Borough Care

Our response

Marketing Strategy

Workshop

We met with the Borough Care team to understand their challenges and the key messages around their live life in colour promise. We then went away and put together a strategy workshop, designed to tap into the Borough Care stakeholders’ thoughts and feelings around their current strategy vs. where they wanted and envisioned themselves to be. 

We design our workshops as a collaborative experience that engages the whole team. In order to decipher what the strategy needed to tackle, this particular workshop focused on three exercises – peaks and constants (looking at ‘always on’ marketing activity and short-term campaigns), stakeholder mapping (examining key audiences) and goal setting. 

Getting the team together to carry out these exercises allows us to read the room, draw out any themes worth exploring and gives everyone the opportunity to share their thoughts and feelings in an open environment.

Strategy

Using the workshop outcomes to inform our next steps, we created a full marketing strategy to bring clarity to Borough Care’s empathetic brand and stance on social care. We focused on how we could deliver this to the people who matter most, their target audiences – including care home managers, family members and commissioners – and examined their competitors’ online presence in particular. 

Another key part of the strategy were the specific goals designed to drive Borough Care towards their aim of helping more people live life in colour in their homes. Addressing this goal went hand in hand with improving their presence in the care home space and becoming the go-to employer for professionals in the sector. 

Once we ran through our process, the Borough Care strategy directed the organisations’ marketing efforts to create a point of difference to competitors. This document could then be used by the Borough Care team as a constant point of reference throughout the transition period to the new approach.

Working together

Internal marketing function

The internal Borough Care team were struggling to make their marketing work for them, with multiple roles splitting the function. This was creating a bottleneck and making the process fragmented. We suggested that the organisation hire an internal Marketing Manager for the first time to address these issues and shape the role so it fulfilled the new needs of the strategy. We then helped to support the Borough Care team throughout the recruitment process. 

With a new hire in place, we set to work relationship building with their new Marketing Manager. Collaborating to improve internal processes and spotting opportunities to improve was helped by the introduction of a fresh set of eyes.

Using empathy to inform

In order to gain an understanding of how unique Borough Care’s approach truly is, our team visited some of the homes for the day. We worked alongside Borough Care’s Activity and Lifestyle Facilitators (ALFs). ALFs are colleagues who are responsible solely for engagement, activities and bringing joy to everyday life in their homes. Spending the day with these key members of staff allowed us to gain insight into what it is, or what it will be, like day-to-day for the target audiences we’re engaging – current staff, new potential residents and potential new employees. This also allowed us to develop empathy for the Borough Care team, improving our relationships and our understanding of them from the very heart of the organisation.