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Aspirational Marketing for Senior Living: Pitfalls to Avoid

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Moving into senior living doesn’t have to be needs-driven only; it can also be desire-driven.

If you agree with this statement, you’ll likely be a fan of aspirational marketing, which involves positioning senior living as a desirable choice rather than a decision made out of crisis.

With aspirational marketing, the goal is to motivate potential residents to view moving into your community as a positive, forward-thinking decision while ensuring that all messaging remains authentic.

However, it’s this “authentic messaging” part that can cause even the best-intentioned marketers to stumble.

Below, we address this challenge by discussing the following:

  • Why authenticity matters in aspirational marketing
  • How to balance reality with aspirations
  • Pitfalls to avoid with aspirational marketing

Why authenticity matters in aspirational marketing for senior living

No one likes a bait-and-switch. That’s the sort of thing that gives marketing a bad name.

For example, if your website promotes a “vibrant community” and the images show people in their sixties dancing in the pub, but the reality is the median age in your community is 81 and there’s no dance floor (or even a pub), well . . . you know how this movie ends, right?

People coming on tours are going to be super disappointed. You’ve wasted their time and your reps’ time. Not to mention, you’ve eroded trust.

On a recent podcast, Debbie Howard, SLS’s president and co-founder, discusses the challenges with aspirational marketing.

Debbie says, “I think most of our clients want to have younger, healthier, less acute residents who are going to stay longer and have a great experience. These clients will ask us to attract a younger, healthier, more aspirational resident who sees senior living as a choice, not a crisis. And yet, when this person comes for a tour, they don’t necessarily see a community filled with younger, healthier people.”

She adds that many clients often want to use stock images that feature younger seniors or represent more diversity, even if the community doesn’t have a diverse population.

“So it becomes a balancing act from a marketing perspective,” she says, “trying to attract that audience while also remaining authentic.”

How to balance reality with aspirations. (Hint: This isn’t just marketing’s burden.)

Doug DeMaio, SLS’s director of client success, says it’s imperative that the marketing team works with people from the community’s operational side to understand what’s truly real.

“We have to understand what initiatives they’re taking on the operational side so we can speak to their vision and mission and make sure that we’re speaking about things that are actually happening,” he explains. “They may be aspirational for the community at this point, and that’s OK, but real initiatives must be in the works.”

For example, let’s say you’re promoting that your community is an incredibly fun place to live. “Is it legitimately a fun place to be?” Doug asks. “Or are we just trying to pay lip service to it being a fun place to be?”

How a partnership between marketing and operations should work

To create an authentic aspirational marketing strategy, the marketing and operations teams must collaborate.

Doug highlights the importance of aligning the community’s actual offerings with the vision marketing promotes. This collaboration ensures the community is actively working toward the lifestyle it wants to portray.

“It’s not about sugarcoating, but about making sure that marketing is based on what’s actually happening or in the works,” he says.

Even if specific programs and initiatives don’t exist yet but plans for them are firmly in place, your marketing can promote them and provide timelines, launch dates, and the like.

For example, if your community is building a pub with a dance floor, you can highlight this information on the website and point out the construction during the tour.

Think of it like the colleges that constantly improve the grounds, dorms, and dining halls—it’s the same concept. People can appreciate the investment and the initiative (and that certain initiatives take longer than others) and envision what life will be like in the community once the initiative is fully launched or completed.

Doug adds, “It’s really about working with the community to balance the desire for aspirational marketing with the need for authenticity by ensuring operational changes back up the messaging.”

Through this collaboration, marketing can promote an aspirational future grounded in reality, creating a truthful and attractive narrative for potential residents.

Pitfalls communities should avoid when attempting aspirational marketing for senior living:

Over-promising and under-delivering: If the marketing portrays a vibrant, youthful community, but prospects see a different reality during a tour, it creates distrust.

Ignoring authenticity: Aspirational messaging should align with actual offerings. Misrepresenting the community’s services, diversity, or lifestyle can lead to disappointment.

Neglecting the current resident base: Focusing too much on attracting younger residents or the needs of your “future” demographic can alienate or undervalue the current resident population—and the prospects who would fit nicely within that population.

Over-reliance on stock photos: We’re not fans of stock images. Using real-life photography builds credibility and ensures there won’t be a disconnect when someone comes in for a tour.

Not collaborating with operations: Aspirational marketing should reflect genuine, ongoing efforts within the community. Without operational backing, marketing messages will fall flat.

Disregarding emotional drivers: Moving to senior living is an emotional decision. While marketing should be aspirational, it must also acknowledge prospects’ fears and concerns when considering senior living. (And yes, younger seniors also have legitimate fears and worries.)

Ignoring long-term prospects: While aspiring to attract younger, healthier residents might be essential to your community’s long-term goals, it’s equally important that your marketing still addresses the needs of those who may require higher levels of care in the future.

Do you need help striking the right balance with aspirational marketing for senior living?

Our content strategists can help you align your messaging with reality and future plans. Get in touch and let’s discuss your messaging needs.

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Senior Living Sales Tips: 3 Faulty Mindsets to Avoid

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Since our founding, we’ve partnered with senior living operators all over the U.S., from start-ups to Top 30 providers. Our most successful clients have scaled from two to thirty-plus locations, while others have doubled in size in just a few years.

One of the biggest takeaways from these client engagements is that successfully growing occupancy often involves dismantling faulty mindsets, especially around senior living sales and marketing and how (and if) they align.

Below, we outline those faulty mindsets and how to reset them for good.

Faulty mindset #1: Thinking that marketing serves sales.

A better way to think about it: Marketing and sales teams serve the prospect.

How the marketing team serves the prospect

In the awareness and early consideration stages, marketing guides prospects until they raise their hand and indicate they want to engage with sales. Marketing also creates effective personas based on leads (and their corresponding demographics) who have already advanced to tours, deposits, and move-ins. The marketing team can use these personas to attract prospects with similar wants, needs, and motivations.

By providing a blend of educational and emotional content, marketing positions the brand as a trusted resource. It also empowers prospects to self-qualify through transparent information like pricing and reviews.

