Senior-Living-Sales-Strategies-for-High-Intent-SQLs

Senior Living Sales Strategies for High-Intent SQLs

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Working with high-intent sales-qualified leads (SQLs) who are close to making a decision can be quite thrilling for a senior living sales director.

No wonder, too. This is the sales director’s job and their source of income. And with the finish line in sight for everyone, it’s natural to get excited. After all, what’s left to do?

Turns out quite a lot. Because at the end of the day, high-intent SQLs are still human, and humans are notoriously unpredictable. Which is why the way sales directors interact with high-intent SQLs will and should be different from the way they interact with other senior living leads.

Head spinning yet? Don’t worry. We’ve got you. Below, we discuss several senior living sales strategies for high-intent SQLs.

1. Senior living sales strategies: Stop selling

OK, we know what you’re thinking: Say what? But here’s the thing: You no longer need to sell to your high-intent SQLs, at least not in the traditional sense. They’re about as “in” as they’re going to get since your community is on their shortlist.

Instead of selling to them, you need to find out if anything’s giving them pause. To do that, ask a version of the following question: “In your mind, what are some of the community’s drawbacks? I can’t promise that I’ll be able to fix or change any of them, but maybe there’s something I forgot to mention that might help alleviate any concerns.”

We can almost guarantee there will be at least one drawback that you can address and genuinely turn into a positive, which might help tip the scale in your community’s favor.

Bottom line: With high-intent SQLs, you don’t need to sell to them anymore . . . you simply need to enable them to buy from you.

2. Senior living sales strategies: If things have stalled, find out if there’s an external factor going on in the SQL’s life.

Sometimes you’re working with a prospect and you’re convinced they’re going to sign papers when—BAM! Everything comes to a screeching halt.

In this scenario, an external factor is often at work.

Some common ones include:

    • Finalizing financial details (for example, the Veterans Aid & Attendance Benefit)
    • Dealing with an unexpected medical issue
    • Stalled by an unrelated family matter (death, wedding, family trip)
    • Selling/downsizing a home

Our point: You need to know what your high-intent SQL is facing in their lives and adjust your conversations and follow-up accordingly.

For example, if your prospect is suddenly in the hospital due to a broken hip, send the person flowers. Don’t do so as a selling tactic, but as a caring tactic. Once they’re back home, stop by for a visit to see how they’re doing. (Call first!) Again, not to push the sales narrative, but to simply demonstrate your humanity.

Once they’re truly back on their feet, then you can ask if recent events have changed their decision or timeline. Some will be ready to move forward. But sometimes external factors might force a downgrade from high-intent SQL to regular SQL or even back to marketing-qualified lead (MQL). This happens. Knowing where your prospect is in their journey, even if there’s been a setback, is important since it will inform how you engage with them going forward.

3. Senior living sales strategies: Think beyond lunch.

More than likely, your high-intent prospect has already vetted the food situation in your community. As food services company Unidine notes in this article, “It is widely acknowledged that food and dining are key aspects of residents’ satisfaction and influence the decision-making of prospective residents.”

If they’ve already done lunch in your community, it’s time to think BEYOND lunch. Hopefully, you took good notes when you chatted with the prospect. (If not, get in the habit of finding out their likes and dislikes when it comes to food—breakfast, lunch, dinner, desserts, drinks.)

Get creative—here are some ideas:

    • For a prospect with a sweet tooth, have your chef prepare a box of yummy treats that you deliver to the prospect with a note: Sweet times await you in our community. Here’s a sample of what you can expect.
    • Invite the prospect and a few members of their family to a special home-cooked meal in your community’s function/event room. The goal is to show how the room can be used precisely for these family gatherings—and to demonstrate how fabulous the food is.
    • Invite the prospect to a special event that includes refreshments, like wine and appetizers. Maybe it’s an author reading or a musical guest.

The goal is to highlight various types of foods—appetizers, family meals, desserts—along with different activities that involve food and camaraderie. The more you can make your community truly feel like home, the more it will help the prospect “see” themselves living there.

