“I’ll be there,” she says, right before hanging up her cell phone and driving off into the storm.

“Their tradition was forged on the battlefield,” a booming voice narrates. “Today, they serve in a field just as challenging: the homefront, where often getting the call means going beyond the call.”

While the commercial was made in 1998, its messaging — that nurses are modern-day heroes at home — rings truer than ever. That’s why Bayada Home Health Care has revived the 22-year-old advertisement as part of an effort to boost recruitment and retention amid the coronavirus.

“We are absolutely hiring more people now than ever,” Bayada CEO David Baiada told Home Health Care News, though he stopped short of sharing specific numbers. “The need for services — both because of societal and demographic evolution, but also because of what we anticipate as a rebound and an increase in the demand for home- and community-based care delivery as a result of the pandemic — is requiring us to continue to accelerate our recruitment efforts.”

Launched in 1975 by Baiada’s father, Mark, Bayada is a home health care provider with more than 30,000 employees providing services across 23 states, as well as Canada, Germany, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Korea and the United Kingdom. The Moorestown, New Jersey-based organization is one of the largest home health nonprofits in the country.

Currently, the company is serving about 25,000 clients per week, but amid the coronavirus, the provider is expecting that number to grow. Reasons include the push to keep vulnerable patients out of in-patient settings and the increase in COVID-19 positive patients being treated and recovering at home, among others.

Providing that care wouldn’t be possible without the caregivers Bayada employs, which is why it recently launched its “Heroes on the Homefront” campaign to coincide with National Nurses Week, which annually runs from May 6 through May 12. The commercial is just one part of it.

“We [first] introduced the Heroes in the Homefront campaign over 20 years ago,” Baiada said. “I think it really kind of struck me that the emotion and the sentiment of the campaign, inclusive of the TV commercial, were really timeless and particularly relevant now in the current environment.”

The campaign advertising is accompanied by a number of resources designed to help recruit and retain workers at NursesWeek.com. There, nurses can win a number of freebies, read stories about current Bayada nurses, take continuing education classes and learn how to join the Bayada team.

Recruitment and retention has been especially difficult for home-based care providers in the past, but the recent rise in unemployment is expected to help.

Recently, some agencies have had luck recruiting workers who have laid off or furloughed from service industry jobs or elective surgery centers. Meanwhile, others predict the COVID-19 virus will inspire more nurses to work in home-based care settings right out of school, rather than later in life.

On top of its hiring push, Bayada is fundraising on behalf of caregivers, bringing in money to help finance things like employee relief funding and personal protective equipment (PPE) costs.

So far, the company has brought in $100,000 in monetary donations for PPE, as well as donations of PPE itself. This comes after Bayada consumed a year’s worth of PPE in just one week.

Baiada says the company’s focus on employee safety, appreciation and satisfaction are nothing new, but that Bayada’s efforts are paying off in the face of the COVID-19 emergency.

“Retention dynamics are no different than they always have been,” he said, though not sharing specific numbers. “It’s part of why this campaign is so important: There’s such a great spotlight on the power of what we’re doing out in the community. I hope others will realize that it could be a calling for them.”

Bayada’s 1998 commercial makes the same appeal to potential caregivers in a slightly different way.

“Not everyone can follow in traditions footsteps, but those who do are heroes to those they care for,” the narrator booms. “Bayada nurses: Truly heros on the homefront.”

The post To Hire ‘More People Than Ever’ Amid COVID-19, Bayada Revives Vintage Advertising Campaign appeared first on Home Health Care News.

While you’re creating your advertising and marketing budget for next year, remember to work with Home Health Care News (HHCN) to put your company’s products and services in front of thousands of home health, home care and hospice professionals every day. Reach them in 2020 with our advertising and marketing programs to deliver brand awareness, thought leadership and actionable sales leads through products and services that include:

– Email, web and mobile advertising
– Webinars
– White papers
– Email blasts
– Live events

Home Health Care News has the platform and tools to achieve your goals in 2020. Click here to download our media kit and simply reply to this email or call us at 312-268-2420 to learn how you can get started.

The post Download Our 2020 Media Kit Today appeared first on Home Health Care News.

While you’re creating your advertising and marketing budget, remember to work with Home Health Care News (HHCN) next year to put your company’s products and services in front of thousands of home health, home care and hospice professionals every day. Reach them in 2020 with our advertising and marketing programs delivering brand awareness, thought leadership and actionable sales leads through products and services that include:

– Email, Web and Mobile Advertising
– Webinars
– White Papers
– Email Blasts
– Live events

Home Health Care News has the platform and tools to achieve your goals in 2020. Click here to download our media kit, simply reply to this email or call us at 312-268-2420 to learn about how you can get started.

The post Download Our 2020 Media Kit Today appeared first on Home Health Care News.

While traditional media advertising — such as television and radio — has been essential in helping the Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania-based agency rise through the ranks, the future is social, according to Senior Vice President of Global Operations Dave Ritterling.

“Geotargeting, Hulu, Youtube,” Ritterling told Home Health Care News. “Those really are the next extension for all of us [home care providers]. We need to be where the people are, and they’re on phones.”