Ultimately, marketing attracts the right prospect, meets them where they are in their decision journey, and segments marketing qualified leads (MQLs) from sales-qualified leads (SQLs). The sales team will pursue the high-intent, ready-to-advance SQLs, while the marketing team will continue to nurture the not-ready-yet MQLs.

How the sales team serves the prospect 

First, let’s back up for a moment. What exactly is a “sales-qualified lead” anyway?

It’s when a prospect takes an action that indicates they want to interact with sales, typically by booking a tour or calling the community directly to speak with sales. This can be a first action or a transition from MQL to SQL, where the prospect advances through lead nurturing via marketing automation emails and text message campaigns.

Once the prospect becomes an SQL, the sales team serves the prospect by building rapport, showing empathy, answering questions, and providing personalized guidance.

Sales will also spend time building a relationship, nurturing and advancing the prospect with creative follow-ups, and overcoming objections.

How the prospect fits in

Prospects determine their status, not marketing or sales. The prospect’s intent (evidenced by their actions) drives their designation (MQL vs. SQL).

Keep in mind that being sales-qualified has nothing to do with being financially qualified, health-qualified, or the right fit. The sales team is responsible for performing the final level of qualification during the discovery process.

The best way for marketing and sales teams to ensure that the marketing budget generates the most qualified leads is to use accurate dispositions in closing leads so the team can quickly identify which channels produce the best leads.

Faulty mindset #2: Thinking quick move-ins are the only answer.

Stop the madness! Quick move-ins are often your most urgent cases. And spoiler: They don’t stay as long as prospects who make decisions based on choice rather than crisis.

Don’t believe me? Consider this.

The 2023 Aline Sales and Marketing Benchmark Report for Senior Housing revealed a strong link between sales cycle length and duration of stay in the community. Short sales cycles (under 30 days) led to significantly shorter stays, often due to high-acuity, urgent cases.

Conversely, prospects nurtured over longer sales cycles, especially those lasting a year or more, resulted in much longer stays, nearly doubling from 18 months to 39 months.

This extended stay translates to more revenue per resident, highlighting the financial benefits of nurturing prospects over a longer sales cycle.

This is precisely why the sales team shouldn’t nag the marketing team about generating only urgent, crisis-driven leads. Doing so is expensive, self-defeating, and unsustainable.

Can you imagine being an airline that only advertises to people wanting to fly a few weeks out? Or a hotel chain that only advertises rooms for same-day booking? Of course not. And yet we still hear from sales teams all the time, “Just get us sales-qualified leads. We only want tours and phone calls.”

Shift your mindset! Building a robust pipeline of prospects in every decision-making stage is much more cost-effective overall and will deliver better ROI.

Faulty mindset #3: Thinking more leads automatically equates to more tours and move-ins.

If you’re bringing in more leads, but they’re not sales-qualified or even marketing-qualified, what’s the point? You’ve wasted money attracting people with little to no chance of converting or advancing to a tour, deposit, or move-in.

When you have an effective digital marketing strategy in place, lead volume often goes down, but lead quality and conversions go up. Conversions are what matter most.

Senior living sales tips: How to reset your mindset by focusing on the following

Quality over quantity. Spend time evaluating uncontacted and lost leads to identify the lead sources that are generating quantity but not quality. Most CRMs offer a report that rolls up leads, tours, deposits, and move-ins by lead source. Focus your marketing investment on the sources generating the highest conversions to tours and move-ins.

Conversion KPIs. Look at the gaps between the marketing and sales handoff since this is where many opportunities are lost. Some of the KPIs to dig into include the following:

⮚      Speed to the lead. It’s critical to understand how much time elapses between when the lead hits the CRM and when the salesperson makes the first outreach attempt. Our data shows that 70% of all scheduled tours are booked within the first hour a lead is generated.

⮚      Persistence and cadence. Look at how many attempts are made to contact the new lead. (For context, it typically takes five to eight attempts to make contact.) You should also consider the types of attempts. Aim for a good mix of calls, texts, and emails. We’ve found that making four attempts on day one achieves the highest conversion of lead to tour. Additional attempts should be made on days two through four.

⮚      Dwell time. You should also understand how long a lead lingers in a stage so you can identify when prospects stall in their journey. Have a strategy to re-engage them before they sit too long. This is especially important for post-tour leads that require quick follow-ups to advance prospects to deposits and move-ins. Remember, each stage—pre-tour, post-tour, and waitlist—requires a strategy.

⮚      Call tracking. Without a doubt, the biggest missed opportunities are unanswered and mismanaged calls. Prospects who call the community have the highest intent and best opportunity to convert to a tour. And yet according to WelcomeHome’s Q2 2024 Sales Benchmark Report, less than 30% of prospects’ calls are answered. Ouch! One of the best things you can do is develop a centralized lead management center—either in-house or outsourced (LeadGenie is a great option).

⮚      Lead segmentation. Use marketing automation, such as HubSpot, to triage leads, send SQLs to the sales team, and move MQLs into lead nurturing and advancing campaigns until they are ready to connect with sales. Lead scoring is an additional strategy to identify lead engagement (how often a prospect visits the website, opens an email/ text, downloads content, etc.).

Spend more time developing relationships within the local community. The highest-converting leads are from “word of mouth” sources, such as friend and family referrals, professional referrals, and community sources. Outreach and relationship building should be a top priority.

Don’t forget to work your “bought and paid for” leads. Most communities have hundreds of prospects labeled “cold” or “lost, but not disqualified.” (The reasons can run the gamut for the latter: stayed home, unable to reach, moved in with family.) Yes, new leads always are more exciting. But all of these “cold” or “lost, but not disqualified” prospects were once your coveted new leads. Re-engage them!

Remember, senior living has an exceptionally long sales cycle. Prospects who weren’t ready months ago may be closer to a decision today. Our “Still Thinking?” campaign moved 20% of “stuck” MQLs to SQLs for one client, while our “Stay in Touch” re-engagement campaign delivered 21 move-ins representing $3.7 million in revenue for another client. There is gold in those cold leads.

Shift your mindset and experience the benefits

Operators who put prospects at the center of their marketing strategy, build a system to nurture them through their journey, balance quick move-ins with longer sales cycles, and focus on lead quality instead of quantity will come out winners with consistent and sustainable occupancy growth.

Need a partner who will help get you there? Book a call with us today.

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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.