4. Senior living sales strategies: Find out who the competition is.

This strategy is a delicate dance. The goal isn’t to bash another community, and doing so is bad form in our tight-knit industry. But if your prospect is vacillating between your community and a competitor’s community, you need to have a plan for how to approach the conversation.

Our recommendation? Arm yourself with a small asset library on each competitor. We’re talking about a folder that you keep on your PC for each main competitor that your community typically finds itself up against.

In each competitor’s folder, you’ll want to have the following:

A comparison chart. Think of a simple, nicely designed “dot chart” that compares your community to the competitor’s community. Honesty is essential. Your community isn’t perfect for everyone. The fact your community has a yoga studio might not matter to your prospect while the fact the competitor’s community has a dog park does matter.

The goal is to simply have a comprehensive, objective-as-possible chart that prospects can glance at. Sometimes seeing everything laid out side-by-side can be just what someone needs to make a decision.

    • Tips for how to share the chart: Be direct. “I know you’re considering our community and ABC Senior Living. I thought you might find this chart helpful.”

A list of current residents who also considered the competitor’s community. In a perfect world, you’d have a collection of short videos from these residents where they talk about why they chose your community instead of the competitor. These videos don’t have to be professionally shot, either, since you’ll only use them for this purpose. (An iPhone video is fine.)

Note: If the current resident is willing to talk to prospects, you can also offer that option. But simply sharing two or three videos of real residents talking about why they decided to move into your community might be all the prospect needs to hear.

    • Tips for how to share the video: Send an email (or if you’re with the prospect in person, you can pull up the video on your phone or tablet) and say something like, “Gloria, one of our residents, also seriously considered ABC Senior Living as well. I thought you’d find it interesting and potentially helpful to hear why she finally decided on us.”

Earned media that features your community. You might not have info like this for every competitor and that’s OK. But you should absolutely collect any positive media coverage about your community—especially if it also mentions the competitor—and share that with your prospect.

For example, if the town/city your community is in has a “Best of” list and your community comes in first for senior living (but your competitor comes in second or third—or doesn’t place at all), this can be something to share.

    • Tips for how to share this info: This sort of info could be good reading to send along with something else. Like, if you send a box of tasty desserts to your prospect, you could include a couple of articles that talk up your community. (And, of course, this sort of info is stuff you’d want to share on the website, social media, and in lead nurturing emails for marketing-qualified leads.)

5. Senior living sales strategies: Appeal to all influencers.

It’s rare to have only one person involved in the decision-making process. Senior living sales directors should get in the habit of asking who’s involved in the discussions. And frame it exactly like that: Tell me more about the discussions you’ve been having about this decision. Who’s involved? Would it be OK if I get their email addresses?

For example, if an adult daughter and her mother are looking for a local community, but you’ve gotten wind about an adult brother who lives in Florida who’s been participating in the discussions . . . it makes sense to get his email address. You could send him a quick, personal email: “I just had a great visit with your mom and sister and want to introduce myself . . .”

From there, if your prospect evolves into a high-intent SQL, you’ll have easy access to the contact information for all the people who are influencing the decision. So, using the above example, you could suggest a Zoom call with mom, daughter, and son to discuss where things stand, next steps, and so forth.

Bonus: Free eBook!

You likely noticed a theme in our suggested senior living sales strategies above—care more, sell less. One of our fabulous colleagues, Mike Miller for Primo Solutions, has a fabulous ebook called Stop Selling and Start Caring. He wrote it specifically for sales and marketing folks in the senior living industry. You can download it for free here.

Marketing Solutions Must Haves

Senior Living Marketing Solutions: 5 Must-Haves

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You don’t need every marketing solution under the sun for your senior living community to be successful. In fact, sometimes too many bells and whistles can dilute your efforts. That said, there are some must-haves that you shouldn’t skimp on. Below, we discuss five essential senior living marketing solutions that we recommend to all our clients.

1. Senior Living Marketing Solutions: Invest in a Strategy.

Somewhere along the way, the word “strategy” has gotten a bad rap. Probably because strategizing involves stepping back, identifying real objectives, and creating a marketing roadmap for achieving them.

