The guide
A care home group should market each home as its own local business, with the group brand sitting underneath as a trust signal rather than as the thing being advertised. Families search for care in a town, not for a group, so the work that fills beds happens home by home, while strategy, brand, website structure, templates and reporting are built once and shared across all of them.
Updated August 2026
Shared at the back, local at the front. That one decision separates groups that fill beds evenly from groups where two homes are full and two are quietly struggling. In brief:
Side by side
Market each home, and let the group brand do its work quietly underneath. A family choosing care is choosing a building, a manager, a garden and a set of reviews. They are not choosing a portfolio.
| Approach | What it does well | Where it reaches its ceiling |
|---|---|---|
| One group brand, marketed centrally | Consistent look, one budget to manage, useful for recruitment and for reassuring families who are already looking at you | Families do not search for your group name, so the advertising reaches almost nobody new, and a strong home ends up subsidising a weak one |
| Every home entirely on its own | Genuinely local, each manager owns their own enquiries, and it is easy to see what is working where | Everything is built five times over, quality drifts between homes, and nobody can tell whether a poor month is the home or the market |
| Shared at the back, local at the front | Strategy, brand, website structure, filming approach and reporting built once, then applied home by home with local photography, local pages and local advertising | Takes more discipline to set up, and needs one person who owns it across the group rather than five people doing it in the gaps |
The third approach is the one that holds up as a group grows. It is also the only one that lets you compare homes fairly, because every home is being marketed the same way. The routes families actually use are local in every case: 55% of families used directories, 40% used online search and 38% relied on word of mouth in Care England and Log my Care's national study of 1,000 people arranging care. A directory listing is a listing for one home. A search happens in one town. A recommendation comes from one family who lived it.
The numbers
Your homes can be moving in opposite directions in the same year, whatever the group accounts say. carehome.co.uk's Caring Britain report found that demand for care homes grew by 1.8% across the country in 2025, and that the national figure hides very different local pictures. The West Midlands saw demand rise by 7%, while the East of England fell by around 1%, London by 0.2%, and the South West grew by only 0.6%, as reported by Caring Times.
Occupancy varies the same way. The CQC's State of Care 2024/25 reports that 84% of care home beds in England were occupied, up from 78% in 2021/22, with London the highest at 87%. A group with homes in two of those regions is running two different businesses.
So the group-level question is never how is our marketing doing. It is which of our homes is under-performing its own local market, and why.
The split
Share the things that do not change from town to town. Keep local everything a family can see.
Different in every town
The address and the map, photographs of that actual building and those actual staff, the manager's name and face, the reviews, the Google Business Profile, the local advertising audience, the open days, and the phone number that rings inside that home. This is everything a family sees, and it is the part that decides whether they enquire.
Three exceptions
Every group tries to standardise at least one of these, and every group regrets it.
They are attached to a place. Four hundred glowing reviews across the group do not reassure a daughter looking at the one home nearest her mother. Each home needs families reviewing that home, on its own profile and its own listing.
A family recognises the person who will actually care for their mother. Photography of a different home in the group reads as evasion, even when nobody can quite say why. Real people, filmed in the home they work in, never anything generated.
carehome.co.uk found that 52% of enquiries come from people who need care within a month, and 16% within a week. A central enquiry inbox that replies on Thursday has already lost that family, however good the home is.
The four routes
Whoever it is, they need to be accountable per home, not per group. That single requirement rules out most of the options quickly.
| Route | Works well when | Its honest ceiling |
|---|---|---|
| A central marketing manager in-house | The group is large enough to keep one person busy, and they know the homes and the managers personally | One person cannot film, run advertising, build pages, chase reviews and answer enquiries across several sites, so something is always waiting |
| Home managers doing it locally | Managers are genuinely good at it and have the hours, which is rarer than it sounds | It competes with running a home, and it always loses. Quality and pace vary by manager |
| A different local agency per home | Each agency knows its own town and its own local press | Several versions of your brand, several reporting formats, and no way to compare one home against another |
| One agency working home by home | The agency structures the work per home and reports enquiries and move-ins per home | You depend on one relationship, so the accountability terms matter more than the credentials |
A general marketing agency can do good work for a group, and plenty do. The ceiling is that care has a buyer nobody else has to think about. There is more on that in the guide to choosing an agency for a care home, and a look at the six kinds of company that market care homes in the UK.