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How Google’s AI Overviews Are Affecting Senior Living SEO

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Google began rolling out AI Overviews in May 2024. What are AI Overviews, and how have they affected senior living SEO? Let’s discuss.

What are AI Overviews (AIO)?

When you conduct a search in Google, you’ll sometimes see AI-generated answers and summaries at the top of the search engine results page (SERP). This space has traditionally been reserved for paid ads. When AI Overviews appear, paid ads have less visibility since they’re placed farther down the page. Organic search listings have also been pushed down.

We did a search on “what is senior living.” Below is the screenshot from our desktop.

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Many people are concerned about the length, depth, and breadth of AI’s responses. If all the info a person needs appears on the SERP, why would they click into a website?

Here’s the thing: We’ve been here before. Remember when featured snippets started becoming more prevalent? Google is constantly evolving in terms of how it answers people’s queries. For Google, its number one priority is creating an excellent experience for users (so they don’t go trotting off to a different search engine).

AI Overviews are simply part of this evolution. And yes, businesses and content creators will need to adjust accordingly.

But again, that’s not new.

Do AI Overviews show up on all searches?

Nope. When Google began rolling out AI Overviews, the overviews showed up in 65% of queries, according to Search Engine Land.

However, by July 2024, AI Overviews appeared in only 12% of queries and fell to 7% by the end of the month. Specific industries like education, entertainment, and e-commerce saw the biggest drops.

Why the drops?

AI Overviews are far from perfect. Some embarrassing, incorrect, and downright dangerous results happened early on.

And they’re still proving a bit flaky.

One of our writers conducted a search on August 16, 2024, about who won the Patriots game the previous night. (In real life, the Pats lost.) AIO served up a big fail for a seemingly simple query.

Remember, AI is famous for hallucinating, i.e., making stuff up. (However, Google says AIO doesn’t typically hallucinate like ChatGPT.)

In any event, Google initially let up on the gas a bit as it worked on improving AIO’s output.

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Where do things stand now with AI Overviews?

Honestly? It’s a moving target, and volatility is the name of the game. Google is doing a lot of experimenting with this feature—and not just in response to its own tests. It’s also responding to competition, most notably from OpenAI’s SearchGPT. (OpenAI is the organization that brought us ChatGPT.)

Google appears to be all in with AIO. Over the summer, it announced it was expanding AI Overviews globally.

Have AI Overviews affected site traffic?

Ah, that’s the million-dollar question. Since the roll-out, so many brands have feared the worst—that SEO best practices as we know them are kaput, that they will see their organic traffic nosedive, and that the paid-ad game will become even harder to win.

Interestingly enough, according to Search Engine Land, two large publishers (Ziff Davis and Dotdash Meredith) reported a “negligible” impact in their Q2-2024 shareholder letters. But again, that was Q2.

The jury is still out as to how much of an impact AI Overviews will have over the long term.

But in the short term, here’s some good news. An analysis of 36,000 keywords by seoClarity found that 99.5% of the time, at least one of the top 10 organic search results was included as a source in Google’s AI Overviews.

The takeaway: Ranking highly in Google remains one of the best ways to get featured in AI Overviews.

What should senior living marketers do?

Our recommendation is the same as it ever was: Remain aware, but don’t panic.

Remember, SEO has never been a static “thing.” And while AI Overviews might be one of the biggest disruptors we’ve seen in recent memory, that doesn’t mean the sky is falling all at once. (HubSpot has a great piece on the evolution of search.)

And here’s even more good news: Local search queries are the least likely to trigger AI Overviews, according to Bright Edge, which has been doing extensive research about AIOs.

For example, people searching for “senior living near me” get served “normal” results based on their location. (The monthly search volume for that phrase is a whopping 49,500, according to Semrush.)

That’s why optimizing for local search, which has always been important, is even more critical now, given AIO. (And this includes making sure you have a fabulous Google Business Profile.)

What about those all-important educational queries during the awareness stage?

Currently, the types of searches most likely to trigger AI Overviews are questions (i.e., what is senior living, how much does senior living cost, etc.).

If you’re worried you can’t compete with sites that already rank well for common questions, try taking a broader view of where and how you share educational content:

Do more videos, full stop. We’re always telling clients to focus more on making videos and sharing them widely. YouTube (which Google owns) also acts as a search engine.

For example, according to Vid IQ (which focuses on YouTube search volume), the phrase “what is senior living” has a monthly search volume of nearly 1700 with moderate competition. So, turn that blog post you likely already have about “what is senior living” into a video to maintain visibility and get more traction via YouTube.

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Keep in mind that once you’ve done one video, you can repurpose it across multiple channels:

  • Share across all social media channels where your community has a presence, like Instagram and Facebook.
  • Include on relevant website pages and blog posts
  • Embed in emails

Focus on optimizing for other search engines, including SearchGPT once it launches. We’ll do another post at some point about OpenAI’s SearchGPT, which is one of the biggest threats to Google. Note: As we go to press, SearchGPT isn’t widely available yet, but it’s just a matter of time.

Don’t be afraid of a zero-click world. We’ve been living in it for a while. Here’s an excellent article from SparkToro about our zero-click reality and why marketers should embrace it.

Remember, this too shall pass. Seriously, every time Google does something big—or it says it’s going to—everyone freaks out. Sometimes the freak-out is for good reason. But other times? Not so much. (We’re looking at you, abandoned plans for third-party cookie deprecation.)

Bottom line: Don’t panic about AI Overviews.

Continue following best practices for senior living SEO, and make sure you’ve optimized your site for local search.

Need help? That’s what we’re here for. Get in touch. We’re always happy to jump on a free brainstorming call.

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Senior Living Sales: Creating a Great Schedule-a-Tour Page

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Before we dive into the anatomy of a great “Schedule a Tour” landing page, we have a quick caveat. If your tours suck, it won’t matter how great your “Schedule a Tour” landing page is. (Just keeping it real, folks! 🙂)

Here are some questions to ask:

  • What are people saying about your tours? Check post-tour surveys, online reviews, and other available feedback. Are there any common negative themes that the sales team needs to address?
  • Are the sales reps crushing their tours? It’s easy to become complacent and go through the motions. Investing in training—even if it’s just the occasional half-day session—can have a big ROI.
  • Is there a straightforward tour-day process that everyone understands? For example, each morning, your front desk should receive a list of people who’ll be touring that day. Front desk staff should know what to do and who to call when someone arrives. Do they escort the tour attendees to a warm, inviting room with coffee and tea? Do they offer to take coats or show people where the restroom is? This is where your front desk staff can truly shine as concierges.
  • Do you have a solid post-tour strategy in place? What happens after the tour matters. Some people will be ready to move forward with your community—yay! But what about the others? You must be proactive and develop a plan for prospects who stall or go silent.