Some might see strategizing as a synonym for slowing down, which is a challenge in our always-on, always-rushed world. And we can certainly appreciate why slowing down can be extremely hard for marketing and sales teams that have a long list of vacancies to fill.

But we’d argue that a sound marketing strategy is needed precisely because it’s so competitive out there. If you approach your marketing willy-nilly—without understanding your buyers or your current website conversions, for example—how can you successfully execute important marketing tasks, like creating content that converts? You can’t measure what you don’t know, right?

The very act of sitting down to create a marketing strategy forces everyone to take a hard look at things like . . .

And that’s just the beginning. No, it’s not “sexy” work. It’s not fast work, either. And it’s not the type of work that will produce results right away since the work itself involves reviewing, compiling, and planning.

But once the work is completed and a plan is in place based on real intelligence? Get ready for turbo-charged marketing that will deliver reliable results over the long haul.

Doesn’t that sound smarter than just winging it?

2. Senior Living Marketing Solutions: Treat Your Website Like the 24/7 Salesforce That It Is.

Sure, every serious business on the planet has a website nowadays. So setting one up might feel like another box you need to check off your endless to-do list. But your community’s website matters. Why? Because it serves as your 24/7 salesforce.

When people are on the hunt for something—new sneakers, a new car, a new home—their search begins online. This is true even among older adults. Consider the following stats:

    • Baby Boomers spend more time online than Millennials, and a staggering 92% of Boomers shop online. [Source: The Shelf]
    • 75% of all Boomers are on Facebook, and 35% use business-focused networking sites, such as LinkedIn. [Source: Kenshoo]
    • Boomers have great attention spans and will read your content! 60% of Boomers regularly read blogs, and 70% percent watch video content online. [Source: The Shelf]
    • Boomers are almost as likely as Millennials to own a tablet. [Source: Marketing Charts]
    • 68% of Boomers own a smartphone. [Source: Pew Research Center]

For most prospects interested in senior living, your website will serve as their first experience with your community. And like it or not, first impressions still matter. Yes, some folks might land on your Google My Business listing first. Or perhaps they’ll see an ad or a billboard or hear about your community from a friend or family member. But they will end up on your site at some point—and usually multiple times.

Bottom line: Don’t treat your senior living website as an afterthought. Don’t treat it like a box you need to check off. And don’t make it look like every other senior living community’s website.

Instead, approach its creation (and its subsequent iterations) with a sound strategy. Pay attention to analytics that give insights into traffic numbers and conversion rates. And if you outsource, choose an agency that knows what it’s doing when it comes to building senior living websites that get results.

3. Senior Living Marketing Solutions: Let Marketing Automation Do the Heavy Lifting

Your community can’t effectively compete if it doesn’t have a seamless method for nurturing marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) over the long haul. Because here’s the reality all communities are facing right now: Prospects require multiple “touches” before making a decision to move into a community. And when we say multiple touches, we’re talking upwards of 20+ for marketing-qualified leads.

Think about that for a second. Let’s use easy math to illustrate. If your site brings in 100 MQLs a month on average, and these MQLs require a minimum of 20 “touches” before making a decision . . . how on earth can your marketing team manually send that many unique emails to that many different people, month after month, year after year?

New MQLs Per MonthTouch Points to ConvertUnique Emails Sent
100202,000

They can’t. At least, they can’t do it efficiently. Things will fall through the cracks, meaning your community will lose great leads to competitors.

Marketing automation solves this problem. Instead of manually sending lead nurturing emails, you’ll program the system to keep track of where the MQLs are in their journey. The automation’s main purpose is to deliver the right content to the right prospect at the right time.

Marketing automation is no longer a “luxury” of national chains, either. Even a small, independently-owned community must use some form of marketing automation to remain competitive.

Luckily, most reputable marketing automation software offers various tiers. So a larger chain might opt for an enterprise license while a smaller community might choose a nimble, budget-friendly option.

