How to choose a home care marketing agency: test it on families and on carers

"Should I spend money finding clients when I cannot cover the hours I already have?" That is an illustrative question, not a quote from a named owner. Not where you cannot yet cover the hours. Family enquiries that arrive with no carer free turn into waiting lists or into clients who go elsewhere, and a recruitment campaign that has only just started has not freed anyone yet. Family advertising can start in the postcodes where your rota has spare capacity, and widen as new carers complete their first shifts. That does not mean hiring two agencies. One agency can serve both audiences, provided it lets the carer pipeline set the pace of the family campaign, and each stage of hiring an agency is a chance to test whether it will. That test is particular to a home care provider (a home care agency, in US terms).

Before the shortlist: write down your two audiences and your capacity

Start with who you need to reach, because an agency can only be as precise as your brief.

The first audience is the family side: the person who will receive care and the relatives deciding with them. The NHS lists four main ways to find a local homecare agency in England: the NHS website, the local council, the Care Quality Commission website, and the Homecare Association members' list. Write down which of those already show you, and which do not. That list is your family-side brief.

The second audience is carers. In 2024/25, Skills for Care counted 109,000 care worker leavers, a 29.0% turnover rate, in England's CQC-regulated non-residential services, and it puts the share of posts sitting vacant at 9.9%. Across the Atlantic, the policy group PHI puts home care turnover at nearly 75 percent in 2024, while warning that no large-scale, comprehensive assessment of turnover across the full direct care workforce exists. Treat the two countries' numbers as different measures, not as one trend. Your brief needs a recruitment target as well as a client target.

Then add the line that joins the two: the postcodes you can staff now, and the ones you could staff with three more carers. That line tells an agency where family advertising can run today and where recruitment has to come first.

Next, write down which rules apply to you, because the agency will write words under your name. In England, the CQC warns that applications from domiciliary care agencies for the regulated activity of personal care are the most likely to be delayed or refused, so do not let an agency plan a launch around a registration you do not yet hold. The CQC describes itself as the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England. The Homecare Association, a UK trade body, says all homecare agencies must register with their statutory regulator if they provide personal care. If you work in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, write your own regulator's name into the brief, since the CQC's stated remit is England. In the US, licensing is state law. Texas law says that, unless an exemption applies, a person may not represent to the public that the person is a provider of personal assistance services for pay without a home and community support services agency licence. Florida's statute, by contrast, asks companion and homemaker services for a registration rather than a home health licence, as long as they deliver no home health service.

Last, decide whether you need an agency yet, using your own numbers to test three separate conditions. Most of your hours are commissioned by a council or arrive as hospital discharge referrals, so families searching online are a small part of your intake. Your own carer turnover runs well below the 29.0% Skills for Care reports for care workers in England, if you operate there. And the number of carers you replace each year is small, which depends on how many you employ as well as on the rate. If all three hold, neither audience needs much paid marketing: a job-board account run in-house may do the recruiting for less, and your time is better spent with the commissioners.

The shortlist: ask for both kinds of work, paced together

Ask each candidate for one campaign where recruitment and client marketing had to be paced against each other, or failing that, an example of each: winning clients for a regulated care service, and recruiting people into care roles. Some agencies have the first and not the second.

Then ask each one to show you a carer job advert they wrote. Read it against the law, not just for style. GOV.UK's employer guidance on recruitment says you must not state or imply in a job advert that you will discriminate against anyone, and that phrases such as "recent graduate" or "highly experienced" belong only where they are real requirements of the job. In the US, the EEOC says it is illegal for an employer to publish a job advertisement that shows a preference for, or discourages someone from applying because of, race, sex, age (40 or older), disability or other protected grounds. A copywriter who has never written for a care employer may reach for the wrong word, such as "young and energetic".

Also ask what they know about claims that depend on your registration or licence. An agency that has written for care providers before should be able to say, unprompted, why a line about being "fully regulated" must match what your regulator actually holds for you. A candidate who looks puzzled has told you something.

The meeting: put your families' questions to them

Use the meeting to test how the agency thinks, not to hear its pitch.

Start with the questions families already ask. The NHS suggests that people choosing homecare ask whether the paid carer will agree to visit in a specific time slot, and whether they will tell you if they are delayed or running late, along with what training carers get. Ask the agency how your website would answer each one in a line a worried daughter could read. Notice that the time-slot question is a staffing question in disguise: your site can only promise the visit times your rota can keep, so the agency needs to know the rota before it writes the promise.

Then ask who they think the carer applicant is. Skills for Care says over half of the workforce in these services were recruited from within adult social care (51%). Our reading is that many of your applicants already work for another provider, so the advert has to give them a reason to move: hours, travel time, pay and support. A candidate worth hiring will ask you about those before suggesting a platform.

Ask how they would describe hours. Skills for Care reports that around 35% of the non-residential workforce was on a zero-hours contract, and 42% of care workers. If you offer guaranteed hours, that is a selling point an advert should lead with. If you do not, an honest advert says so, and an agency that wants to hide it will cost you good applicants later.

Finally, describe a month when carer applications dry up and ask what the agency would do. You want to hear which family campaigns it would pause, in which postcodes, and what it would move into recruitment. Ask, too, who will write your carer adverts and who will run your family-facing pages, by name.

The contract: your accounts, your data, your creative

Have the ad accounts opened in your name, with the agency added as a user. That covers search, social and any job-board account, so that if the relationship ends you keep the history and the audiences.

Your two lists need different handling. A family enquiry may describe the health of the person who needs care, while a carer application holds someone's work history, so ask where each list is stored, who can see it, and whether the two are kept apart.

The creative should be yours too, with the source files of every advert, page and photo. If a photo shows a carer or a client, ask whether the person agreed in writing to appear in marketing, and keep that record, because the people in your pictures are often receiving or giving care. Check the notice period and what the agency hands back on the last day.

The first weeks: reports that tie the two audiences to your rota

Ask for a monthly report on a fixed day that splits the two audiences: client enquiries and carer applications as separate lines, each with its own cost. Then ask for the numbers that matter more than either: how many enquiries became a started client, and how many applicants completed a first shift. The agency cannot see your rota, so you will have to share those outcomes with it.

Share your capacity each month as well, using the postcode line from your brief, so family advertising stops where you have no carers free and recruitment advertising works harder there. Look at one live advert each week in the first month, and compare any registration or licence line with what your regulator holds for you. When your registration or licence status changes, ask the agency to update your careers page in the same week as your care pages.

Expect the first month to go on setup, and give the work time before judging it. Our post on how long before a marketing agency shows results covers a sensible review date. For the services The Social Target provides to care providers, see marketing for home care providers.

This week, in order

1. Write the capacity line: the postcodes you can staff now, and the ones three more carers would open up.
2. Pull your own numbers: how many carers you employ, how many you hired and lost in the last 12 months, and how many client enquiries became started clients. Compare your turnover with the 29.0% for care workers in England, if you are there.
3. Send two or three candidates the same short brief, with one of your carer job adverts to rewrite and the NHS family questions to answer, and compare what comes back side by side.

Once the capacity line is written, tell us about your business and we can talk about both audiences.