You can learn more about creating a red-carpet tour experience here.

OK. Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming . . .

For this article, we’ll assume your community already gives fabulous tours. (But if it doesn’t, start there. Then, come back to this post.)

Below, we share tips for creating a great “Schedule a Tour” landing page.

Empower prospects by having them choose the day and time for the tour.

If possible, allow people to schedule a tour directly on the page. This doesn’t have to be a hassle from a back-end perspective. Calendar integrations (like Calendly) can make it easy for people to select currently open blocks on your sales reps’ calendars while keeping everything in sync.

The benefits of doing this are many:

  • You’re empowering the prospects. They choose the day and time that’s convenient for them.
  • You eliminate unnecessary back and forth. Nothing is worse than playing phone or email tag.
  • You lose fewer qualified prospects to competitors. While the prospect is waiting for a call back from your community, they can book tours with many of your competitors right online.

PRO TIP: If your website and workflow can’t accommodate a calendar integration, revisit your calls-to-action (CTA). If your CTAs currently say, “Schedule a Tour,” you might want to do A/B testing using the phrase “Request a Tour.”

Sure, “Schedule a Tour” and “Request a Tour” essentially mean the same thing. However, the former suggests someone can book online while the latter prepares the person (even if only subconsciously) that they’re merely “requesting” at this stage.

It’s possible your A/B testing won’t show any noticeable differences in conversions. But you can’t know for sure unless you test and measure.

Don’t treat your “Schedule a tour” landing page as an afterthought.

After the home page, the “Schedule a Tour” landing page is one of the most important pages on your site. What does yours look like? Is it light on copy with simply a calendar or a form and maybe your community’s address?

Talk about a missed opportunity!

While you want to make it super simple to schedule or request a tour, you should also make the entire tour experience special—and it begins with this landing page.

Create a robust “what to expect when you visit” section.

Include the following info:

  • Tour length
  • Who’ll be giving the tour (if you have multiple sales reps, highlight their faces, names, and short bios)
  • Where people should park
  • Where people should enter
  • Where should people go after they enter
  • Tour highlights
  • Any special considerations (how to cancel a tour, what to do if the weather is bad, etc.)

Think videos

For our regular readers, we likely sound like a broken record. But video marketing works, and consumers expect to see brand-related videos.

Here are some ideas:

Community overview: Sharing a short (90 seconds, max) video highlighting the grounds and the community can be a great way to give people a feel for the place before visiting.

What the area has to offer: Create a montage or snapshot of all the cool places in the area and some of the outings that residents go on.

Meet our staff: Create meet-and-greet videos with staff members, especially the folks who residents interact with regularly, like dining staff, housekeeping, etc.

Share user-generated content (UGC): Encourage people who attend tours to take pictures, share on social media, and tag your community. Highlight some of the user-generated content on the Schedule a Tour page (get permission to use the photos, of course).

Add FAQs

People skim pages, so it can’t hurt to reiterate points you’ve made elsewhere (like where to park) in easy-to-read FAQs.

Create solid pre-tour communications. 

We talk a lot about post-tour communications, and for good reason. But the pre-tour communications you send via email are just as important.

After all, you want the person to show up, right?

At a minimum, make sure you have the following workflows set up. (Remember, marketing automation is your friend.)

Tour confirmation email

Automatically send an email confirmation once the tour has been scheduled. This email should include the confirmed date, time, and (ideally) the tour guide’s name. It should also include helpful information, like directions, parking, and other relevant instructions.

Most of all, it should sound warm and friendly. “We can’t wait to meet you, Rose, and show you around our community. Tours typically last 30 minutes, but you’re welcome to stay after the tour to check out things on your own. Some places you might want to visit include our wonderful library, hair and nail salon, and café where you can enjoy a treat on us and experience our chef’s yummy sweets.”

Countdown-to-tour-day emails (a.k.a., reminder emails)

Again, use marketing automation to set up these email workflows. If the tour is a week or less away, you can simply send one email along with a day-of reminder (more on this in a moment). But if the tour is a few weeks away, you can send more reminders, provided these emails deliver value.

Each reminder should have that warm, friendly feel and reiterate vital info (tour date, time, guide, etc.) Then, use the email as another opportunity to share:

  • Resident stories – specifically on why they chose your community
  • Reviews
  • Videos

Remember, people are straddling the consideration and decision stages while waiting for the tour. Give them information that will get them even more excited to see your community.

Day-of-tour reminder email

This email should go out in the early AM hours of the day the tour is scheduled. Again, you want to aim for a warm and friendly tone and remind people where to go when they enter the building.

⮚      PRO TIP: Keep in mind that sending email should be a given, but as more and more Boomers enter the mix, you’ll also want to add text reminders to your marketing mix.

Need more tours, deposits, and move-ins?

We have a proven system for getting more high-quality leads and turning them into more tours, deposits, and move-ins. Get in touch and we’ll explain how we do it.

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Content Brainstorming: Match It to the Prospect Journey

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When it comes to content brainstorming, the biggest mistake that senior living marketers make is overlooking the “why.”

Don’t create content just to create content or to check off a box. A chaotic approach like that might have worked fifteen or even ten years ago. But it won’t get you far in an ultra-competitive landscape.

To succeed with content marketing today, you must have a thoughtful strategy guiding your content creation, one that aligns with the buyer’s journey.

Below, we approach content brainstorming by matching it across the three stages of the buyer’s journey: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. (In senior living, we also talk a lot about the “where, whether, and when” stages since the journey is rarely linear.)

Content Brainstorming for the Awareness Stage

In this stage, people are just starting to become familiar with senior living. Maybe an adult child is looking into options for a parent. Maybe an older adult is thinking about downsizing. Or perhaps an urgent medical condition—a fall or dementia diagnosis, for example—has forced someone to begin researching.