Ritterling shared those insights with HHCN at Visiting Angels’ annual conference last week in Nashville, Tennessee, where he said the importance of social media and emerging technologies took center stage.

“The days of the Yellow Pages are over,” Ritterling said. “What people are doing is using social media. I think we’re just going to see that trend really go quickly.”

The prominence of online advertising is nothing new.

But with studies showing that 86% of consumers read online reviews and 67% of adults age 65 and older use the internet, online advertising is becoming increasingly important in capturing clients.

Specifically, the average person seeking senior care online is a woman between 50 and 70, according to third-party market research compiled from more than 4,500 respondents and used by Caring.com. Most often, that person is the care recipient’s adult child (39%) or spouse (29%).

Lately, Visiting Angels has been researching new — and better ways — to capture those audiences.

“A lot of our strategies have been with cable, but now that cable’s changing, we’re going to a lot more digital sources,” Ritterling said. “We’re on NPR now, which is unique for us. We’re finding new areas where listenership trends are happening.”

Beyond bringing in new clients, social media has also been hailed as a way to recruit caregivers, as retention is at an all-time low and demand for services is at an all-time high.

“It has become table stakes — an effective multi-channel marketing effort,” Hireology CEO Adam Robinson previously told HHCN. “Recruiting via social media certainly includes potential applicants that read your post, click on a link and apply to a job, but equally important is brand building. Word of mouth is heavily influenced by a company’s online employment brand.”

Medicare Advantage play

Beyond digital advertising, another area of interest for Visiting Angels is Medicare Advantage (MA), Ritterling said.

“The more we think we know, the more we find out we don’t know,” Ritterling said. “I think there’s a lot more work to be done in that area for us to get our arms around it and figure out how we’re going to approach that. We see it as an opportunity but as we learn more and more, we’ll engage that more.”

While Ritterling declined to go into specifics, he said Visiting Angels is “looking at, developing and discussing” MA partnerships.

“We’ve got our feelers out,” Ritterling said. “We’ve got such a great experienced director group, many of which have lots of experience in that area. We’re working with them and sort of helping them chart the way as we approach this.”

The post Visiting Angels Exploring Hulu, YouTube as Next Frontiers in Client Recruitment  appeared first on Home Health Care News.

Executives shared that view and other winning sales and marketing strategies April 10 during a panel discussion at Home Health Care News’ Capital + Strategy Forum in Washington, D.C.

“A home health sell is very different than a home care sell and is very different than hospice,” panelist Wanda Coley, president and COO at Wilmington, North Carolina-based Well Care Health, told conference attendees. “[We’ve been] trying to really divide those sales teams so you can speak to the customer at that level.”

Panel moderator John Griscavage, CEO of San Francisco-based PlayMaker Health, agreed.

“In my experience, it’s a very different sale,” he said. “The several-hour conversation, holding the hand of the family member is a very different thing than the more transactional nature of home health.”

As those conversations have grown more sophisticated over time — with a larger focus by clients and referral sources on factors such as readmission rates and quality scores — Well Care has updated its sales teams to match.

“Most recently, we separated our teams,” Coley said. “We did have our sales teams selling the care continuum.”

Well Care provides home care and home health services to patients in eastern North Carolina. It’s also working to roll out hospice offerings.

“What we found was home health really took the majority of the [sales representatives’] time,” Coley said. “They were incentivized more on the home health side, so that’s what they sold. Private duty or home care received less attention, so we separated our marketing teams. In fact, we eliminated marketing on the home care side and rolled it into a branch manager role.”

The move has allowed sales representatives to hone in on selling home health, maximizing referrals. Well Care’s hospice line will also have its own sales team, Coley said.

Panelist Tim Hanold — CEO of Richmond, Virginia-based CareAdvantage, which offers medical and nonmedical services in the mid-Atlantic — also lauded separating service lines. His company has also recently taken a similar approach to marketing, allowing CareAdvantage to customize content for different areas.

“Previously we took a broad brush approach to our digital marketing platform,” he said. “We found that we really needed to outsource it and use a company called Five19 out of Richmond. They have these different tactics that allow us to be more hyper-local across the mid-Atlantic. That’s native video, that’s really unique blog content and things that really speak to our different markets.”

Meanwhile, panelist Lesly Cardec — senior vice president of marketing and public relations at Sunrise, Florida-based Interim Healthcare — says the home care and hospice franchise is also leaning into local marketing.

While maintaining brand consistency is a priority, the company is exploring new ways of allowing local offices to make locations their own.

“It’s a balance game,” Cardec told attendees. “Consumers are local. They want local marketing and local marketing is now becoming hyper-local marketing. … Where the opportunity lies is maybe the industry should look at the franchisor from the marketing perspective a little differently. Maybe the way that they view us is more providing the infrastructure to allow the markets to make it their own and adapt to their market’s needs.”

The post Hyper-Focused Sales and Marketing Strategies Help At-Home Care Providers Boost Business appeared first on Home Health Care News.