A care home marketing plan is one page. It says how many rooms you need to fill, who you want to reach, what you will do each month, who does it and what it costs.
Set the budget by working back from your empty rooms. A percentage of turnover tells you very little.
An empty room costs you its fee every week. Knight Frank’s 2025 review of care home trading put the average fee at £1,298 a week. At that rate, one room is about £5,600 a month.
Smaller homes have less room for that than they did. A report led by Care England in October 2026 found the typical smaller provider had cash to cover about 1.23 months of wages, down from 1.33.
A written plan keeps your money on the things that bring families in. It also gives you an answer when the next salesperson calls about an advert in a magazine.
What should you do first?
Give yourself an afternoon with your occupancy figures and last year’s marketing invoices. Then work through this list in order.
- Count your rooms. Write down how many you have, how many are filled today and how many you want filled by a set date.
- Work out the move-ins you need. The occupancy calculator does the sum, and the next section shows how it works.
- Add up what you spend now. Include adverts, directories, leaflets, your website, any agency and any software. You may find something you had forgotten about.
- Find out where your last 20 enquiries came from. Ask your administrator or receptionist. If nobody wrote it down, start a list today.
- Test your own front door. Ask a friend to call at 6pm and to fill in your website form on a Sunday. Fix whatever goes wrong before you spend another pound.
- Get a budget figure. Put your numbers into the marketing budget calculator.
- Write the page. Use the seven headings below, and pin it above your desk.
What goes in a care home marketing plan?
A busy Home Manager needs something that fits on one side of A4. These headings are enough.
- Where you are. Rooms, occupancy, your CQC rating, your Google rating and enquiries a month.
- Your objectives. Rooms filled by a date, and a few numbers that get you there.
- Who you want to reach. The families and professionals who choose homes like yours.
- Why a family should choose you. One or two sentences in plain words.
- What you will do. Five or six activities at most, each set against a month.
- Who does each one. A named person, and who covers on their days off.
- What it costs and how you will know it worked. A monthly figure and the numbers you will check.
Write it so your deputy could run it while you are on holiday.
How many move-ins do you actually need?
Most plans count the empty rooms and forget that residents also move on. Knight Frank’s review put the average stay at about 26 months, so even a full home replaces many residents each year.
Here is an example. Say you have 40 rooms, 34 are filled and you want 38 filled within a year. Closing the gap takes four move-ins.
Keeping 38 rooms filled, with a 26-month average stay, takes about 18 more. That makes 22 move-ins in the year.
Now turn that into enquiries, using your own rates if you have them. Say half your enquiries book a visit and half of those visits become a move-in.
That is four enquiries for each move-in, so 88 in the year, or about seven a month.
That number tells you where to look. At three enquiries a month, the plan has to bring in more. At ten, with few rooms filled, look at what happens to each enquiry after it arrives.
What are good care home marketing objectives?
An objective is a number with a date on it. Nobody can check “raise our profile” in March. Anyone can check whether four more rooms are filled by the end of March.
Keep the rooms at the top and let everything else serve them. A plan for the home above might say this.
- Fill 38 of our 40 rooms by 31 March.
- Get seven enquiries a month, each one logged with where it came from.
- Answer every enquiry the same day, and by 10am the next morning for evenings and weekends.
- Book a visit with half of all enquiries.
- Earn two new Google reviews a month.
- Send one story to the local paper every month.
If you are already full, your objective changes. Aim for a list of families who have visited and want to hear when a room comes free. That shortens the gap between residents.
Who are you really marketing to?
Usually it is a son or daughter. Picture the daughter who needs a room by Friday for her dad, who is leaving hospital. She is frightened, and she is calling homes at lunchtime.
Then picture the family who start looking months ahead, after mum’s second fall. They read your website late at night and want to visit without any pressure. Marketing to adult children has to work for both.
The ONS found 37% of care home residents in England paid for themselves in 2022 to 2023, from 26.4% in the North East to 47.5% in the South East. Know your own area.
Enquiries can lean further towards private payers. carehome.co.uk reported in January 2026 that 69% of its enquirers who knew how they would pay expected to fund their own care.
Our guide to self-funding families covers what they look for.
Professionals belong in the plan too. Discharge teams, social workers, GPs and district nurses all talk to families, so write down who you will get to know, by name.
If shifts are your bigger worry, add local care staff as a second audience. Recruitment marketing uses much of the same work.
Why should a family choose you?
This is the centre of your marketing strategy. Write one or two sentences that could only describe your home, then check they match what a family sees when they visit.