They’re learning what senior living is, what it isn’t, who pays for it, and the different levels of care. They might have had a hazy understanding before entering this stage—maybe in the past they knew someone who lived in a community—but now they’re looking at senior living with a fresh eye.

This is an important stage since people often encounter your community for the first time. Helpful, educational content is critical.

But what if you’ve been writing educational content and feel you’ve already answered every question under the sun?

Here’s where to look for fresh content ideas.

1. See what’s trending—literally—with Google Trends.

Google Trends allows you to see what topics are hot across Google Search, Google News, and YouTube.

We like using the Explore function in Google Trends and occasionally plugging in broad terms like:

  • Independent living
  • Assisted living
  • Memory care
  • Senior living
  • Retirement

You can certainly come up with plenty of other topics, but if you regularly check the ones above, you might spot a trend worth exploring content-wise.

For example, we explored “independent living.” Here’s what’s trending in related topics.

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Notice the query “what is palliative care” is up 150%. We went to Semrush and plugged the phrase into the keyword tool. That query alone is highly competitive, with a monthly search volume of 33K. But when we sorted by keyword difficulty, we got the following, which shows this could be a great long-tail keyword phrase to focus on. You could create an informational blog post or guide (or both) that answers some of these less competitive keyword phrases and discusses how palliative care fits into senior living.

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Nope, “what is palliative care” isn’t the sexiest of topics, but consider this:

  • It’s a topic people are searching on.
  • It’s absolutely related to what your IL community is selling. What happens if someone becomes seriously ill while living in your community? How does palliative care fit in?

Don’t like that topic? No problem. Look at one of the other related topics, like “cost of independent living.” Maybe it’s time to revisit existing assets about funding IL or develop a new guide altogether.

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2. Check out AnswerThePublic.

With AnswerThePublic, you can uncover what questions people are searching for in Google. Then, you can create content that answers those questions. Content formats can include:

  • Blog posts
  • Social media
  • Videos
  • FAQs
  • Lead nurturing emails
  • Relevant website pages

By creating a free account on AnswerThePublic, you unlock three daily searches. Here are the results for “senior living.”

Sure, you’ve likely already answered some of these questions in your content. But these questions serve as a reminder that certain queries are evergreen. There will always be people wondering how much senior living costs, whether Medicare covers it, who qualifies for senior living, etc.

Revisit evergreen topics and produce fresh takes.

  • You could do something like “Fact or Fiction Friday” on Facebook and set the record straight on some of these common questions.
  • You could group a bunch of the Q&As into a blog post.
  • You could add them to your FAQ page.
  • You could create a one-sheet that the sales reps share with tour attendees.

3. Visit Quora for more authentic conversations people are having about senior living.

Pay attention to how people answer questions on Quora and who’s answering them. You’ll likely see comments from current and former senior living employees, residents, and families.

People on Quora share their candid, authentic insights that can inform content for all stages. These insights can also influence content needed for things like recruitment.

Content Brainstorming for the Consideration Stage

In the consideration stage, people compare options and schedule tours—hopefully with your community.

Make it easy for people to compare.

 

Create highly visual charts.

At-a-glance comparison charts make it easy to see the differences between your community and your biggest competitors. (Don’t sugarcoat, and never misrepresent your community.)

Encourage residents to share the experiences they’ve had with your community and with other communities.

  • Don’t just ask residents or their families why they chose your community—ask them why they didn’t choose your competitor.
  • Reach out to residents who moved in from another environment, whether that’s another community, home care, or a family member’s home. Get their take on why the move into your community made sense at this time.
  • Ask people to leave reviews about all their experiences with your community—from touring, to moving in, to living in your community.
  • Encourage user-generated content where people create their own content and tag your community so you can share/repost (with permission, of course).

How to turn these stories into helpful content:

  • Record the person (use your smartphone) and share snippets on social media.
  • Do a write-up as a blog post.
  • Use the story as a sidebar in relevant guides (for example, “Senior Living vs. Other Options”).

Differentiate your community in the “sea of sameness.”

Think about the stories that would help people wavering between your community and a competitor.

For example, is your move-in day process better than your competitors? If yes, create content around that process:

  • Publish a comprehensive website page that discusses the move-in process, what to expect, helpful resources, etc. Need inspo? Look at college websites. They know how to build excitement around moving in.
  • Include a call-out to this page on tour confirmation emails. Include a note saying, “We can’t wait to show you around. And even though we might be getting ahead of ourselves, we wanted to show you how easy it is to move into our community.”

Talk about how your community addresses specific elephants in the room.

  • Create content around anxiety over moving. Have an honest discussion and provide strategies for effectively managing anxiety.
  • Talk about romance and sex. Yes, really.
  • Talk about death and dying. Buzz kill or refreshing take? How you write about it is key. Our point: don’t avoid hard topics simply because they’re hard.

Read more ways to differentiate your community.

Content Brainstorming for the Decision Stage

During this stage, people tour and make their final decision.

Elevate the tour experience. (Yes, fabulous content can help!)

We don’t have to tell you how critical tours are. Treat the entire tour “path” accordingly.

  • Don’t just have a simple “request a tour” button on your site. Again, take your cue from colleges and create a page that helps people plan their visit. Where should they park? Where should they go upon entering? Who should they ask for? What can they expect during the tour (length, food, etc.)?
  • Make it easy for people to schedule tours. Ideally, someone should be able to schedule their desired day and time directly on the page—and receive instant email and/or text confirmation. (It’s 2024, folks. There’s ZERO reason why your site shouldn’t have this functionality.)
  • Provide genuinely helpful post-tour content. You should have a follow-up email workflow for people who just attended a tour. Remember, at this stage, people don’t require more education. They already know what senior living is, and they’re familiar with your brand. Instead, focus on content that will speak to them about this monumental decision they’re facing.

o   “How I decided” videos/stories. Create a series of videos or stories where residents talk about the moment they decided to choose your community. What was the deciding factor? What was the moment like?

o   Tips for deciding between two close contenders. For prospects having trouble choosing between a couple of communities, create a checklist or toolkit (more on this below) that helps them look at the pros and cons.

