close the sale!

Give Them What They Want

Indeed, the right strategy for your landing page may even lead you to craft package deals that fits customers’ needs like a glove. But doing this requires detailed insight into your market’s desires, and clarity about the home care market segment that you serve.

Nothing about this process is static. While an approach that pushes Martha's emotional triggers may work well, it must be modified to suit the analytical and logical part of her brain when she's searching a month later for a transportation service to take her Mom to a Doctor's appointment.

Keyword research and SEO can help estimate the volume of prospective buyers or people in search of a solution, so that it is possible to create compelling content for landing pages targeted directly at buyers searching with generic keyword phrases.

These can work so well that even prospects who haven’t heard of your brand before, or aren’t sure if they even want the solution you offer, are converted into buyers through the near-magical resonance created by a landing page tailored to their emotional needs.

The trick, then, is finding the right generic search phrases to target – and knowing your prospect’s mind well enough to persuade visitors into taking the action you want. This will boost earnings massively.

Only A Poor Craftsman Blames His Tools

The tools today’s SEO experts have access to are powerful enough to blow any competition out of the water, especially when combined with strategic insight into the psychology of one’s ideal prospects.

Keyword research is important to assess the size of your market and find the exact search phrases around which to craft content. Excellent software and tools are available to help with this.

But what makes a 1% to 2% conversion rate get much higher, and transforms the impact of your landing pages, is a deep understanding of the psychology of your prospective customers.

Web analytics help you track the actions visitors take on your site, so that you can see what they do and then try to find out why they do it – and whether or not they behave in the manner you expected them to.

This is what makes analytics data valuable. When this information is anchored in business strategy and viewed in the backdrop of economic end-points, it helps fine tune the online selling process in a reliable and well-informed manner, instead of playing costly guessing games.

The pity is that most home care businesses merely employ Google Analytics as a traffic counter. Don’t limit yourself to that.

Focus on the right key performance indicators (KPIs) and critically examine the data against the metrics you expect to see when you build a process based on the SOSTAC marketing framework (Situation analysis, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Action and Control).

If At First You Don’t Succeed…
Try again. And again. Eventually, you’ll get it right.

Conversion rate optimization involves constant testing and tweaking.

At each stage, you measure what works and keep doing more of it, dropping the tweaks that didn’t work as well. Blindly directing more traffic at a process that doesn’t convert well, or worse, fails to target the visitor correctly, is wasteful and frustrating.

If your search phrase analysis confirms a huge demand for the solution you’re providing, then there’s often a good reason why people don’t buy – you are not mirroring their needs.

It is your responsibility, through the adoption of an intelligent SEO strategy, to provide the specific solution to their needs by laser focusing your landing page on the exact issues and problems that the keyword phrase tells you they have.

Even after you’re certain this has been fixed, you still have room for improvement. Say you’re buying traffic through a pay-per-click system like Google Adwords. When you measure conversion strength for the different keywords you are targeting, you’ll find not all of them are equally effective.

Investing some money on a quality check like this will point you to the best keywords that are most likely to convert. These terms can then become the target of your comprehensive (and long lasting) SEO strategy for organic traffic.

And last – but not least – your copy on the landing page can make a big difference in converting visitors into buyers.

A professional SEO copywriter may cost you more money upfront. But if the copy raises your conversion rate from 1% to 6%, wouldn’t it be worthwhile? Ask yourself what a 3% increase in sales will mean to your bottom-line and you’ll quickly be able to rationalize the higher expense.

In almost every case, good SEO is not a cost but an investment. An investment in the future growth of your business. And one of the most cost effective options among all marketing methods we know today.

SEO lasts for a long time. No one pulls the plug on a great SEO strategy. And even when you look at it from a purely economic perspective, you’ll see that it’s an investment that will gain value for years to come.

So that’s what goes on behind the scenes when you engineer your home care landing page design.

As a home care business owner, you cannot indulge in the luxury of deciding what your people should like. Your customers are in control. You must give them what they want.

