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Branding is everything when it comes to selling aged care. Families simply want their loved one to go to a facility that will take exceptional care of them, treat them with dignity and provide them with quality of life. When people shop for aged care, they’re not only looking for a good price, they’re looking for human connections – nurses who smile, amenities like home, as well as an environment of laughter and friendship. Strong aged care brands understand this, not only offering exceptional care, but communicating it in a meaningful way. Here are three signs of an excellent aged care brand:

1.They’re unique

Many aged care providers struggle to stand out in such a competitive industry. Often this is because they’re trying to be it all, for example, “a luxury facility at a low price with excellent care and quality of life”. While it can be tempting to try and corner the entire market, this approach rarely works. A strong aged care brand finds its niche – its unique selling point – and focuses only on this. What does it stand for? What does the organisation value most? An excellent brand will always avoid using things like quality of care or accommodation as unique selling points – these are merely standard expectations for the industry. Instead, it will focus on an area where it truly stands out against the pack, for example, it’s community, the diversity of its residents or the specific location. Remember, it’s the unique brands that have the strongest voices, so always dare to be different.

2.They’re consistent

The aged care industry is constantly changing, which is why it can be tempting to shift your brand offering to accommodate new market demands as they arise. While being agile to change is important, a strong brand never changes its essence or its core offering. While moulding your brand entirely every time there’s a shift in the market can work in the short term, it can destroy brand reputation in the long term. After all, there’s nothing worse than a company that doesn’t keep its promises. Remember, excellent brands dictate market activity – they’re not dictated by it. Your brand identity is one of your most valuable commodities, so stand your ground and remain true to your values no matter what happens.

3.They build community

An exceptional aged care brand doesn’t just care for its residents, but also the wider community. It utilises digital channels to keep residents’ families in the loop – not just to drive traffic to its website. Strong brands avoid the mistake of using digital communications for advertising. Instead, they offer meaningful information that loved ones and future residents will want to read. They understand that adding value is essential, offering up some of their aged care expertise to their networks. For example, providing healthcare advice, telling residents’ stories or keeping the wider community informed about what’s going on at the facility. Strong aged care brands understand that providing something worth reading helps to develop a stronger voice, and they do this wherever possible, going above and beyond the competition.

The team at Merryn Bourne Creative specialise in marketing for the Aged Care sector. We solve business problems, providing organisations with the right approach to engage clients and deliver the bottom-line results they’re looking for. Whether you need to review your current marketing or start afresh, we will write and implement the strategy to increase your brand reputation, market attractiveness and the overall velocity of your sales. For more information, contact us today.

Getting access to your marketing data is simple, but the hard part is figuring out how to use it. For example, how do you combine all your data streams – your website, social media pages and sales information – to understand the big picture? Data is abundant in today’s day and age and it can be extremely overwhelming. As a result, many organisations shy away from the stats, but this is a huge mistake. Research shows companies that turn their data into insights are far better at identifying threats or opportunities, leading to much faster performance and more growth. Here are five simple ways to make the most of your marketing data:

1.Define your goal

What do you want to achieve with your future marketing campaigns? Whether you want to corner a new segment of the market, build a stronger brand community among your current clients or introduce a new product, clearly defining your goal is the first step. When you know what you want to achieve from your marketing, making sense of your data becomes far less daunting. By having a clear question in place, you cut out all the useless information and keep only the most relevant, which is why a goal-oriented approach is key.

2.Build your framework

Now that you’ve got your goals set out, the only information you need to consider are the bits that answer your question. Rank your data by how well it answers this question and how directly it relates to your intended goal. With the most important data at the top, you’ll then need to segment your data into separate groups. For example, if your goal is to increase your sales within a specific market sector, you’ll need to pull apart all the information you have about that sector, the different kinds of customers you serve and their purchasing habits for this target market. It’s this process of segmenting and filtering where you start to draw insights from the information, so always be thorough during this step.

3.Bring insights to life

With your insights in front of you, you can now profile your customer – how and why they purchase products, their interests and how they spend their time. Don’t stop here though – getting stuck on single insights can cause you to lose sight of your goals. Put yourself into your customers’ shoes. Don’t think of your customer numerically, but rather, think of them as human: who are they? what are their interests? What frustrates them? What makes them tick? Data best achieves your goal when its used to tell a meaningful story, not when it’s a bunch of numbers on a database. This is why viewing your target market on a personal level is so important.

Having the right data will allow you to think beyond the curve. You’ll be able to make business decisions with more confidence, sending you leaps ahead of the competition. Merryn Bourne Creative can help you turn your data into marketing intelligence. We solve business problems, providing organisations with the right approach to engage audiences and deliver the bottom-line results they’re looking for. Whether you need to review your current marketing or start afresh, we will write and implement the strategy to increase your brand reputation, market attractiveness and the overall velocity of your sales. For more detailed information, contact us today.