The key (beyond choosing the right marketing automation software) is setting it up properly. This takes work, including a deep understanding of your prospects and their buying journeys. But once set up, marketing automation does the heavy lifting so that your marketing team can focus on other things—like creating compelling content, analyzing results, and doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

4. Senior Living Marketing Solutions: Remember to Use Lead Scoring

This goes hand-in-hand with marketing automation. But we find that lots of communities either overlook this point or they don’t take full advantage of lead scoring.

When properly set up and executed, lead scoring provides several benefits:

    • A real-time view of where leads are in the sales funnel. At a glance, you’ll have a solid sense of your overall pipeline and which leads are nearing decision time. This will help improve sales forecasting.
    • Increased efficiency and sales productivity. Sales teams can focus their time on sales-qualified leads.
    • A key input to your marketing automation software. Lead scoring will automatically indicate which lead needs to go where. SQLs will be served up to the sales team. MQLs will enter appropriate nurturing campaigns.

In order to work, however, lead scoring requires . . .

    • Sound strategy. What makes a lead sales-qualified vs. marketing qualified? Do you want to go deeper than simply scoring a lead as an MQL or SQL?
    • Smart implementation. You need to make sure lead scoring is set up properly on the backend. Our biggest tip: This requires more than one set of eyes. And you absolutely must test to ensure the leads are being scored as you envisioned they would be.
    • Revisiting over time. Marketing automation’s biggest advantage—the automation part—can sometimes be its biggest curse. Too often, marketing and sales teams will “set it and forget it”—for good. You do need to occasionally revisit your lead scoring strategy: Has it changed? Have you learned anything new that could affect how you score leads? And you need to occasionally revisit the actual setup to see if anything has broken along the way.

Again, don’t skimp on this process. Lead scoring is a critical component in successful marketing automation.

5. Senior Living Marketing Solutions: Think Analytics.

Practically everything we do as marketers is measurable. While the number that matters most is move-ins, that’s the finish line. Many milestones exist along the way—important milestones that will help deliver leads to the finish line. And all of those milestones have analytics attached to them.

Think about things like . . .

    • Website analytics (traffic, landing pages, calls-to-action, etc.)
    • Google Analytics
    • Social media analytics (specific to each platform)
    • Advertising analytics (print, digital, radio, TV)
    • Lead analytics (such as MQL-to-SQL conversions and SQL-to-move-in conversions)
    • Email marketing analytics (opens, click-through-rates, conversions)
    • Call center analytics
    • Live chat analytics

And the above isn’t an exhaustive list, either.

Some marketers love numbers. Others hate them. If you fall in the latter group, don’t ignore the analytics because you don’t like them. Instead, consider outsourcing the analysis. A good consultant or marketing agency can help you understand what the numbers are telling you so that you can make informed decisions.

Bonus Solution: Work with a Reputable Senior Living Marketing Agency

Because marketing is SO involved, it can be challenging for marketing and sales teams to manage everything on their own. Luckily, there’s a solution for that: outsourcing some of the work to an agency like ours. We know senior living. We know marketing. Let’s talk about your community’s specific marketing needs.

Let's chat!




Why-Leads-Require-Many-More-Touches

Why Senior Living Leads Require MANY More Touches Than Others

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How many touch points does it take to get a senior living lead to move in? While this number will vary from one community to the next, generally speaking, senior living leads require many touches—likely more than your marketing and sales teams even realize.

In the Enquire Solutions white paper, Marketing Automation Templates for Senior Living, they share a chart about the number of touch points a prospect requires, on average, before becoming a resident.

Turns out, leads need a minimum of 22 touches for independent living, assisted living, and memory care and 28 touches for life plan communities. The sales cycle can range from 107 days (for memory care) to a whopping 400 days (for life plan communities). Assisted living and independent living fall in the middle at 145 days and 203 days, respectively.

The question, of course, is why. Why do senior living leads require so many touch points? And what do your marketing and sales teams need to do as a result?

Why Senior Living Leads Require More Touch Points

Moving, in general, is stressful.