Ask your longest-serving carer and three families what they would tell a friend. You may hear about the chef who knows every resident’s breakfast, or the garden the residents planted. Use their words in your plan.
Your CQC rating is part of this picture, and each rating gives you a different job to do.
If you find it hard to put your home into words, our guide to branding, photographs and film will help.
Which marketing strategies should a care home choose?
Match the work to your gap. Some work brings enquiries within days and stops when you stop paying. Some takes months to build and then carries on. These four examples show how the mix shifts.
- Six empty rooms and cash getting tight. Fix how enquiries are answered this week. Then run adverts on Google, Meta or ChatGPT while the slower work builds.
- One or two empty rooms, most of the time. Spend on being found on Google, on reviews and on local professionals. Keep a small advert budget for when a room comes free.
- Full, with families waiting. Turn adverts down. Put your time into the local paper, open days and keeping in touch with families who have visited.
- A new home, or one few people know. Tell the area you are there, with open days, leaflets and visits to GPs and social workers.
How to market a care home sets out the order that suits most homes. Each step has a full guide, including reviews, your website, being found on Google and AI, adverts and the local paper.
Pick five or six things your team can keep up. One job done every month will do more for you than ten started in January and dropped by March.
How much should a care home spend on marketing?
Start from your empty rooms. The marketing budget calculator uses your rooms, occupancy, fee, CQC rating and the homes around you to give a monthly figure, and you can use it without giving an email address.
It begins at about £800 to £1,500 a month to keep one full home’s marketing working, adverts included. That starting point is our own judgement, so treat it as a place to begin.
One-off costs, such as a new website or a photo shoot, sit on top.
It then adjusts for your position. These steps are our rule of thumb, drawn from experience and without research behind them.
- At 90% full, spend 1.25 times the starting point.
- At 80% full, 1.5 times. At 75%, twice. Under 70%, up to three times.
- Requires Improvement adds 10%, Good adds 5% and Outstanding adds nothing.
- A new or little-known home adds 30% until it is 60% full.
Spending more while income is down feels wrong. It makes sense because each room you fill pays back straight away. Put the extra into adverts first, since they bring enquiries soonest.
Take the example home again, with 34 of 40 rooms filled, a Good rating and an average number of competitors. The calculator gives about £1,450 to £1,900 a month.
At £1,298 a week, its six empty rooms are missing about £33,700 a month in fees. Nobody can promise that the budget fills them. It does show that one extra resident would more than cover it.
How should you split the budget?
Keep about 15% back for surprises, such as a competitor closing or a new rating. Share the rest between online work and work in your own area.
- Online. Adverts, being found on Google and reviews.
- In your area. The local paper and radio, print and leaflets, events and visits.
The fuller you are, the more can go local. Give each leaflet or printed advert its own phone number or web address, so you can see what it brings.
Ask for advert spend and the fee for running adverts as two separate numbers.
Our guide to what care home marketing costs shows how to compare quotes. Ways to reduce your costs shows where money is usually wasted.
If you run a group, budget each home on its own figures. A home at 72% with a Requires Improvement rating needs far more than a full home. Look at the split every three months.
Who does what, and when?
A plan with no names on it tends to stay in the drawer.
- Home Manager or owner. Owns the plan and checks the numbers each month.
- Administrator or receptionist. Logs every enquiry, where it came from and what happens next.
- Deputy. Takes visits and follow-up calls when the manager is away.
- Activities coordinator. Collects photographs and stories, with consent, for the website and the local paper.
Then map the year. Mark your open days, local events and any month when rooms may come free. Book the hour for each job in the diary now.
How do you know the plan is working?
Look at the same few numbers on the first Monday of each month.
- Rooms filled.
- Enquiries, and where each one came from.
- Visits booked and move-ins.
- Cost per enquiry, which is your total marketing cost for the month divided by the enquiries you received.
- Cost per move-in, which is the same cost divided by move-ins.
Every three months, move money from what brings few enquiries to what brings more. Give slower work a fair chance, since being found on Google and a local reputation take months to build.
Run the budget again twice a year, and whenever your rating or occupancy changes.
When is it worth getting help?
You can do all of this yourself, and our guide to what you can do without an agency shows how. We’d rather teach you than bill you.
Help earns its cost when the plan keeps slipping because nobody has the time, or when a job needs skills your team lacks, such as running adverts or rebuilding a website.
The Marketing Assistant is our monthly done-for-you service, and all our prices are published. To see where you stand first, use the free enquiry review.
If you do hire anyone, ask the questions in what to check in an agency contract.
Every guide on this topic
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Costs and money
Who you are marketing to
Doing it yourself
If you are planning to sell