Keyword research and strategic SEO will tell you exactly what they want. Before wasting your money on something that won’t work, ask your SEO strategist to safeguard and secure your investments by integrating SEO into other components of your digital marketing strategy.

Always keep in mind the important fact that your landing page should not just be ‘search engine friendly’… it needs to be buyer friendly if it is to deliver the highest value to your business, in the present and far into the future.

About The Author: Trond Lyngbø is a Senior SEO Strategist at Metronet Norge with over 10 years of experience. Trond is the author of the books "Importance of SEO for Your Online Business" and "Power Social Media Marketing".

http://searchengineland.com/what-comes-before-the-landing-page-the-crucial-role-of-psychology-driven-seo-105792

Regards,

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN

Owner/ Managing Partner

LTC Expert Publications
Phone: 888-404-1513
Email: valerie@ltcep.com

See our client samples: http://MySeniorService.com
Register for our webinars and marketing videos: http://LTCSocialMark.com

Understanding Home Care Leads- How to Get Them, and How to Close Them!

valerie — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 03:11:52 +0000

It's time to take the plunge in 2012 and do what the smart home care business owners are doing!

What's that you ask?

1. Getting rid of home care marketing strategies that aren't generating clients. That includes yellow pages, print, radio, tv, and websites! (Did I say that? Did Valerie say WEBSITES? WOW!)

2. What I really mean is that smart home care agency owners are having a HOME CARE LEAD GENERATION website created for them. Small investment, huge return. There are some very specific factors that go into a TRUE LEAD GENERATING website. Call to action, special secret codes, Google happy content, less junk, more direction, keyword optimized with only the BEST keywords that consumers type in to find your services.

3. Have an Exclusive Home Care Lead Generation Program designed and implemented just for your office. Gone are (or should be) the days of relying on leads that are parsed out to 3-4 other providers- hacking off the consumer, and making the lead almost worthless.

4. Get rid of the old thinking about Pay-Per-Click Home Care Leads (assuming you've ever tried it) and take a fresh look at what WORKS and what WASTES your money.

5. Consider having your home care lead generation website "optimized" for mobile as opposed to being just "mobile friendly" - there is a big difference! A mobile friendly site will show up on a smart phone (the whole site, really small). A mobile "optimized site" gives the viewer on the mobile phone EXACTLY what they want so that they can reach you fast!

6. Closing home care leads- Have you listened to what an incoming call sounds like in your office? Really? We have, and guess what, we all have a lot to learn! Your phone answering person is the first line of marketing in your office. Talking too fast, too slow, putting people on perpetual hold, sounding irritated or uninterested is DEATH to any service provider. You have a lot of competition out there, don't drive them away by how the phone is being answered. Lead programs should be recording calls so that you can not only listen to the playback, but you can help your staff learn more about phone answering techniques.

__________________________________________________________________

Melanie Stover from HomeCareSales.com and The Home Care Sales and Marketing Society gives us this advice on closing more leads by paying attention to how the phone is answered:

"Home care agencies would do a great service to themselves and their potential clients if they started at the beginning with a uniform effective live greeting. This means dump the phone trees. Have a live person answer with the name of the agency, their own name and a question.

Example: "ABCD Home Care, this is Melanie, how may i help you?" (Slow, pleasant, cheerful, sincere voice)

Most agency owners think this is getting done but it is not. This sounds simple but we listen to 100s of recorded calls a year where the caller is not sure they called the right place by the way the phone was answered.

Next the caller needs a great opened ended question.

Example: Hi Mary, what prompted your call today?

Let the caller talk.

Most of the time we can fill out an entire inquiry form with that one question, and a few follow up questions.

___________________________________________________________________________

Then we have "LEAD CARE for HOME CARE AGENCIES". "Lead Care" is an entire follow up system designed to send specific messages out to your leads on a regular basis, including a monthly e-newsletter. Follow-up failure is not an option in this economic environment. Therefore, "LEAD CARE" eliminates the problem and increases your bottom line.

