How To Build Your Linked In Network To Increase Home Care Referrals

Want more referrals?

So much of generating referrals is about relationship building and staying in front of your top referral sources.

So how can you do both at once AND do it with multiple referral sources at once?

Simple...social media! Or more specifically...Linked In!

In today's episode of Home Care Digital, we break down the specific steps to start leveraging the #1 professional social network to get referrals!

 Are you looking to build out your network, get to know more people, and have them get to know more of you? LinkedIn is a powerful tool for that can help you with that. On today's episode of Home Care Digital, you will learn about building out your LinkedIn network and the best strategies on how to do this.

When it comes to home care business, LinkedIn should be one of the most powerful tools to consider. It’s a channel where home care owners can see results by leveraging LinkedIn. 

Build and Grow your LinkedIn Network

Build your Profile

Build out your LinkedIn profile before you start going out and connecting with new people and establishing your network. 

As Porter Gale says, “your net worth is your network”. This I have seen again and again to be true and really how impactful it can be.

The more people that you know and know you, the greater that you're going to be able to grow your brand. Your business will open up so many doors. The more people that know you, the more connections that you have, and the better connections you’ll have.

Focusing on building your network is one step to growing a home care empire building or home care business.

Start Connecting

To start building your network, there are three types of people to build with:

• People you know
• People you kinda know
• People you want to know

So the first thing is just connecting with people you already know. There's no strategy with that because they already know you. Think about referral partners, friends, and people from high school. Again, it doesn't even matter - just people that know you.

If you’re into the home care business, it’s important to let people know how you will do it. That's the power when people actually know what you currently do. You can help even more people because basically, everyone at some point is probably going to need care for their loved one.

The more that you're continuing to get that brand recognition of who you are and how you help people, the better it's going to be.

Another strategy is to think about people that you want to know. It’s important to learn how to get into how you can start engaging with those individuals.

You might feel overwhelmed by this. However, the reality is that this is such an easy thing to do. You just spend a couple of minutes a day to connect to this person and just start thinking about people in your life and checking them out and connecting with them.

Those are good people to know or have in your network, especially if they're local businesses, Anyone that's working locally in your own network is going to be really impactful.

I don't recommend just going off and connecting with people that you don't know. Some people have done this strategy, and I personally don't like it.

I don't usually accept people that I don't know unless they are in the industry and either serving homecare agencies or if they are homecare owners. They are potential clients and referral partners.

Keep in mind that when connecting to your potential clients or partners, not everyone is the same. Everyone's got different beliefs, but most people do not want to connect with people that they do not know. And so we want to make sure that we do this tactfully in a way that's going to help and build those relationships prior to sending that connection.

Reminder:  be mindful of your connections.

Start Expanding your Network

The first thing is qualifying the people that you want to connect with through your research. Look up companies that you want to get established first and look at them, check who works there, but also understand what is their potential to refer.

You may even call those businesses before necessarily making this connection to see. They make or not give out that information. But it's a good thing to know and really understand what's the likelihood that they are going to refer you.

The other thing is that it is quality over quantity. Having a smaller amount of really good connections is going to be a lot more impactful than just having a bunch of people that you, you know, kind of know you but aren't actually going to drive more business to you.

There are a lot of times when people think about social media as a way to just go viral and get so many views.

It doesn't matter if the right people are seeing what you're sharing. What’s more important is that you're engaging with the right people. It's going to drive greater results.

You can get so much more from 200 loyal, amazing fans than 10,000 people that just, you know, don't really care that much about you but follow you.

So keep that in mind. We want results, not contacts.

Some of the top referral sources include:

• Hospitals
• skilled nursing facilities
• assisted living facilities
• memory care
• Hospice
• elder law attorney's

Anybody who is serving your niche are good people to think about to target in how you want to build and establish those relationships.

So how do we take that next step? Looking for the key contacts, such as:

• marketers
• social workers
• discharge planners
• etc.

Here's the first exercise that I want to talk about:

One, connect with people that you know.

A good place to start can be your top five referral sources, power partners, your referral partners, or anyone that's ever sent you business, and then local contacts right from your past friends, family, and clients. This is all repetition and requires consistency.

Number two, do some research list five different facilities that you want to get into, and follow their business pages.

Aside from LinekdIn, you can also do this on Facebook. That can be a good strategy. But we're focusing more on LinkedIn right now following their business page so that you can see if they're posting and they're sharing on their business pages. You can be in tune with what they're sharing.

So once you do those exercises, you're ready to start to build and expand your network.

Once you know that information you can start to follow perspective contacts, right? Do not just connect with people you don't know. Follow them. You can even hit the little bell on the LinkedIn profile so that you get notified when they post something so that you can then go and engage with their content and meaningful comments.

Number 3, follow some key contacts, use the company pages, follow them and start engaging with their content. 

The main idea here is this can be really simple and just going out and engaging with people following their account, not connecting and then engaging with their content after you reach a certain point of engagement with them. Then you can expand that connection. And so increase your acceptance rate by making sure that you do at least a couple of posts before reaching out.

It becomes more impactful if you ask them a question because then that ensures that when they reply, you know that they did see your comment.

Asking a question can be really powerful. Once they engage with you, you're better positioned to reach out to them,  say something, and send a connection. Add a note and then reference the post that you engage with. For instance, you can say, “Hey, thank you so much for sharing. I think there are a lot of ways for us to collaborate where I can help support you to do X, right?”

Focus on how you can help them. And then they're going to be much more likely to accept your connections where you can continue to build and establish that relationship.

It’s all about building relationships. And you don't just all of a sudden become best friends with people you've got to establish these connections. Get the starting point, build, nurture and they grow, they flourish, and then they become revenue referrals for your business.

Final Thoughts

I hope you enjoyed today's episode. To conclude, LinkedIn is so powerful and you really start to leverage and utilize this. It's going to drive incredible results for you and your business.

Do you want to attract more clients, more caregivers and referral sources using the power of video? Well, I am so excited that I just created a brand new free mini course that's going to go over how you can leverage video. It only takes 2 hours a month to create amazing video assets that you can use and leverage again and again.

To learn more, go to https://homecarebrandmastery.com.