In a first ever national webinar focused towards families and consumers, the National Private Duty Association (NPDA) is hosting Home Safe Home: Making Informed Senior Care Decisions, an educational event that covers advice on hiring a home care provider. This live and interactive consumer-oriented event will be offered Sept. 23, 2010, at 8 p.m. EDT.
To register go to www.privatedutyhomecare.org.
You do know it when you see it or experience it. A dining experience is enhanced by the service. Given the food, the reason for being there, has to also be good, but the excellence comes with how that food is served, and how the wait staff makes you feel- special? Or just like another diner?
Searching for solutions on line is no different. In shopping for a home care solution for a mother, the basics must be present. For home care it is the services, explained clearly and in a layman’s language, and location(s) served. Also good for home care is some personal information about the agency staff, in particular where does the buck stop? Is that person one who drives the staff towards excellence? A concerned adult child is looking for some assurance that her mother will be cared for in a loving and safe manner. So, the website as the adult child’s first encounter with the world of home care must relate something personal about the agency and its management. Interested? Read more now. »
corecubed specialized in Internet marketing, but it took a strategic corecubed team retreat this past week for us all (except one) to agree upon that. Since 1998 we have been building websites, using search engine marketing strategy, and helping clients grow their businesses using the internet. So, this morning, I went to Wikipedia to see what the thoughts were on internet marketing, and here is what I found. Should be no surprise that Wikipedia says that internet marketing is “also referred to as i-marketing, web-marketing, online-marketing or e-Marketing,” and “is the marketing of products or services over the Internet.”
Wikipedia goes on to say that “The Internet has brought media to a global audience. The interactive nature of Internet marketing in terms of providing instant responses and eliciting responses are the unique qualities of the medium. Internet marketing is sometimes considered to be broad in scope because it not only refers to marketing on the Internet, but also includes marketing done via e-mail and wireless media. Management of digital customer data and electronic customer relationship management (ECRM) systems are also often grouped together under internet marketing.”
And, it was if we wrote this about our company, since Wikipedia continues to explain that “Internet marketing ties together creative and technical aspects of the Internet, including: design, development, advertising, and sales.” Interested? Read more now. »
Well in a word, almost everything. The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft held its 9th annual art car weekend starting this past Friday. If you have never attended an art car event, it is really something to behold. Artists take free reign with decorating their cars from tasteful to ridiculous to sublime. The car that got the most attention this year (and for good reason) was the fish car. You would really have to see it to believe it, as it is a car with lobsters, fish and sharks, all moving and singing, led by a singing bass standing up at a microphone and a lobster conductor waiving a wand to the tune of the music.
Fishcar Lobster Conductor
Soaring heat in Louisville today, with temperatures expected to reach 100. Yesterday, however, I was at a spot in the Adirondacks where there was a record low of 36 and the makings of a truly remarkable location: White Pine Camp. Once used by President Coolidge as a retreat, the owners of this spectacular “camp” have managed to create a truly remarkable experience that, based on marketing theory, does, indeed sell itself.
Self selection is how folks get there, and referrals. No TV, no cell phone access, just pure nature and rustic accommodations with touches of luxury where needed. So how do they market? Catering to the high end travel and leisure business they invite the travel writers to come and visit and then just let them experience it. They provide excellent services and accommodations to their guests, and the property manager makes certain that guests know what they are in for prior to booking. It certainly is not for every vacationer, as this is a place where one can be inactive as possible (picture book at lake with view), but also highly active with kayaking, canoeing, hiking and exploring the countryside. There are no locks on the cabins. Nothing unsafe in the area (except for moose and bear) and no reason for alarms or calendars.
"Truly Remarkable" Just Needs the Right Place to Tell the Story
The kinds of questions I get when I do marketing seminars, or webinars about private duty are so specific to the entrails of running a private duty business that it is hard for me to understand how someone who has not actually done that can answer the in-depth level of response that my viewers/attendees expect. As a consultant, myself, to industries in which I have not had a business, I know that I do bring something to the table, but it is not that deep understanding that one only gets from doing something oneself.
The difference between experiential knowledge and knowledge obtained by research, consulting or learning from others is simply different. Thinking of an analogy, it seems that you can learn how to climb, what supplies to take with you, what to do in case of an emergency, but until you have donned the equipment, faced the elements, and actually climbed a mountain, you really cannot empathize with the hardships you face, the meaning of split second decisions in an emergency, the responsibility and the feel of the weight of the responsibility that comes from having safety over the lives of others.
Translated into running a home care business, it seems that starting, growing, understanding hardships, facing challenges and the problem solving that evolves comes out of that experience allows a person to walk that talk better than not having experienced it. It is facing a difficulty and working through it that gives a greater depth of ability to understand issues.