Nothing screams ‘unprofessional’ like poorly written marketing material. From typoos, to confusing sentences and unnecessarily Capitalised Words, writing mistakes can be ugly. Companies need to write correctly – but they also need to write well if they want to build a valuable and trusted brand. Here are eight tips for smoother, simpler and more effective business writing:

Be persuasive, not pushy

Companies that write to be helpful and show they really care about their product or service have better persuasive power than those that are too pushy. People tend to block out anything that’s too salesy, so your writing should show your customers your worth, not tell them.

Get straight to the point

Less is more. When your writing is simple, clear and concise, customers are far more likely to read and engage with it. Make sure you only say what’s totally necessary to get your point across – anything more becomes waffle.

Be accurate

Consumers are savvy, hard to impress and even harder to fool. This means businesses that use incorrect facts, figures or statistics will get caught out. To protect your credibility, it’s essential to strive for accuracy 100 per cent of the time.

Be authentic

Your business should have a strong voice that aligns with your target consumers. To build a solid relationship with customers, this voice also needs to be consistent across all communications touch points.

Be thorough

Your writing should answer your consumer’s main questions immediately, in their order of importance. Don’t beat around the bush – if you give customers the information they need, they’ll do more business with you.

Be human

Trusted brands don’t only write content to sell products, they write to build personality. Consumers are far less likely to engage with boring mechanical writing and are far more likely to connect with content that appeals to them on a deeper, human level.

Use tools

There are a variety of tools out there beyond Microsoft Word’s spellchecker that can help you improve your writing. For example; Grammarly provides extra proof reading and spelling advice (even on social media), Hemmingway Editor evaluates the simplicity and clarity of sentences, while Evernote can help you manage your time more effectively.

Proof read everything

Check, double check and triple check your work. Even the most well-written communications sound cheap when they’re rife with spelling and grammar errors.

Need help developing a written voice that motivates and excites? Merryn Bourne Creative can work closely with your brand to improve communications, connect with consumers and generate real sales results. For more detailed information, contact us today.

The concept of a marketing funnel can be used to visualise the journey that consumers take from the initial point of contact with your brand to the eventual decision to purchase. Most people engaged by initial marketing efforts won’t go on to make a purchase – they’ll get trapped around edges of the funnel at some point, restricting them from making their way through. Only a small number of consumers will make it through the narrow part at the bottom of the funnel, after they’ve made a purchase.

The good news is that focusing on certain stages of the customer’s journey can give your customers the push they need to glide straight through. Here are the phases your customers will travel through on a successful funnel journey:

Attracting awareness
An optimised marketing funnel will have a wide entry point, effectively capturing the awareness of greater numbers of customers –the more customers that know about your brand, the better chance they’ll have of buying your product. To do this, you’ll need to make Search Engine Optimisation your best friend, getting very familiar with the tactics used to increase your search rankings – the higher your organic ranking, the more clicks you will get and the more exposure consumers will have to your brand. The key words used in blog content can positively affect SEO, while opening the brand to referral traffic. Combine these efforts and you’ll be leading customers to your virtual doorstep in no time!

Generating leads through interest
Once the consumer knows who a brand is, capturing their interest right away is essential for them to move onto the next phase of the funnel. Make sure your website is clear about your offering, what differentiates you from the rest and why consumers should be interested in what you have to offer them. At this stage, customers who aren’t interested will drop off pretty quickly, leaving behind the interested ones as potential leads for the business.

It’s important to remember that just having an interested customer is not enough – they’ll need to be transformed into a lead, or physical sales contact before they can make it through to the next phase. This is where a lead-optimised website is just as important to the customers’ journey as aesthetic design, function or even content. So, how do you turn your website into a lead generating machine?

• Give customers lots of options to contact your business via phone, email or social media – a loud but also tasteful call to action.
• Content, content, content! Create engaging, helpful and consistent blog posts that show you know really know what you’re talking about. This will make users want to sign up for your newsletter. Boom! Lead generated.

Positive evaluation of the brand and product
Consumers will shop around a little bit more before making their decision about your brand, its campaigns, social media, case studies, content marketing, email and newsletters. It’s here that consumers weigh up all the products in their consideration set and make a decision based on perceived value and quality. At this point, if they have any doubts about your brand, the customer will get stuck in the funnel and probably decide to go with someone else. If they like the personality of your brand, not just for the price or specifications of your product, you’ll have a loyal customer on your hands. They’ll glide straight through your funnel.

Commitment
At this point, your customer needs to commit – whether that’s signing a contract or getting out their credit card. It’s essential to make the purchase decision as easy and pain-free as possible here, otherwise they’ll put off their purchase decision and risk getting stuck at the end of your funnel. This is where sales efforts, like trials and demonstrations come in, to make your product or service seem irresistible to the point where they have to have it, immediately.

Sale
Success! The consumer finally makes it through the marketing funnel and the sale has been finalised.

We can optimise your marketing funnel, contact us today.