Hi I’m York, managing director of Five on a Bike and long term veteran of filming in the care industry. I have worked with care homes and care home groups, large and small, across the UK for over 10 years, producing beautiful video content to give viewers a true insight into what their homes are like. I have a full understanding of the touchpoints of the marketing funnel, and I understand how important it is to find the right kinds of respectful, and caring people to work with in this industry.

If you don’t have time to read everything in the blog below, this quick visual summary of my investment case for video might be a good place to start your research. 

So, let’s begin with a £6,000 investment in video. In the table below, I will break down where this will take our average care home customer.

Before we get into the nitty gritty details, I think it’s important to state that I strongly believe that salespeople should not mis-sell services. The objective of the sales process is to help the right people buy what’s best for them. If you trick or mislead people though your sales process, I trust that it doesn’t end well.

This is especially important in this sector. The decision someone makes about which home to choose will have a profound effect on their wellbeing. I have put together an honest team of creators who all stand by the same principle: we have a duty of care to residents and potential residents, and we only film to promote truly caring homes and individuals. 

This needs to be said here because I do not want the sense of this article to be cold and harsh. The numbers that we will explore are there to help you to build a value case for the investment in video, simply because we know that it is a struggle to find this information so explicitly out there. 

However, the bottom line is, and will always be, that this line of work is about real people making real and profound choices and we never, ever forget that.

I am going to focus on videos for the sales and marketing process here, as that makes up the majority of our work. We do have experience creating video for internal comms, which you can read a little about here if you’re interested in those specifically.

In an ideal scenario your home’s web page would have a virtual tour front and centre, an emotive case study within the page, and then a testimonial video within its reviews. Then, to top it all off, you can use your showcase to boost the sales process.

I’m going to be very open and honest here and talk about the costs of all this. The prices below are the average quotes that we’d give for each of these types of videos.

Video Tour – £2,000

Case Study – £2.500

Testimonial Video – £2,500

Showcase – £2,000

So, if you buy each of these videos off the shelf one by one it will cost around £9k in total on paper. However, all of this content is very easy to overlap, meaning less shoot days, less editing time, and ultimately less money spent. So, if you’re going for the whole package, it’s actually looking to cost more like £6k.

Let’s say you do the smart thing (cheeky face) and you do choose to buy a package of all these videos for £6k, now how do you work out if that’s good value for your organization?

The first thing to work out (as I’m sure you already have) is your average value of each customer.

Here’s my example:

 

£36,608 (Average Customer Value Per Year – stats found here)

x

3 Years (Average Length of Stay)

= £109,824 (Customer Value)

 

We might like to know what the profit is from this customer, which can be trickier to work out but let’s say 10% for now – giving us £10,982.

It’s no secret that web traffic is one of the most valuable converters so, unsurprisingly, the primary objective of our videos is to increase the conversation rate on your website. 

Let’s imagine you have 1000 people going to your website per month. These people will land on your website from a range of places, word of mouth, social media, Google Search, care home referral sites, etc. but they are there for the same reason – to check your care home out. You might have had a glowing review from Barbara’s daughter chatting to someone outside the local coop or there might be a post on a Facebook group where some has asked for recommendations on a fantastic local care home and your URL has been shared.

If the viewer’s experience on your website is not as good as it could be, many many people will turn away, and you’ll have lost them at the first hurdle. 

I might take a moment to stop here for some clarification. Video will not fix a bad website. Your website should be built around optimum user experience and be easy to navigate, fit for purpose, and engaging. Once this is in place (and it already should be) video then turbocharges a potential customer’s experience. But, if your website looks like it was made in 2003, and hasn’t been updated since, then video isn’t the one-stop solution to all your issues.

So, let’s imagine you have a fantastic website, everything is working well and it’s already bright and engaging, how does video work then?

Let’s say that out of those 1000 people that visit your site a month, 1% of them contact you. They might give you a call or send a contact form, giving you an average of 10 inquiries without video. The first thing video achieves on top of this is connecting with your viewers on a deeper emotional level. Video allows your potential customers to feel what your home is like before they have ever visited (see an example of this below!), demonstrating the atmosphere and personality of your home much better than photos and 360° tours ever could. 