Our Private Duty Business Manual and all the forms one could ever want to use are available for sale on our Home Care Agency Marketplace, www.markethomecare.com. All of these processes and forms come as a result of years of experience actually starting and growing a business, and running it profitably along the way. Many of the questions I get on the private duty marketing webinars are answered in our marketing module, and all the information in all of our forms and manuals has been personally vetted, if not written, by me. So, why not use a proven tool to help growth, and one that comes from experience, having walked that talk for over 17 years and having talked that talk for 13 more.
Well it has been a long time in coming, but corecubed has a newly redesigned website. Done in ExpressionEngine it allows us a great showcase of some of our client work, and also I now have the ability to edit internally, so I am not at the mercy of my wonderful designers, rather in control!
Some benefits to using a content management system (CMS):
1. Updating. It is really easy to update a website without needing to know programming code or be skilled at web design.
2. Cost savings. It is much quicker to add pages, post articles, and link to files than it would be with the old standard HTML designed website, and you don’t have to pay another skilled person to do it.
3. Scalability. With a CMS site, planned and designed for growth, expanding and growing is easy to do with a great system already in place. ExpresssionEngine and WordPress allow for easy expansion without starting over from scratch.
4. Community & Connectivity. When updated often and set up to integrate with social media outlets, a CMS often has the ability to easily make connections with other sites and to bring more visitors to yours.
However, let me emphasize that there are other reasons that make a CMS site beneficial to the business, but those relate to the skill set of the designers and the people planning the site (which we have in depth here at corecubed):
1. Clean code. What that means to you is that the search engines like it and it makes the site ranking better if the parsing is easy.
2. Flexibility. We can easily change out showcased items on the home page, what is featured on the inside, and where photos and text are located.
3. Attractiveness. Well this is not really the CMS, this is our designers! They do know their stuff and continue to deliver top quality and incredibly attractive design.
Note that the clean code and attractiveness come from the skill of the person setting up the CMS. Don’t be misled thinking you can slap up a CMS site and have clean, SEO-friendly code out of the box. It is as easy to build an awful CMS site as it is an awful HTML site! “Well. Maybe even easier…….” says Will Chatham, Web Manager at corecubed.
Join us with a new website or a redesigned website if your business is sluggish, or if you have new products or a new story to tell. We specialize in content-driven websites and utilize ExpressionEngine and WordPress on a regular basis. Our web design team is deep and rich, and we use these tools to provide ourselves and our clients with powerful content management that doesn’t sacrifice SEO, clean code, or beautiful custom design.
Since 2006 we have been collecting products that help home care agencies grow and posting them to one of our internal sites, www.markethomecare.com for sale. Recently we launched the site in a new shopping cart format, and it is along the lines of the websites we have been developing recently. Content management is really the future of how anyone who wants to do great business on the internet is doing it. Simply stated it allows anyone, whether computer/tech savvy or not to edit, post, upload and control the content of the site.
We have recently completed redesigns of several home care agency sites in ExpressionEngine, a content management system that allows for incredibly intense and powerful design with that added power of editing capability for the owner. A blog is built into the software, and the code is clean so the search engines love it. A picture is worth a thousand, so take a glance at Live Free Home Health and also Responsive Home Health. I think you will be impressed with the design, the information, the ease of navigation. And, just imagine if you had the power to edit as well! Interested? Read more now. »
Well it IS the 5th of July and the celebration is over for another year. Watching all those celebrants, the fireworks, and the enthusiasm made me think of marketing a business, and the difference between a hard launch of a product (like the 4th of July, don’t you wish?) and just getting the word out regularly about what you offer. Less flash, but definitely worth the effort.
Since we have loads of products and services that directly help those in the home care, home health care and hospice industries, you should know that we just upgraded our marketing site www.markethomecare.com so it is now easier to use, and better meets safety and compliance standards. Take a look see and let us know what you find there. We add in new products regularly, and the prices are right for those watching their budgets. And, in case you are not finished celebrating and want to see the largest fireworks display in North America, I am including a video from Thunder Over Louisville. Definitely NOT a flash in the pan, but the real fireworks deal.
Continuing to share my research when interactive marketing was just in the beginnings, and relating it to social media today, I am taking excerpts from Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, “Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers.
I just love the term “Google juice”, and they have many things to say about how blogging links boost your Google juice. Again, this also now applies to social media, a phenomena that was not present in 2006 when they wrote the book. In fact, nothing boosts your search engine’s standing better, they said. Neither a press release or a full page ad in the NY Times will boost your search engine rankings as much as regularly updated blogs. The shortest, cheapest, fastest and easiest route to prominent Google rankings is to blog. Note that this is still a great way to get Google rankings, but we now recommend using WordPress as the tool in which to design your website so you have the benefits of search engine friendly text and format, plus a ready to go built in blog. And that technology is affordable. Take a short web questionnaire to see costs. Interested? Read more now. »
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Industry veteran and Private Duty Business Manual author, Merrily Orsini, MSSW, is a member of the Board of Directors for the National Association of Home Care and Hospice and serves as the Chairman of the Private Duty Homecare Association.
Read more about Merrily Orsini
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