How to Get Quality Senior Living Leads from Google Ads

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One of the biggest challenges with senior living lead generation is educating prospects who know very little about senior living itself.  This is especially true for leads that convert via paid advertising, like Google Ads.

Prospects tend to search for senior living based on need, like downsizing or helping a parent. But they don’t always know what they can afford.

This lack of knowledge can lead to uninformed inquiries in person, over the phone, or on your website. Specifically, when discovering your community in a search engine, a prospect might engage with an ad for independent living when they really need assisted living. They might find you via an ad for assisted living when their loved one needs memory care. Perhaps they’re even drawn to “luxury” experiences even though their finances put them squarely in the “affordable” category.

In short, uninformed prospects can be frustrating for everyone, including the prospect themselves. However, you can minimize these issues by tweaking your Google Ads campaigns. The idea is to educate prospects so they can qualify or disqualify themselves before engaging with your sales team.

Here’s what we mean and how to do it.

How to Get More Quality Senior Living Leads from Google Ads

More leads don’t always translate to better leads. So how can you create an ad funnel that sends the right prospects to your sales team?

1. Include a “starting at” rate.

Your sales team and your prospects have the same first question: Can they afford your community?

Since Google has strict policies about targeting (and because consumers are inexperienced in researching senior living), communities can start qualifying leads by including clear “starting at” pricing in ads and landing pages.

This helps prospects see if they can afford your community before they engage with an ad.

  • If the answer is no and they don’t click, don’t think of it as a lost lead. Remember, if they can’t afford your lowest-priced option, you don’t want them to talk to your sales team anyway.
  • If they choose to click, then they’re probably confident that they can afford your community. This will make your sales reps’ jobs that much easier.

2. Show what your pricing does for residents.

The goal of the landing page is to deliver on the ad’s promise while getting the prospect to give you their contact information. For some, this call to action (CTA) might be downloading a brochure or guide. For others, it might mean requesting a tour or a call with a sales rep.

Before people take that all-important next step, you can help them self-qualify (or disqualify) once again by:

✔    Reminding them about the starting price

✔    Providing additional financial considerations to help them further qualify or disqualify, like “private pay only” or clarifying whether you accept Medicaid

✔    Defining your community’s levels of care

✔    Listing some amenities that your residents enjoy

Adding pricing to your ads and landing pages will likely help reduce unqualified leads, but it won’t eliminate them entirely. People are still people, after all, and some will pursue things they can’t afford on the off chance that they can get a deal, like a luxury community.

Because of that, qualifying prospects early is still worth the effort. Every unqualified lead that you do prevent gives you the chance to spend more on better leads.

3. Think beyond pricing.

Yep, we just spent the first two points talking about pricing. But here are several other ways to qualify leads beyond listing pricing information.

  • Use structured snippets in ads to list community amenities.
  • Use images, videos, and logos to give visuals of your community.
  • Send automated marketing emails to prospects to qualify them further.
  • Use sitelinks to provide alternative pages for clickers, such as downloading a brochure, requesting a phone call, requesting a tour, viewing floor plans, and / or seeing resident testimonials.
  • Assign a “conversion value” to different actions in Google Ads to help it optimize for lower-funnel, higher-quality leads.

Rock Your Google Ads Even More: Bonus Tips

Here are bonus tips to help reduce the number of unqualified leads from paid ads.

✔    Develop a list of keywords that describe your community (to help Google serve your ad to your ideal prospect).

✔    Develop a list of negative keywords that represent what your community isn’t (our team uses over 300 negative keywords to weed out unqualified clicks).

✔    Do not use “broad match.”

✔    Use each Google Ad campaign to achieve the right goals.

o   Display is for awareness.

o   Search is for lead generation.

o   Re-targeting is to advance existing contacts.

✔    Do not send prospects who click on a Google Ad to a generic contact form or the home page of your community’s website. Always use landing pages with forms and information about your community.

✔    Partner with a senior living call center (like LeadGenie) to conduct the initial discovery and sort out the unqualified leads before they advance to your sales team.

More helpful reading and listening:

Need help with your paid ad campaigns?

Our team is devoted to helping our clients get the most out of their paid ad budgets. Get in touch and let’s discuss your Google Ad campaigns.