REMINDER #1: The best content in the world can’t make up for a lousy tour experience—or a community that doesn’t match everything the content has been promoting.

REMINDER #2: Even the most logical among us make decisions based on emotions. (Once we’ve made a decision, we often look for a logical rationale to support it.) Make sure some of the content you create triggers emotional reactions.

For example, you could send a series of emails with built-in emotional triggers:

  • “Remember how you felt when you walked through our gardens? Here’s a reminder.” (Include images or a video walk-through.)
  • “Remember how wowed you were by our incredible menus? Here’s what our residents recently had for dinner.” (Again, include images or video.)

Create content that empowers people.

At this stage, many people need the courage to sign on the dotted line, so to speak. Create empowering content that helps them do exactly that.

For many of our clients, one of the most powerful pieces of content is a “how to decide” toolkit. People crave guidance, and if you can provide a tool that helps them, even better.

We’ve also created a “What are you waiting for?” campaign for those who’ve stalled post-tour. It’s a highly visual email campaign that reminds people what they could be experiencing if they lived in your community compared to what they’re likely experiencing in their current environment.

For example, in one email, you could have an image of a harried person lugging a laundry basket down to the basement. Next to that image, you’d have a shot of a cheerful staff member handing freshly folded towels to a relaxed resident.

Need more help with content brainstorming?

That’s what we’re here for. We have fabulous content writers and strategists who can help you create winning content that aligns with the prospect journey. Get in touch and let’s talk about your content needs.

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Content for Each Stage of the Senior Living Marketing Funnel

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Content makes the senior living marketing world go round, but not just any content. You must have strategic content that reaches the right prospect at the right time. Otherwise, what’s the point?

For example, you could have the most fantastic content to go with your sales pitch, but if someone is only in the early stages of learning about senior living, you’ll be wasting your time.

This is why we recommend focusing on the various stages of the sales funnel and matching the best content for each stage.

What’s the sales funnel?

The sales funnel indicates where your prospects are at any point during their buying journey. It is typically segmented into three sections: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.

  • The Awareness stage happens at the top of the funnel. In this stage, people realize that they or a loved one needs senior living. This stage is education focused. Prospects learn about senior living, how much it costs, how to finance it, and different care levels.
  • The Consideration stage happens in the middle of the funnel. As the name suggests, people in this stage are considering their options. Note: Not everyone in this stage will necessarily “buy” senior living. Some might decide to stay in their home or move in with family members, for example. They’re considering all their options.
  • The Decision stage happens at the bottom of the funnel. Folks in this stage are poised to buy. But again, not everyone will buy. And even if they buy, it might not be for months or years. (The sales cycle in senior living is notoriously long for certain lifestyle options, like independent living.) And, of course, they might not choose your community.

In senior living marketing, we also discuss three other stages—Whether, Where, and When—that coincide with the Awareness, Consideration, and Decision stages.

For example, during the Whether stage, people often wonder “whether” they should move into senior living, whether they can afford it, and whether they must sell their home before moving. They’ll turn to the Internet for answers to these questions and to educate themselves (which is why this stage coincides nicely with the Awareness stage). Read more about the Whether, Where, and When stages.

Why is it critical to match the right content to the right stage?

As we mentioned, if you give someone good content at the wrong time, you’re essentially wasting good content. You’re also missing an opportunity to deliver content that will resonate better with the prospect.

For example, the divorced woman in her early sixties who is thinking about retirement isn’t interested in reading customer stories about your community or coming in for a tour yet. She’s still in the early Awareness stage, where she’s educating herself about senior living, costs, and so forth.

On the other hand, someone who has already toured your community doesn’t need a guide explaining what senior living is. They are way past that point. And if you send it to them as follow-up content after they tour your community, you’ll not only look silly, but you’ll also waste an opportunity to give them content that could actually be helpful in their decision-making process.

What type of content formats work best for each stage?

What follows isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s a good overview of the types of content that senior living marketers and writers should be planning.

Good senior living marketing content for the Awareness stage

  • Blog posts optimized for search
  • Infographics
  • Videos
  • Listicles
  • Educational guides (e.g., Senior Living 101, How to Fund Senior Living)
  • Educational webinars
  • General FAQs (about senior living in general)
  • Self-directed surveys (e.g., What senior living lifestyle is best for you?)

Good senior living marketing content for the Consideration stage

  • Case studies/customer stories
  • Comparison charts (your community compared to others in the area)
  • Day-in-the-life videos
  • Day-in-the-life blog posts
  • Meet the staff videos/blog posts
  • Webinars
  • Specific FAQs (about your community specifically)
  • Decision toolkit
  • Interactive elements (like interactive floor plans)
  • Lead nurturing emails

Good senior living marketing content for the Decision stage

  • Invites to on-site events (book clubs, musical events, lunch & learn series)
  • Testimonial videos
  • Case studies/customer stories
  • Schedule a tour (make sure people can schedule their own)
  • Post-tour nurturing emails

Notice that some content will overlap between stages. For example, case studies and customer stories can be used in both the Consideration stage, when people are thinking through their options, and the Decision stage when they have whittled their choices down to your community (hopefully) and one or two others.

When creating the content, make sure your buyer personas are current. Not every community’s ideal resident is the same. For example, a luxury community that caters to high-net-worth people won’t spend money developing content about how to afford senior living.

Content marketing is an investment, but when done right, you’ll enjoy an excellent ROI.

The key is doing it right. Here are more articles to help you write compelling content that converts people in various sales funnel stages.

✔    How to Create Engaging Content for Your Website

✔    Content Offer Ideas for Senior Living Marketing

✔    Content Marketing for Local SEO: What to Write

✔    Best Content for Email Marketing to Baby Boomers

✔    More Bottom-of-the-Funnel Content Ideas for Senior Living

✔    What to Look for in a Content Marketing Agency for Senior Living

Or you can reach out to us and have our team of fabulous writers do the heavy lifting for you.

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Senior Living Sales: Cold Leads Success Story

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When it comes to senior living sales, we often discuss best practices, like finding gold in lost or cold leads. But stories are much more compelling, right?

Below, we share results we achieved for a client and the takeaways you can learn and apply to your own community.

Many lost leads aren’t actually lost—they’re simply deferred.

