Archive for category: Marketing Resources

What’s the problem with this marketing story? A 55-year-old woman has been broaching the subject of senior living with her 80-year-old mother. Unfortunately, Dad died three months ago, leaving Mom all alone in the house where the daughter—let’s call her “Gabby”—grew up.

Gabby knows the house is too much for her mom. Mom has been mostly non-committal whenever the topic of senior living comes up, but she doesn’t flat-out say no. Gabby has been casually googling senior living communities in the area. She recently visited one website that caught her eye and downloaded an interesting guide about steps to take when considering senior living. She glanced at it and put it aside to read later when she had more time.

Fast forward a few weeks. Gabby’s mother experienced a fall. Luckily, she didn’t break anything, but Gabby knows she needs to push for senior living sooner rather than later. Coincidently, Gabby received an email this morning from the same community where she downloaded the guide. Gabby pounces and calls the number in the email to book a tour for the upcoming weekend.

Gabby and her mom take the tour, and both fall in love with the community. While they do visit a few more communities, they keep coming back to this one because they’ve developed a great rapport with the sales counselor. Before long, Gabby’s mom signs a lease with the community.

So, again: What’s the problem with this marketing story? You might be thinking, Not a thing. The story demonstrates effective marketing and sales efforts, right?

Sure, it’s great that the community’s site came up in Gabby’s online search. It’s great that Gabby downloaded a piece of content (which means the community got her email address). It’s great that she opened the lead nurturing email. And it’s great that she scheduled a tour.

The issue? The phone call she made to book the tour.

That phone call can cause a potential hiccup in the marketing attribution. Remember, to understand what campaigns bring in the best leads, the sales and marketing teams must be able to close the loop in their reporting. So, the question becomes, how can you track phone calls and synch them with digital contact records in your CRM, like HubSpot?

Luckily, solutions exist, and our favorite is CallRail.

What is CallRail?

In a nutshell, CallRail describes itself as the AI-powered lead intelligence platform that gives businesses of all sizes the ability to track and attribute calls, texts, forms, and chats just as easily as you can track clicks.

The CallRail integration with HubSpot allows businesses like senior living communities to connect call data to HubSpot contact records and track the campaigns generating move-ins. CallRail works with over 200,000 businesses and has been a HubSpot app partner since 2018.

Why integrate CallRail with HubSpot?

Because the senior living sales cycle can be so long, we recommend taking advantage of CallRail and using call tracking as a complement to your existing digital marketing efforts.

Benefits of integrating CallRail with HubSpot:

• Track calls from any source, including online ads, offline marketing, and your website
• See phone-tracking data within HubSpot—no need to toggle between multiple platforms
• Learn which marketing campaigns are driving the most leads so you can make better use of your budget
• Drill down into the summary of each call with CallRail’s Conversation Intelligence—discover keyword phrases, learn about questions prospects have, and identify which sales reps are rocking their calls (and which ones need coaching)
• Bolster your lead scoring—call data is helpful in advancing prospects. If someone calls in directly to the community (showing higher intent), you can use that call data as positive criteria as part of your lead-scoring strategy

Remember, marketing isn’t linear (as much as we’d like it to be).

In a perfect world, prospects would follow the path we marketers have envisioned, like visiting the website, downloading a piece of content, getting lead nurturing emails, and ultimately clicking on a link in one of the emails to schedule a tour via a form on the website.

But as our earlier example suggests, marketing is never linear. The casual, low-intent prospect who hasn’t opened the last two emails you’ve sent might pounce on the email you send tomorrow because her situation has changed. Her mother fell, and now she needs to move much faster than originally planned. But instead of clicking on the link in the email to schedule the tour, she calls instead.

If you’re not tracking that phone call, your marketing and sales team loses out on critical data—not to mention that it will be much harder to close the loop in your marketing and sales reports.

But if you have CallRail integrated with HubSpot, you can ensure all the marketing intelligence associated with that prospect isn’t lost simply because she chose to call instead of clicking on a link.

CallRail + HubSpot: A winning formula.

We don’t have to tell you how long the senior living sales cycle is—and it only seems to be getting longer, especially among Boomers choosing to stay put in their homes.

Get the most out of your marketing efforts by tracking as much as possible, including calls into your community, with CallRail integration with HubSpot.

Reminder, CallRail will . . .

• Help supercharge your HubSpot
• Provide practical insights into calls
• Demonstrate a positive way to use AI

Psst. Don’t know what to do first? Or don’t have the time? We can take this off your plate.

And if you want to know more about CallRail and HubSpot, check out the webinar that Paul Trusik, our Director of Operational Technology, was involved with last year. You’ll find it in the second point in this article, “4 ways to get more marketing insights from HubSpot with AI-powered applications.”