It’s bold to make sweeping predictions at this stage, so at the very least let me promise you (from experience alone) that video does have a fantastic impact on how people take action on a website. The best statistics I could point you towards is that video on a webpage increases the time spent on the website by 70% – 100%. So, if someone was originally likely to average spending 1 minute 30 seconds on your site before video, they would now be averaging up to 3 minutes. 

So, because I like to be really cautious and not oversell. Let’s take it back a notch here and say that video could increase your inquiries by 20%. When it comes down to it, that still balances out to increase your number of inquiries from 10 to 12 per month.

I was creating some video content for a car dealership many years ago and the MD told me something that has stuck with me to this day.

Out of 10 people that inquire:

• 3 will buy from you because they like you
• 3 won’t buy from you because they don’t like you (and there is nothing you can do about it)
• A great salesperson and sales process will convert the 4 in the middle

So, someone has visited your website and picked up the phone/sent in an email inquiry and your dynamic sales team jumps into action. They work with the potential customer to explain everything they need to know and find out whether that potential buyer is a good fit for your home.  

Let’s say your salesperson is a little above average and usually converts 40% of the inquiries that they receive. Hold tight for some more figures…

 

Without video – 10 inquiries a month @ 40% = 4 conversions per month 

= 48 New residents a year*

 

With video – 12 inquiries a month @ 40%    = 4.8 conversions per month 

= 57 new residents a year*

 

Let’s look at the profit: 9 New Customers x £10982 = £98,838

 

* Here we are not factoring in what video can potentially do in the sales conversion process! 

 

Ok, ok, ok it just sounds too good to be true…So, as I don’t like to over-exaggerate, let’s really take these numbers down. Let’s say we need to factor in the effect everything else in your marketing has on the sales and inquiries and allow video to be responsible for 20% of it…That’s still 2 new customers a year. Giving you 4 times the value of what you spent on the video content.

A little bit of data and a lot of word of mouth. We actively engage with our clients and try to work with them to place their videos at the best possible points in their marketing process. This gives us a real insight into where and how video works best. It’s tricky to tie the success down to an exact science. But video across marketing, in general, is vastly considered a very strong tool. Just have a think about how you interact with videos online or on TV…

What are our best tracking points?

• Time on site
• Did they watch the video before sending the contact form?
• What actions were taken after watching the video?
• Feedback about the video (this entails simply asking for their thoughts in the sales process)

My favorite anecdote that I’d like to share here, regarding the effectiveness of video on a website in the care home industry, is a story that was feedbacked to me from the salesperson at one of our client’s homes. We made an emotive case study video to be placed front and center on their website. This salesperson reached out to me and told me that they had a potential new resident make an inquiry about their home, who said, “I wasn’t even considering your brand, then I saw the case study video on your website and I really wanted to meet the person in the video and talk to them about what it’s like to live here.”

Needless to say, they then moved into that home.

Above, I mentioned how you can also use video to drive traffic to your website. Once the content has been filmed and the videos have been made, there are many ways you can maximise their value.

• Chop it up to use it on different pages on your website 
• Use shorter, engaging clips on your social media platforms
• Shape some clips into a website or social header video
• Awards entries
• Video clips behind text to display testimonials

When we begin a relationship with a new client, we often offer these shorter videos within our packages. As I said before, we want to help maximise each and every video within your marketing process, and these little snippets don’t take up a lot of our time once the content has been filmed. So, regardless of your production company, we highly recommend that you do open up a conversation about how you’d like to sweat the assets after they’ve been filmed.

So, overall, I think that video is a fantastic investment for your care home (but I would say this, wouldn’t I!). With the right tools in your armada – a good website, great sales and marketing team, and a respectful, flexible video production company, the opportunities for return on investment are endless.

If you made it this far, thank you for taking the time to read this blog. I sincerely hope that it has paved a bit of a clearer path towards how you can use video in your care home marketing process!

If you’d like to chat further about anything mentioned here, or you’d just like to say hello, please do drop me a message on LinkedIn or fill out the contact form here on the website – I’d love to hear from you!

– York