Remember, lost leads were once qualified leads.

Unfortunately, something happened along the way that forced these leads into the dark abyss known as the “lost lead” category in your senior living CRM. Leads in this bucket might also have labels like cold, unable to reach, decided to stay home, chose home care, or moved in with family.

But here’s the secret about these leads. Don’t think of them as lost forever. Think of them as deferred.

  • That person the sales team reached out to only once or twice might not have been ready for the sales call then, but they could very well be months later.
  • Those who decided to stay home might think about things differently after a snowy winter.
  • That person who chose home care might have more needs than the aides can handle—or that the person’s home can accommodate.

Our point: Revisiting lost leads is a smart strategy. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. And thanks to marketing automation, you don’t need to put the onus on your senior living sales team to call or manually email hundreds or thousands of lost leads. A turnkey email campaign (we call ours “Stay in Touch“) can do the heavy lifting. If someone bites (i.e., engages), then the sales reps can get involved at that point.

Here’s a recent success story using this approach.

We went through this process with one of our clients, Sinceri Senior Living. They had around 4,300 cold leads that they wanted to re-engage. Our automated “Stay in Touch” email marketing campaign resulted in 20 move-ins, equating to three million dollars in revenue. Not too shabby, right?

Even better: An additional 350 (or so) leads re-engaged (whether it was moving to marketing-qualified or sales-qualified status), so the sales reps then had another 350 engaged leads to work with.

⮚      TAKEAWAY: Don’t ignore lost or cold leads. View them as opportunities. Create a plan for entering them into an automated email campaign that will re-engage and convert at least some of them to tours, deposits, and move-ins.

Most stalled leads won’t stay stalled forever.

Your community likely has a bucket of marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) that have gone through your nurturing workflows, yet they still haven’t advanced to sales-qualified lead (SQL) status.

Stuck MQLs also offer great opportunities. Sure, after they’ve gone through your nurturing workflows, you could simply enroll them in your email newsletter and call it a day. But that likely won’t be enough to nudge them.

That’s why we recommend creating a slow-burn, long-term drip campaign. We call ours “Still thinking?” In it, we offer ways for the person to self-identify where they’re at in the process, if things have changed for them, and so forth.

Again, this is an automated email campaign—no heavy lifting for sales or marketing (once you set it up). The goal is to re-energize some of the stuck leads. It won’t work on all of them, but even if you can get a small portion to move forward, it’s all good.

And for the rest of the leads that truly cool down to the point they enter the “lost” bucket? You can give them a break from emails for a while before entering them into the “Stay in Touch” campaign. And don’t worry: Good marketing automation, like HubSpot, has settings you can enable to ensure people don’t go through the same workflows repeatedly.

Here’s a recent success story using this approach.

We used the “Still thinking?” campaign with Sinceri. The result? Twenty percent of the stalled MQLs advanced to SQL status.

⮚      TAKEAWAY: You have to nudge MQLs along. Yes, even after they’ve been through the initial nurturing workflow. The sales cycle for senior living can be long (especially for independent living).

Would you like to experience similar conversions with your cold or stuck leads?

The results we achieved for Sinceri Senior Living weren’t an isolated experience. We strive to get these results for all of our clients. Get in touch and let’s talk about how to convert cold and stuck leads into move-ins.

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How to Market Senior Living Communities in a Sea of Sameness

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One of the biggest challenges in how to market senior living communities is differentiation. On the surface, most communities look the same. They all promote having the best care, best staff, best dining, best activities, best blah, blah, blah. (Sound familiar?)

If you can’t figure out what makes your community genuinely different and special—in other words, its unique value proposition—prospects will resort to focusing on price and location when deciding. Price wars are a race to the bottom, and you can’t move your community, so get ready to play the “let’s make a deal” game.

That’s the bad news.

But here’s the good news.

Developing a unique value proposition isn’t as hard as you might think. The unique value prop doesn’t need to be sexy or over the top to “win.” It simply needs to be true and resonate with your prospects.

So, how do you create this value prop? Begin by leaning into the things that your happiest residents and families continually say about your community.

Here are some ideas to get you going.

  1. Embrace your newness.

If yours is the newest community in your market, lean into that. Be the bright, shiny penny and play up your newness. You likely have the latest technology and modern finishes, and residents can be the first to live in their space. No scuffs, scratches, or stained carpets here.

But remember, the newness won’t last. Claim this position while you can, but behind the scenes, work on developing another value proposition to replace it when the time comes.

  1. Embrace your oldness.

OK, so maybe you can’t play the new game, but you can focus on your experience, stability, and years of service to your community. Older communities often have better locations and larger apartments. Promote this. Not to mention, older adults turned off by ultra-modern aesthetics might feel more comfortable in older communities.

Bonus: You might be able to offer a lower price point since competitors are paying significantly more for construction and financing.

  1. Promote high acuity levels of care.

Several regional and national brands position their ability to manage high-acuity residents. Their messaging about caring for the “frailest of the frail” attracts their ideal prospects (or their families). These communities don’t try to be all things to all people. Instead, they focus on what they’re great at: serving older adults who need more care.

If this describes your community, focus on your staffing levels, staff training, and the technology that supports better management of frail seniors. Include compelling proof of your community’s excellence by achieving deficiency-free status.

  1. Highlight luxury.

If you are the luxury price leader, your marketing messaging should focus on exclusivity, discernment, and lifestyle.

Here are themes that tend to resonate with people seeking luxury:

  • When only the best will do.
  • Dream bigger.
  • You earned this.
  • Design your life one day at a time.

The key is focusing on what elevates your brand to luxury status. For example, other communities might have fitness centers, but your community has personal trainers.

  1. Highlight affordability.

The key to marketing an affordable product is positioning your community as a responsible choice for consumers who are planners and don’t want to run out of money. Your community offers everything that your prospects need without making them pay for additional amenities that they’ll never use.

This is an example of an un-sexy but highly effective message for people who can’t afford frills or simply aren’t interested in them.

  1. Show off your specialty.

Maybe you only offer independent living or stand-alone memory care. Your marketing messaging can promote all the advantages of being purpose-built for that lifestyle to sell against competitors offering multiple levels of care.

Specializing in just one lifestyle should give you an advantage to create a unique experience that your competitors can’t provide in a more blended model.