Getting it wrong
The group site with a location dropdown. One shared page listing five homes gives local search almost nothing to attach to a place. Each home needs a real page, with a real address, its own photographs, its own manager and its own enquiry path.
One Google Business Profile for the whole group. A single profile cannot rank in five towns. One profile per registered address, each claimed, categorised, photographed and kept current. If families are struggling to find you at all, start with what a family finds when they look a home up.
Averaged reporting. A group at 92% occupancy can contain a home at 74%. Reporting that only shows the group hides exactly the home that needs help, often for a quarter or more.
The house style that flattens every home. Groups often standardise photography and language so hard that all five homes read as identical. Families are choosing between homes, so the differences are the whole point.
The order that works
Expect the first home to show movement in weeks and the whole group to take a couple of quarters, because the work is sequential by design. The mistake groups make is starting everywhere at once: four homes launched together means four half-finished sets of photography, four managers half-briefed, and no clean read on whether any of it worked.
Not the worst home, the clearest one. Empty beds, good care and low visibility is the ideal starting point, because you can see quickly whether visibility was the issue.
Its own page, its own Google Business Profile, its own photography and film, its own local advertising audience, and its own enquiry response. No shortcuts at this stage, because this home becomes the template.
Enquiries, viewings and move-ins for that home, compared against what it did before, never against the group average. Ask every enquirer how they found you and write it in the same place each time.
The second home takes a fraction of the time, because the strategy, structure and approach already exist. Only the local parts are new: the photographs, the manager, the audience, the reviews.
January is worth planning around. carehome.co.uk sees searches rise by an average of 29% every January compared with December, so a group that finishes its first build in November is ready for the busiest month of the year, and one that starts in January is not.
How it is priced
Usually as a mix: something shared at group level, something that scales per home, and something that only exists where money is being spent locally. There are four models you will meet, and no honest way to quote them without knowing the group.
Most group arrangements combine two or three of these. What matters more than the model is whether the invoice can be read home by home. If it cannot, you will never know which home is paying for which result. Price depends entirely on the number of homes, how much needs building and how much filming is involved, so it is worth walking through on a call rather than guessing from a page. Heritage works on results rather than a standing retainer.
Who this is for
Groups of roughly three homes and above, where at least one home has beds it wants filled with private residents and the others are steady. A private-pay family chooses a home directly rather than waiting on a placement, and they want an honest picture of daily life before they visit, which is exactly what home-level marketing gives them.
It is the wrong priority for a group whose homes are all full with a waiting list, for a group in the middle of a serious staffing problem, where the honest answer is to fix that first, and for a group of very small sites where the numbers rarely support the work. It is also not the answer to a care problem. Marketing brings a family to the door sooner. What happens after that is the home's own. If you want the single-home version of this argument first, start with the routes to occupancy that actually move, or read what makes marketing a care home its own discipline.
Common questions
Mostly each individual home, with the group brand working underneath as a trust signal. Families search for care in a town, not for a group, and they choose a building, a manager and a set of reviews. The group name reassures them once they are already looking at a home, so it belongs on every page and profile without being the thing you advertise.
Yes, and a substantial one. Each home needs its own page with its own address, its own photographs, its own manager, its own reviews and its own enquiry path, because that is the page local search and AI answers can attach to a place. A shared page with a location dropdown gives search engines nothing local to hold on to.
Yes. One profile per registered address, each one claimed, categorised, photographed and reviewed separately. A single group profile cannot rank in several towns, and reviews left for one home do not reassure a family looking at another home thirty miles away.
Some of it is, some of it is not. Strategy, brand assets, website build, templates and reporting are done once and shared across the group, so the cost per home falls as the group grows. Advertising spend, filming and reviews stay stubbornly local, because each home needs its own audience, its own faces and its own proof.
One agency is usually the better answer, provided it can work home by home rather than treating the group as a single account. Several local agencies means several versions of your brand, several reporting formats and no way to compare one home against another. The question to ask is not how many homes they have worked with, but whether they will report enquiries and move-ins per home.
Keep reading
What to ask, what to look past, and the answers that tell you who has actually worked in care.
Filling private bedsThe routes to occupancy that actually move, in the order a home should work through them.
Being found locallyWhy families miss a good home online, and the order to fix it in, town by town.
