She reads your reviews before she calls you.

Own the listing, not just the care

Most agencies have never claimed their Google Business Profile, or claimed it once through a vendor nobody can now reach. That means you cannot respond to a review, correct your hours, add photos, or answer the questions families are literally posting on your page.

Ownership is the whole first step, and it is free. What follows is knowing what to do with it.

• Claim and verify the profile, in your name, with credentials you keep
• Respond to every review — including the hard ones, which is where families actually judge you
• Fill in what a frightened person needs at 2 a.m.: after-hours reality, service area, what happens when they call
• Photos of real people, because stock photography reads as a chain
• The Q&A section, which anyone can post to and almost nobody monitors

Asking for reviews without being grotesque

This is the part a general marketing agency gets wrong, and it is the reason I would not hand this work to one.

The standard playbook is an automated review request a few days after service ends. In hospice, service ending means someone died. An automated ask arriving in that week is not a marketing misstep — it is a wound.

There is a right way. It involves timing, the right person asking, and language that does not treat a family’s worst month as a conversion event. Done properly, families are often glad to be asked, because many of them want somewhere to say what your nurse did at three in the morning.

If a review process cannot be run with dignity, it does not get built. That is not a marketing constraint — it is the whole standard.

Found, answered, and advertised to — one strategy, not four vendors

Reviews, search, AI answers and paid advertising get sold to you as four separate services by four separate people. They are not four things. They are one question asked four ways: when a family goes looking, what do they find, and does it sound like you?

Handled separately they contradict each other — the ad says one thing, the website says another, the reviews say a third, and the AI assistant splices all three into something you would never have said.

• Reviews — the first impression, and the one asset you already own
• Search (SEO) — being findable for what families actually type, which is rarely your agency name
• AI answers (AEO) — what an assistant tells someone who asks about hospice in your city, assembled from whatever it can find written about you
• Online advertising — reaching the adult child at the moment she starts looking, narrow and local
• The landing page she arrives on, written for a frightened reader rather than adapted from a referral brochure

AEO is the newest of these and the least contested. Most agencies have never checked what an AI assistant says about them. It is usually assembled from a decade-old directory listing.

Advertising that reaches the daughter

Almost every dollar in hospice marketing goes to referral sources. Meanwhile the person actually making the call — the daughter, the son, the spouse — is searching on her own, comparing, and deciding, often before a physician has said the word out loud.

Consumer advertising in hospice is close to empty ground. Not because it does not work, but because the industry never learned to talk to families and is nervous about trying.

• Search advertising for the moments families actually look — not brand terms nobody types
• Local presence, so you appear when someone searches with no idea what to search for
• Landing pages written for a frightened reader, not adapted from a referral brochure
• Social advertising aimed at the adult child, who is the real decision maker and is not on the platforms your industry assumes
• What the AI assistants say when someone asks about hospice in your city — which is increasingly the answer instead of a list of links

Budget honesty

You are not going to out-spend the agency with twelve reps, and I am not going to recommend a budget that pretends otherwise. Consumer advertising at your size works when it is narrow, local, and pointed at a moment — not when it is a monthly retainer buying impressions.

I will tell you the number I think is worth testing and what result would justify continuing. If it does not clear that bar, we stop.