Reach Family Caregivers at the Right Time with a Smarter Digital Strategy

We know that family caregivers often face immense stress and fatigue that can come from the unrelenting demands of providing care. Yet, according to a 2020 AARP report, only 29% of family caregiver respondents reported ever having a healthcare provider ask them what they need to care for their loved one, let alone what they need to support their own well-being (13%). And 62% report having insufficient training or knowledge to provide required care.

Audience insight data, paired with modern digital ad targeting capabilities, presents a powerful combination to get the right message for your unique audience at just the right time. Transcend clients have seen up to a 100-175% increase in site traffic in the first year of working with us on a new laser-targeted advertising campaign, along with significant self-referral gains. However, it’s essential to employ a carefully thought-through approach to ensure your messaging is properly reaching and resonating with the right audience in your market.

Level Up Your Advertising Power with Data

Relying on simple targeting parameters (age, gender, geographic location, and topics or interests) is no longer enough to achieve census and LOS growth.

At Transcend, we deploy an audience-centric approach that uses a combination of traditional market research, data science, advanced analytics and AI to create robust audience profiles for more precise audience targeting in every market.

This approach shifts the focus from selecting the best channels or social media platforms for displaying ads to instead finding the right audience and delivering relevant messages at the right time – letting the data from your audience guide where exactly your ads should be placed.

Audience profiles begin with those basic demographic factors like age and geography, but are layered with a multitude of other home care- and hospice-relevant attributes that allow for targeting family caregivers with extreme precision, such as:

• Whether they are currently a caregiver for a loved one
• What specific disease state the caregiver’s loved one has, such as CHF, COPD or Alzheimer’s
• Whether they have a non-spouse adult dependent living in their household (like a parent)
• If they are planning to move a family member to a CCRC in the next year

These granular parameters allow you to maximize the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns, both optimizing performance and click-through-rate, while maintaining a reasonable ad spend.

For example, a hospice care provider we worked with in West Virginia implemented an audience-centric approach with precise targeting. The campaign served current family caregivers in the area ads that featured personal testimonials from caregivers like them, who shared how our client’s care supported both their loved one and themselves. The provider achieved a click-through-rate increase of 26% year-over-year, which is a great indication that their advertising is being served to the ideal audience. The campaign ultimately supported dramatic increases in ADC and LOS.

The level of specificity with which you can target online audiences allows the delivery of even more nuanced creative and messaging. For instance, if you offer specialized memory care, you could promote this offering specifically to those caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s.

Advanced Targeting Strategies Expand Reach and Impact

Audience-centric digital strategies gain even more effectiveness as they continue to run, unlocking opportunities for you to expand your reach and impact even further. You can employ advanced website analytics to better understand the family caregiver audience that your advertising is pulling through to your website. This data supports an increasingly tailored targeting profile that you can utilize for retargeting and lookalike audience modeling. This deep profiling data is also a great resource for other disciplines on your team, from helping train intake staff on the current concerns and needs of area caregivers to helping fundraising teams speak to what will resonate most with potential donors.

We’ve all experienced retargeted ads, mostly when online shopping or engaging in other consumer experiences, when you’ve visited a website and immediately start seeing ads across the web and on social media for the exact product or service you were just looking at. You can apply this same strategy to those visiting your website to reengage audiences who have visited and encourage them to move further through the marketing funnel toward decision and action.

With advanced website analytics tools, like custom site pixels and tagging, you can even retarget audiences for specific pages on your site. For instance, perhaps you want to deliver unique messages to those who have read about your caregiver support services, read about specialized care programs or who have navigated to your contact page.

Lookalike audience modeling can use data from your site visitors to find more in-market family caregivers who exhibit a similar profile and online behavioral patterns as those who have visited your site. After you build up website traffic to key landing pages with your digital advertising efforts, you can then develop a lookalike audience model of visitors to those key pages, allowing you to flood your site with an even larger, yet still highly relevant, audience.

A Transcend client in Michigan illustrates how effective this approach can be in maximizing the effectiveness of an advertising budget. By using lookalike audience modeling to supplement their family caregiver campaign, they achieved an 18% increase in website traffic in the first month alone, along with all-time highs in advertising click-through-rates.

This potent combination of audience-centric targeting, retargeting and lookalike audience modeling offers an unparalleled opportunity to reach family caregivers in a way that is both effective and efficient. Are you ready to elevate your digital advertising into a powerful form of caregiver outreach? Contact us at hello@transcend-strategy.com to start the conversation.