A recent OnePoll survey reported that Americans say moving is the most stressful life event (followed by divorce and marriage). While older adults might recognize that it’s time to move into senior living, the act of moving (and all it entails, like selling their current home) might cause them to stall and stutter along the way.

This is why sales and marketing teams need to be patient and provide those regular touch points. You want your community to be top of mind when the person is finally ready.

Moving into a senior living community is a big monetary investment.

The bigger the price tag on a purchase, the more time people need to evaluate their options and crunch numbers. This is true for any pricey purchase, not just senior living.

Even older adults who have financial stability—for example, they own their own home and have retirement savings—might be skittish about moving into senior living. After all, what if their money runs out?

This is a very real concern. In fact, New Retirement cites a study that claims “60% of baby boomers are more afraid of running out of money than dying.” But here’s the rub—older adults should be worried. The same article shares the following:

    • 83 percent of baby boomers in the lowest income quartile will run out of money in retirement
    • 47 percent of boomers in the second lowest quartile will run out
    • 28 percent of boomers in the second highest quartile will run out
    • 13 percent of boomers in the highest income quartile will run out

Providing extra touch points—and including ones that directly address money worries—is a smart way to reassure prospects and move them down the funnel.

Choosing a senior living community is one of the most emotional purchases a person (or family) will ever make.

When a person buys their first home, emotions can run the gamut, but excitement and pride tend to top the list. When a person is shopping around for senior living, the emotions they experience are understandably different. While some people might feel excited about the next chapter, especially if they’re recently retired and entering into independent living, others might have mixed feelings:

    • A sense of loss about leaving their home (often the one where they raised their family)
    • Monetary concerns (will they outlive their funds?)
    • Fears around declining health
    • Existential angst (facing their own mortality)

Given what so many senior living leads are dealing with, it’s no wonder they need time to process, consider their options, and engage numerous times with communities before making a decision.

Our job as senior living marketers is to patiently accompany them on this journey of contemplation and discovery. The goal of ongoing communications shouldn’t be to sell, sell, sell, but rather to give, give, give. Give prospects information that will truly help them.

Strategies for Creating a Multi-Touch Lead Nurturing Campaign

Here’s what you need to keep in mind as you nurture your leads over the long haul.

If you haven’t already, invest in marketing automation. You can’t do effective lead nurturing without quality marketing automation. Full stop. It’s important to choose the right marketing automation for your community’s specific needs and budgets. If you need help selecting software, call us.

Make sure you set up lead scoring. Not all leads are created equal. Some leads will be more sales-qualified than others. The sales-qualified leads (SQLs) will be served up to the sales team for follow-up. The marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) will enter your long-term lead nurturing programs.

Understand your prospective buyers. In addition to the pain points outlined above, your prospects might have other pain points as well. Remember, you’re selling to various people, including older adults, spouses, adult children, and so forth. You need to create lead nurturing for each persona.

Map out different journeys and create content that will be helpful throughout each journey. For example, if your prospects are getting “stuck” because of concerns over money, develop content that acknowledges their fears and that offers potential solutions. Some examples . . .

    • Provide a short guide on the Veterans Aid and Attendance Benefit and a checklist that helps the person self-qualify.
    • Create and share short videos from current residents who had similar money concerns—and what helped them feel good about choosing your community.
    • Give authentic answers to tough questions. You could create a guide called “Retirement Worries: What Happens if Your Money Runs Out?”
    • Offer a complimentary lunch & learn with your community’s financial counselor.

You get the idea. When you approach your lead nurturing from a problem/solution perspective (rather than a sell, sell, sell perspective), developing helpful content for 22+ emails isn’t as challenging as you might think.

That said, if you get stuck with all the touch points, let us help.

Too often, communities simply go through the motions when it comes to creating and sending automated emails. That approach won’t get you the results you want. Reach out and let’s discuss a sound strategy for creating a multi-touch nurturing campaign that turns prospects into move-ins over the long haul.

Let's chat!