Nothing can transform senior living marketing from meh to WOW faster than video. It’s among our top recommendations to our clients, yet the hardest one for them to embrace.

Listen, we get it. Video marketing can sound intimidating. And a decade ago, it was. But today’s smartphones shoot excellent video, and editing apps simplify splicing and dicing.

The best part? You likely already have someone on your marketing team who can take on editing videos. Or you could task an intern with the role. Gen Z knows a thing or two (or a hundred) about shooting compelling videos. And all they need is their phone. (If neither option is viable, we can help, provided you get good raw footage—more on this below.)

Empower people in your community to shoot raw footage.

The key to getting more videos is empowering existing team members within your community to take more videos. We’re not just talking about the senior living marketing and sales teams, either. The activities department, dining services, and even admin folks can all be tasked with taking videos.

Let them know all they need to do is shoot the raw footage and that your team will handle the rest. Easy-peasy!

Make it simple for people to share their footage with the marketing team.

You need an easy way for people to transfer the raw footage from their phones to a place where your marketing team can access it. Many options exist. If you’re unsure, go with Dropbox.

Here’s what you do:

• Each month, set up a community Dropbox folder for the current month. You’ll have one main Dropbox folder. Within it, you’ll create a new folder each month. Turn off permissions for the other months’ folders as you go along.
• Create a shareable link to the current month’s folder. Make sure the setting says that anyone with access to the link can edit.
• Email the Dropbox link to the staff (or the folks you’ve empowered to be on your video team). Alert them that this month’s folder is awaiting their awesome uploads.

In your email, always include a link to instructions on how to download the Dropbox app to their phone and how to upload videos from their phone to Dropbox. We recommend creating an unlisted YouTube video that only people in your organization can view, demonstrating how to do this on iPhones and Androids.

If people have trouble transferring the raw footage to Dropbox, invite them to stop by the marketing team’s office for help.

In the email, you’ll also want to remind people about the types of video footage you’re looking for.

• Sweet moments between residents
• Video testimonials from residents and their families during move-in day
• Shots of the grounds (flower garden, after a snowstorm, a rainbow)
• Snippets from activities and events
• “Day in the life” videos of residents and employees
• Holiday-specific montages (like the activities department decorating for Christmas or the Fourth of July)

You should also provide reminders about video etiquette and resident privacy.

The more specific your suggestions are, the better. For example, if your community is hosting a Kentucky Derby party, ask for footage of all the fabulous hats people are wearing and capture people toasting with their mint juleps.

Now, you might be thinking, “Yeah, this sounds great. And people will likely have good intentions. But what if it doesn’t result in anything?”

That brings us to our next tip—the magic formula for getting people to participate.

Offer incentives for the best footage.

Think of it this way: If you invested in professional video shoots, you’d spend thousands of dollars.

Your monthly incentive program will cost considerably less. Invest $150 per month to use as an incentive. Give $100 to the person who provides the best footage and $50 to the runner-up. (If you can up the ante, even better. The bigger the incentive, the better the footage—and you’ll likely have more options.)

Promote last month’s winner in the email you send out during the current month.

Don’t just send the email only once. Send it at the beginning of the month, the middle, and towards the end with a “last chance to enter this month’s raw video footage contest.”

At the end of the year, you could hold a community-wide contest where people vote on who recorded the best footage used in a video—and the winner gets a substantial prize, like a $100 bonus.

Assign one or two people on your team to edit video footage and create the final videos.

By running all the footage through your marketing department, you’ll have quality control measures to ensure the content is appropriate and on brand. (Bottom line: You don’t have to use all footage that comes in, either.)

This work doesn’t have to be a heavy lift, either. Video editing can happen through a simple phone app like InShot. We recommend upgrading to InShot Pro because it has more features. It costs less than $5 per month. (Or if you want to install editing software on a desktop, that could work, too. But honestly, being able to do everything on a phone makes it easy and fun.)

Remember, people don’t want overly-produced videos—they want authentic videos, especially on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube shorts. The goal is to make sure the video is engaging and reflects well on your community.

You can easily create any branded visual assets you need in Canva, like thumbnails.

Don’t forget to share your videos in places other than social media—blog posts, relevant web pages, and emails are excellent places to pop in a video.

But when you do post on social media, give a shout-out to the person who captured the raw footage and remember to tag them. They might share the video with their followers, which means more exposure for your community.

It takes time to build momentum. Don’t give up.

Once word gets out about the incentives and people begin seeing their footage online, you’ll be surprised at how eager people will be to participate and share the video snippets they capture.

And again, if you need assistance editing any of the raw footage that comes in, our team can help.