Aligning yourself with the right home care marketing agencies and following the lead of other successful home care business owners will make 2012 one of the best yet!

Talk to us and let us know what kind of questions you have. We have answers! (and lead programs )

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN

888-404-1513

valerie@ltcep.com

George Novoson

george@ltcep.com

Regards,

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN

Owner/ Managing Partner

LTC Expert Publications
Phone: 888-404-1513
Email: valerie@ltcep.com

See our client samples: http://MySeniorService.com
Register for our webinars and marketing videos: http://LTCSocialMark.com

Thinking About PPC for Your Home Care Agency? 10 Mistakes To Avoid When Starting With PPC

valerie — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:46:22 +0000

By Dominick Frasso

http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/10-mistakes-to-avoid-when-starting-with-ppc-0108691

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a great way to drive traffic to your website or landing page to gain the valuable and highly targeted traffic you need. A lot of success can be had through this advertising method; however, if done incorrectly it can burn through your budget faster than you can imagine, leaving you with minimal conversions and visitors that bounce at first sight of your page.

If you are just getting started using PPC for your small business website, here are some critical mistakes to avoid when getting started with Google Adwords:

1. Overbidding and Reliance on Broad Search Terms

Broad search terms often drive a lot of impressions and clicks to your landing page. The problem is that the traffic it drives could be traffic that is completely irrelevant to the product or services you are selling since the keyword can be used in such a broad match type. For example, if your website sells iPhones and you use that keyword as a broad match type, you’ll likely gain traffic for different variations of keywords because they contain that same base keyword:

There are many types of iPhone search terms that may return your ad, some of which may be completely irrelevant. If you sell strictly iPhones, you just invited and paid for a lot of irrelevant traffic to a landing page that does not deliver the product the user was looking for (iPhone cases, for example). Therefore, by bidding too much on those broad search terms, you exhaust your budget with little to no ROI. Instead of creating broad based ad groups, consider creating several “exact match” and “phrase match” ad groups. These lead visitors to a landing page that is specific to the keyword and product for which they are searching. You’ll increase your Quality Score by increasing your Click Through Rate (CTR), spend less money and gain clicks that will return a much higher ROI for your campaign. These match types are very important in your campaign and bidding strategy, so be sure to pay close attention to them.

2. Ignoring Negative Keywords

If you don’t use negative keywords in conjunction with broad match or phrase match keywords, you will likely drive irrelevant traffic to your landing page. The benefit to using negative keywords is that you can still strategically use broad match and phrase match keywords, but reduce unwanted impressions as well as unwanted clicks that cost you cash! For example, if you sell new iPhones on your site but not new iPhone cases, you may want to add “case” and/or “cases” to your list of negative keywords. This way, your ad will not gain impressions when people search for new iPhones cases when you only sell used iPhones. A good place to research what good choices for negative keywords may be for your Ad Group or Campaign is by navigating to Keywords > See Search Terms. There you can see which keyword phrases are eating up impressions and clicks and costing you wasted ad spend.

3. Too Many or Irrelevant Keywords in Ad Groups

Having too many variations of keywords or irrelevant keywords in your ad groups will lower your quality score, dramatically resulting in a much higher Cost Per Click (CPC) and decreasing the effectiveness of your PPC campaign. You’ll want to keep your keyword variations limited and create entirely new ad groups for keyword variations that don’t closely match or belong together in a particular group. Keep your ad group keywords very tightly themed!

4. Improper/Irrelevant Landing Page

Landing pages for your PPC Ads should be keyword/product relevant and be optimized for conversion. This can be done at the ad group level as long as you have tightly themed ad groups. Be sure that your landing page has a clear call to action (CTA) to produce the desired conversion. It should be the whole reason you are conducting paid search campaigns to begin with. A conversion can consist of a sale, a form fill, a newsletter sign-up or any other event you would consider a goal of a visit to your site. To produce true ROI for your paid search campaigns, make sure this conversion is well defined and measurable!

