01
Positioning
What your home stands for, in the words families use, so you are chosen on quality rather than on the lowest weekly fee.
Social Care · Care Home Marketing
A care home marketing
plan you can act on.
Most care home marketing plans sit in a drawer. This is a working plan: clear objectives, a channel mix chosen by cost per enquiry, a budget you can defend, and the handful of numbers that tell you whether occupancy is about to move.
The promise
One page your whole team can run.
A plan is only useful if the registered manager, the enquiry line and the marketing lead all know their part. We keep it to objectives, audiences, channels, budget and metrics, so it stays a tool rather than a document.
5 steps
Objectives, audience, channels, budget, measurement
£0
To start on bamboo, our care home marketing software
20 yrs
Advising care providers on demand and reputation
On the record
The coverage does the talking
A live feed of where our work has been showing up: real placements, real titles, real reach.
604M reach
England · BBC
Monkey business at Leamington Spa care home birthday party
83.7M readers
UK News · The Mirror
Penguins visit care home to give OAPs a dose of pet therapy
25M reach
Social affairs · The Independent
Unpaid leave 'huge step forward for millions of carers'
Syndicated
Social affairs · PA Media
Unpaid leave 'huge step forward for millions of carers'
New from Bridgehead
Run this plan in bamboo
bamboo is our care home marketing software. It writes your Google and Meta campaigns from your CQC profile, hosts the landing pages, logs every enquiry and ranks you weekly against every comparable home nearby. Free to start.
01Win enquiries
Campaigns · Landing pages · Enquiry tracking
02Beat local rivals
Presence Score · Competitors · Media coverage
03Protect your name
Reviews · Reputation audit · Coverage books
04Get talked about
Press releases · Media database · Newsletter
05Be found
SEO audit · Answer engines · Care calendar
What the plan sets out
The parts of a working plan
02
Objectives
A target occupancy, a private-pay to funded mix, and an average weekly fee, expressed as numbers you can hold the plan to over a quarter.
03
Audience
Who you are marketing to: self-funding families, discharge and social work teams, GPs and case managers, each reached differently.
04
Channel mix
Google Business Profile, local search, reviews, referrer relationships and paid where it earns its place, ranked by cost per genuine enquiry.
05
Reputation and CQC
The reviews, coverage and third-party proof that reassure a family checking your last inspection report before they ring.
06
Budget and measurement
A budget tied to cost per enquiry, and the four metrics, enquiries, show-rounds, conversions and occupancy, reviewed monthly.
The definition
What is a care home marketing plan?
A care home marketing plan is a short, dated document that translates a marketing strategy into action: it names the occupancy objective, the audiences, the channels and campaigns for the period, the budget behind each, and the metrics that will show whether it worked. Where a strategy answers why and what, the plan answers who does what, by when and for how much.
The strongest plans in care are ruthlessly short. One page of objectives and metrics beats twenty pages nobody reads, because the people who deliver it, the manager, the enquiry line, the marketing lead, need to see their part at a glance and be measured on it.
Care marketing rewards consistency over creativity. The homes that stay full tend to do a small number of unglamorous things reliably, a well-tended Google Business Profile, a steady review habit, warm referrer contact, rather than a big campaign once a year. A themed open day is not evidence of a working plan on its own; a themed open day promoted to local self-funders and followed up within a day, converting visits into show-rounds, is.
Before writing a new plan, check where enquiries are actually being lost: search visibility and Google Business Profile completeness, whether the website answers the questions families ask, review volume and reply habit, and whether discharge teams and GPs still name you at short notice. That diagnosis is what tells you which of the parts above to spend on first.
For the work we would take on ourselves, see the full range of services we offer.
FAQs
Care home marketing plan FAQs
For most homes it is a well-tended Google Business Profile paired with a steady review habit. Together they win the local map pack and reassure the family who finds you there, at almost no media cost.
The decision is high-stakes, emotional and made under time pressure, often by an adult child, sometimes by a discharge team. Trust and reassurance do the selling, not persuasion. CQC ratings and safeguarding mean every claim must be accurate and defensible.
Sustained occupancy at or above a target level, a healthier private-pay to funded mix, a defensible average weekly fee, and a steady flow of qualified enquiries. Objectives should be specific and dated so the plan can be judged against them.
Budget by cost per enquiry rather than a percentage of turnover. Once you know what a genuine enquiry costs on each channel and what share converts to a move-in, you can spend confidently up to the point where an extra resident still pays for the marketing that won them.
Monthly against the four leading metrics, with a fuller quarterly review of objectives and channel mix. Care demand is seasonal and local, so the plan should flex without being rewritten from scratch each time.
Either. We build the first plan with you, hand over a template your team owns, and can stay on to run it. The care home marketing cluster is designed so an operator can self-serve the guides or bring us in for the retainer version.
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ReadSpeak with us
One conversation tells you
if we're the right fit.
Thirty minutes with a partner. We'll tell you whether we can help, what the work would look like, and what it's likely to cost, before either of us commits to anything.
