Context
Westlake Village Hospice needed patients, fast, with about $1,000 a month to spend. The minimum they would have settled for was two admissions.
Diagnosis
This was one of the hardest projects I’ve taken, and the budget wasn’t why.
Hospice communication is aimed at families whose relative may die soon. Nothing in the standard performance marketing kit applies. Urgency is grotesque. Scarcity is grotesque. Emotional pressure is grotesque. And Meta’s own rules block most of what the category would otherwise say, largely for good reason.
That leaves a narrow corridor: explain the service clearly enough that a family can act on it, without pushing anyone, and without getting the account banned.
Meta was still the right channel. At $1,000 a month it was the only one that could get us to the number at all.
Decisions
- Picked Meta on cost per enquiry and accepted the strictest moderation on the internet as part of the deal
- Led every ad on the word certified, which answers whether these people are real without claiming anything about outcomes
- Told families the care costs them nothing, because US hospice is covered by insurance and most people don’t know it. That removes the fear that stops the call, and it does the job pressure would do elsewhere
- Wrote to the adult child rather than the patient, since the patient isn’t the one deciding
- Put a hand, an arm or eye contact in every photograph, so the ads carry care without mentioning what the service is for
- Treated moderation as an ongoing job rather than a setup step, because accounts and ads kept getting blocked
- Upgraded the website and added enquiry capture as a second channel
- Set up the CRM and the intake handling, so an enquiry from a family in distress reached a person quickly
Results
The client reported about twelve new patients against a goal of two, on roughly $1,000 a month. The same account reported that the hospice filled its available capacity. These figures are testimony rather than platform measurements and are labelled that way throughout the page.
What’s not in those ads is the part worth looking at. No countdown, no limited places, no act now, no survival statistics, nothing about death at all. In a category where the standard performance kit is unusable, the offer had to be built out of things that happened to be both true and reassuring.
The recurring fight was moderation. Every block meant reworking the language and the visuals to find something that carried the meaning, stayed inside policy, and still sounded human. There was no clean answer. We found it by iterating.
Then the client stopped calling, which in this business is what success looks like. A full hospice doesn’t need more enquiries.
Twelve admissions on roughly $1,000 a month is the number. The work behind it was finding language that a family in that situation could read without being pushed.