  1. Niche down.

Niche developments often appeal to older adults who want to live with people with similar backgrounds, experiences, and hobbies.

Here are some examples of senior living communities with interesting niches:

  • Lasell Village in Newton, Mass, is a university-based retirement community (UBRC) built on the Lasell University campus. The community says the pursuit of lifelong learning is central to its lifestyle.
  • The Lillian Booth Actors’ Home is built for retired Broadway professionals (actors, musicians, directors, and designers).
  • The design-build company Haskell has created senior housing for Naval and Air Force personnel: Fleet Landing in Florida and Falcons Landing in Virginia.
  • There has been a lot of press about developing communities for retired NFL players.
  • Some companies are building specialty properties for the LGBTQ community, while others are focused on a specific culture.

The above is a small sample of ideas, but many others exist, like big campuses, small residential homes, buy-ins, rentals, and many more. The key is identifying your authentic value proposition and building your marketing messaging and campaigns around your strengths.

Need help standing out in a sea of sameness?

Messaging is one of our core services and specialties. Get in touch, and let’s brainstorm how to market senior living communities like yours.

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Are You Maximizing Your Senior Living Marketing Budget?

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The success of your senior living marketing—whether in-house or outsourced—is measured by tours, deposits, and move-ins. While it might be tempting to think your marketing is “working” as long as those three things consistently trend upwards, you could be leaving money on the table and not even realize it.

Budget season is the perfect time for a gut check. Here’s what to do . . .

Review your traffic and conversion sources.

As the saying goes, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Questions to ask:

  • Do you have complete visibility into each of your marketing channels, including digital and traditional?
  • Are you using UTM tags properly so you know where people are coming from and how, when, and where they convert?
  • Do you use centralized marketing technology, like HubSpot or something similar, that empowers you to monitor traffic sources and campaigns throughout the prospect’s journey?
  • Does your marketing tech integrate with your CRM? If not, the two systems won’t communicate, leading to disjointed data.

By asking these questions, you can identify areas you need to fix or improve. For example, if you recently launched an email marketing campaign, but the tracking is broken or non-existent, you won’t know if the campaign is working—or how well.

Or maybe your website traffic and conversion sources are not aligned or a historically successful source of qualified leads is trending down.

Again, these things can be subtle and easy to miss, especially if conversions seem good and the sales team appears happy. You must be proactive, pop the hood, and see what’s what. If you don’t, you might lose out on viable leads that could turn into tours, deposits, and move-ins.

Evaluate your content’s performance.

You need content for all phases of the buyer’s journey. However, too many marketing teams fall into the trap of thinking that the most popular content produces the most conversions.

That’s not always the case, which is why it’s essential to understand which pieces of content drive the most tours, deposits, and move-ins.

For example, guides like “How to fund senior living” tend to be top downloads for many communities. But the question is, how many of the people who download the funding guides ultimately convert into move-ins?

With some of our clients, we’ve discovered that when we look at the people who’ve moved in and best reflect the ideal customer profile, another piece of content—like a decision-making toolkit—actually converts more move-ins.

Intel like this can help you adjust and optimize your content marketing strategy. This is why you shouldn’t get hung up on vanity metrics like most downloads. Instead, always consider which content (and which content paths) produce the best conversions to tours, deposits, and move-ins.

Assess your budget allocation, look for wasteful spending, and adjust accordingly.

Here’s a four-step process to follow when developing your budget. Doing this will help ensure you’re putting all of your marketing dollars to good use:

  • Consider your current budget for each channel (e.g., organic, paid, social, etc.). Remember, the best way to inform future strategy is through current performance.
  • Review each channel’s results. And not just contacts and leads—you must know which channels are producing tours, deposits, and move-ins.
  • Identify any gaps. What don’t you have in your marketing stack? For example, if you haven’t launched a new version of your website in three years, you probably need a new one or a significant refresh at the very least.
  • From there, reallocate your budget accordingly. Put more dollars toward what’s delivering the most tours, deposits, and move-ins.

Now’s also a good time to audit your martech stack for technology and software you’re still paying for but not using. You’re wasting budget that you could be using somewhere else that actually helps generate more leads—and ultimately tours, deposits, and move-ins.

  • PRO TIP: Communities often wonder how to split their budget between digital and traditional marketing. This will depend on various factors, including the care level you’re selling, what type of community you have (rentals vs. life plan communities, for example), and even location. A rule of thumb: for-profit properties, an 80/20 split makes sense. For non-profits, a 70/30 split works (these communities tend to send more direct mail).

Understand and monitor key metrics.

Do you know the lifetime value of a resident? If not, tackle that first. It’s the granddaddy of all metrics.

Make sure you’ve set up clear goals and conversion tracking:

  • Define and track specific conversion goals, such as form submissions or phone calls.
  • Analyze conversion funnels to identify potential drop-off points. (More on drop-offs below.)
  • Implement tracking codes and pixels for accurate measurement.

Analyze demographic and behavioral data:

  • Explore demographic insights of website visitors and email subscribers.
  • Analyze user engagement based on age, location, and interests.
  • Use this data to refine your buyer personas and marketing messages for them.

Pay attention to funnel drop-off points:

  • Identify stages in the conversion funnel with high drop-off rates.
  • Analyze user behavior, messaging, or design issues causing drop-offs.
  • Optimize those specific areas to improve conversion rates.

Remember, the above items still matter if you work with an outside senior living marketing agency.

The primary difference is that you’ll collaborate with the agency about these items.

If you’re questioning whether your agency is the right fit and delivering measurable ROI, you should take a step back and evaluate their work—and your relationship with the account team.

Remember, a good agency will:

  • Create custom dashboards that highlight the metrics that matter most in achieving your goals
  • Be proactive in delivering reports, analysis, and recommended adjustments
  • Not be afraid to make changes based on what the data says
  • Act like a partner rather than a vendor

Some communities might find the agency’s results OK, but the customer service is severely lacking. You shouldn’t have to sacrifice one for the other. A good agency will value its relationship with you and promptly respond to emails, calls, and requests.

Still not sure you have the right agency?

Check out eight signs it might be time to fire your senior living marketing agency. Or you can simply contact us! We value our client relationships and love getting great results for them.