Marketing a care home in the UK: the inspection rating and the fee question decide the enquiry

Two things decide most care home enquiries in the UK, and your marketing controls neither of them. The first is your inspection rating, published by the regulator whether you advertise or not and read by every family that finds you. The second is money: who pays, what the weekly fee covers, and whether you take placements funded by the local authority. The job of a care home's marketing is therefore narrower and more useful than a campaign. Make sure what is already published about you is accurate and easy to find, then answer in public the questions the inspection report does not answer, in the order a family asks them.

This page covers the regulator's part in how families find you, how to use a rating accurately in marketing, the fees and funding pages that most homes never write, where UK families actually look, and the enquiry route itself.

Start with what is already published about you

Care homes in England are registered with and inspected by the Care Quality Commission, which publishes a profile for every service with its rating and the full inspection report. Scotland has the Care Inspectorate, Wales has Care Inspectorate Wales and Northern Ireland has the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority, each with its own published reports and its own framework. In every nation the regulator's page for your home is public, is linked to from directories and local authority listings, and often ranks for your own name.

So the first piece of work is housekeeping rather than marketing. Check that the regulator holds the correct service name, address, registered manager, bed numbers and categories of care, because families and professionals screen on those fields, and check the same details match your website, your Google Business Profile and every directory you appear in. A home listed twice under two spellings loses enquiries to its own duplicate.

Using your rating accurately, which is also a rules question

State your rating plainly, say the date of the inspection it came from, and link to the report so a family can read it themselves. A home that links to its own report is trusted more than a home that quotes one line from it.

Accuracy here is governed by the same advertising rules as any other claim. The CAP Code, administered by the Advertising Standards Authority, requires you to hold evidence for a claim before publication and not to mislead by omission. That means three disciplines: do not call the home outstanding unless that is the rating you hold, do not quote a strong line from one part of an inspection while the overall rating is lower, and do not keep a rating on the website after a newer inspection has replaced it.

If your current rating is requires improvement, write the page anyway. Say what the inspection found, what you changed, when you changed it and who to ring with questions. Families are not reading for perfection, they are reading to find out whether anybody is being straight with them, and the homes that say nothing are the ones that look worst.

The fees and funding page, which almost nobody writes

The question that ends most enquiries is money, and it is usually asked by somebody who has never had to learn how adult social care is paid for. Publishing the structure clearly does two jobs at once: it answers the question, and it stops you spending time on enquiries that were never going to become a placement.

• Say what the weekly fee includes and what is charged separately, by care type, and how a fee is reviewed.
• Explain the routes in plain words: a resident who funds themselves after a local authority financial assessment, a placement funded by the local authority, NHS continuing healthcare where the need is primarily a health need, and a third party top up paid by a relative.
• Say whether you accept local authority funded placements, and whether that changes by care type or by availability.
• Explain the assessment sequence, who carries out each part and how long each step takes in your experience, and point families to the independent sources on the means test rather than restating thresholds that change.

Separate your pages by the words families actually use. Residential care, nursing care, dementia care and respite are four different searches and four different decisions, and a single page trying to be all four answers none of them well.

Where UK families and professionals actually look

Route	What it decides	What to do about it
The regulator's own directory	Rating, registration, categories of care	Keep every field correct and current
Google Business Profile	Whether you appear in the local map results	Correct category, tour hours, real photographs, answered questions, replies to reviews
Care directories and review sites	The shortlist a family builds in one evening	Claim the listing, complete it, keep fees guidance and availability honest
The local authority	Placements for council funded residents	Be on the framework or approved list, and keep the contract contact current
Hospital discharge teams	Crisis placements, often within days	One named contact, a phone answered the same hour, and a page they can hand to a family

The enquiry handling and referral funnel behind these routes, written for United States senior living rather than for a regulated UK care home, is set out in our note on marketing for assisted living, and the measurement in it transfers cleanly even though the regulation does not.

The pages a family reads before they ring

Write these properly and the number of enquiries that turn into visits rises without any more traffic.

• A typical day. Meal times, what the food actually is, activities this month, and how a resident who stays in their room is included.
• Visiting. Hours, whether family can join a meal, grandchildren and pets, and how you handle an outbreak.
• Staffing. Who is on at night, the qualifications of the care team, how long the manager has been in post.
• What happens when needs change. The question underneath every enquiry is whether a parent will have to move again.
• End of life care, written with care, because the family reading it is already thinking about it.
• Moving in. The assessment, the paperwork, what to bring, the first week.

The enquiry route, access and data

The person enquiring is often older themselves, is usually on a phone, and is sometimes doing this from another part of the country late at night. A form is not an enquiry route on its own. Publish a number that is answered, say who answers it out of hours, and give an email that reaches a person.

Accessibility is a legal duty as well as a courtesy. The Equality Act 2010 requires reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and for a website that means readable text that scales, real contrast, captions on video, forms that work with a keyboard and a screen reader, and a route to a human for anybody the website defeats.

Enquiries about care contain health information, which UK GDPR treats as a special category of personal data. Keep enquiry notes in the system you use for care records rather than in a marketing list, and never put any detail about a resident's health or circumstances in a public reply to a review. Thank the reviewer, say what you have changed, and invite the conversation offline.

Ratings, fees and group pages: what managers ask

Should we publish our fees?

Publish the structure, what is included at each care type, and how a fee is reviewed. Families screen on this before they call, and the enquiries you lose by publishing are the ones that would have ended at the same question three calls later.

Can we use our CQC rating in advertising?

Yes, as the rating you currently hold, with the inspection date, and ideally linked to the report. Quote it as it stands rather than selecting the strongest phrase from the report, and take it down the day a newer inspection replaces it.

Most of our residents are placed by the council. Is marketing worth anything?

Yes, and the work is different. Contract and framework relationships bring the placements, so the marketing effort goes into being the home that discharge teams and brokerage officers choose first: availability that is current, a named contact, an answered phone and a single page they can hand to a family. Your public pages then do the job of reassuring that family after the council has named you.

Do homes in a group need their own pages?

Each home needs its own page, its own profile and its own phone number, because the rating, the staff and the fees are specific to that building. The group site holds the company story and the care type explanations, and every home page links into them.

The question a daughter types at midnight

A family deciding between three homes now often asks an assistant instead of running five searches: which homes near this town take dementia residents, which ones accept council funding, what the fees include. The reply comes back as a short list with reasons attached, assembled from regulator data, directories, review platforms and the homes' own pages, and none of the homes named is told it was considered. Read that answer for your own town, using the questions a family would use, and you learn what is being said about your home and who said it. AI Knows Us was built for exactly that reading: the homes an assistant names, and the source behind each one.