5. Running Only one Version of Your Ad

“Always be testing.” It’s a common phrase in the online advertising world and it is imperative you have a testing strategy when managing your PPC accounts. It is good practice to create more than one version of your ad to test the effectiveness of all aspects of your ad itself. For text advertisements, test the title, copy and display URL to see which versions or aspects of your ads have a greater chance for clicks as well as conversions. For image ads, test the copy, the creative and the call to action. While it is a good idea to run more than one ad simultaneously, don’t run too many. Limit your testing to between 2 and 3 ads running at the same time. Once you’ve determined a winning variation, create another challenger and keep the tests going!

6. Not Testing Landing Pages for Conversion Optimization

Google Adwords has a great free tool called Website Optimizer. Website Optimizer is a great way to conduct A/B testing to test two different styles of landing pages for conversion, or multivariate testing to see what particular elements of your landing page change conversion behavior. This free tool is also a great way to determine what aspects and variations of your landing pages are more likely to create a conversion, resulting in higher ROI for your campaigns. You should constantly be testing your pages to see what changes can lead to increased conversions.

7. Improperly Tracking Traffic

Be sure that when you do run your PPC campaigns, you have as much detailed tracking in place as possible. Use conversion tracking in Google Adwords to place the conversion pixel on your conversion page. This pixel will allow you to see exactly what campaign, ad group and keywords produce conversions and drive ROI for you. A good place for the conversion code placement for e-commerce and lead generation campaigns, would be on a ”Thank you” page, which is the last page a visitor sees after completing what you have determined is a conversion. For example, we are targeting CEOs interested in executive coaching and track various conversions related to leads that come in.

8. Paying No Attention to Competitors

Do you know what strategies and keywords your competitors are using for their PPC campaigns? Have you ever typed in your brand name in the search box and seen your competitors’ paid search ads displayed right next to your organic listing? It’s a good idea to make sure you are bidding on your brand keywords in addition to your competitors’. You don’t want your competitors taking potential conversions away from you by using your own brand keywords and conversely, you do want to try to gain conversions away from them using their brand keywords. Here’s an example of how Samsung does just that:

9. Forgetting About Mobile

Mobile continues to play an increasingly important role in online advertising. There are two areas in mobile you don’t want to forget about. Google Analytics provides valuable insights on what types of visitors you have to your pages, including what type of device they used to get there. This can be a good way to measure the importance of a mobile strategy for your company, which helps when allocating budget towards a mobile strategy as well as helps dictate the types of devices for which you should optimize your landing pages.

10. Ignoring Contextual Targeting on Networks

A common mistake when starting with PPC is to place your text and image ads on the Google Display Network without using any additional contextual keyword targeting. This strategy adds another layer of tightly themed targeting that will allow your advertisement to show only when page or article content matches closely to your ad group keyword themes. It is a great way to really make sure your ads are being shown in relevant places about relevant topics and to a potentially relevant user.

The on page article is titled ‘Twenty-one favorite iPhone tips’, and next to it you see contextually targeted ads that promise ‘Deals on iPhones’. Be sure to use keywords even on your Display Network campaigns!

PPC is a strategy that is extremely data driven and if done correctly can yield high ROI for your marketing spend. If you have some tips you’ve used or seen be successful, share them in the comments below.

Author:

Dominick Frasso Dominick Frasso on the Web Dominick Frasso RSS Feed

Dominick Frasso is the SEO/SEM Specialist at Vistage.com, an executive coaching organization that helps CEO members build better companies through unique business coaching opportunities. After a successful enlistment in the United States Marine Corps, Dominick began his career in marketing. He has spent time in traditional marketing roles…

Regards,

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN

Owner/ Managing Partner

LTC Expert Publications
Phone: 888-404-1513
Email: valerie@ltcep.com

Marketing Elder Care with Press Releases

valerie — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 06:00:00 +0000

Online Marketing for Assisted Living Facilities, Home Care Agencies

valerie — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 06:00:00 +0000

2012 Lead Generation for Senior Service Providers

valerie — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 06:00:00 +0000