Content Offer Ideas

Content Offer Ideas for Senior Living Marketing

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Struggling to come up with compelling content offers for your community’s website? Listen, we get it: Creative ruts happen. But providing engaging content offers is super important, so don’t allow yourself and your team to wallow in that rut for too long. After all, awesome content can help convert anonymous web traffic into leads—and leads into move-ins. 

Here’s a quick-hitting list of content offer ideas to jumpstart your senior living marketing.

Content Offer Ideas That Educate

The all-important top of the funnel (TOFU) is the awareness stage, which is where many prospects begin their journey. It’s all about educating people and answering their questions (which can range from basic to more complex). Here are some content offer ideas that can satisfy both needs.

Consider developing an “All About” series for people to download.

You can create an ongoing feature that focuses “all about” the various aspects of your community. For example . . .

  • All About Our Senior Living Dining Room
  • All About Our Senior Living Dining Menus
  • All About Our Senior Living Amenities

By the way: All of those titles include competitive keyword phrases. Each article can be its own download, and content lengths can vary. Some might be only a couple of pages. Others (especially those requiring lots of visuals) might be longer and more brochure-like. You can promote them on appropriate pages of your website and your blog via enticing CTAs. You can also promote them on social media.

Create content offers around RELATED longtail keyword phrases. 

Communities tend to focus content around all aspects of “senior living.” But why not expand into other relevant terms that people search on, like retirement? 

For example, simply go to your favorite keyword tool and type in “What is it like to retire in . . .” (Florida, Texas, Massachusetts—you get the idea.) Or “Is [this state] a good place to retire.” See our screenshot below from SEMrush for an example of phrases that came up when we made Florida the focus of our search.

You can create a compelling download that answers the main question about whether Florida is a good place to retire. In it, you can highlight all the fun things that your residents do in and around your community, which can be a great way to introduce people to your community and your brand. 

(Remember, this is the education stage—the goal is to get your community on people’s radar. When they download, you’ll have their email so that you can continue to nurture them on their journey.)

Offer interactive surveys. 

Surveys can help people self-qualify. Our recommended go-to is Roobrik, which describes itself as a way to help older adults and their families make informed decisions about the future.

Create educational checklists. 

People love checklists because they are easy to skim and they can help people digest info. Some checklist ideas:

  • A Checklist for the Adult Daughter Helping Mom to Move
  • 10 Signs It’s Time to Move Into a Senior Living Community
  • A Checklist for Adult Children Researching Memory Care
  • Do You Qualify for the Veterans Aid & Attendance Benefit: A Handy Checklist
  • A Checklist to Follow When Downsizing Your Home

Create a series of “what to look for” guides.

Here are some examples to get your juices flowing.

  • What to Look For in Senior Living Dining Programs 
  • What to Look For in Senior Living Amenities
  • What to Look For When Comparing Senior Living in Florida (or whatever your region/state)

Again, you’ll want to make sure you have a strong keyword focus for each guide.

Content Offer Ideas that Engage

While all of your content should be engaging, when it comes to the middle of the funnel (MOFU), people have either done their basic research or they’re coming to the table with existing knowledge. People in this stage are now considering their options. (This is also known as the “consideration” stage.)

Create easy-to-read comparison charts.

Create a comparison chart with your top five competitors. Make it super easy for people to skim and get the gist: That your community outranks your competitors in the areas that matter most.

Create case studies—lots of case studies. 

You can never have too many case studies. When building out a case study library, think of all the various scenarios you’ve heard about from residents. 

  • Maybe it’s the adult child who had a hard time convincing her parents to move in, but once they did, they were so happy. Write a story about it. 
  • Maybe it’s the veteran’s widow who never realized she qualified for the Veterans Aid & Attendance Benefit, but after guidance from one of your wonderful sales reps, she discovered this source of tax-free income and was able to join your community. Write her story.
  • Maybe it’s a story about two widowed people who found love in your community. Share their story.

You get the idea. There are SO many stories—and we’re not simply talking about the more generic “here’s what it was like to make the move” stories. Focus on specifics. Even if that story only applies to a very small segment of qualified prospects, it could truly ENGAGE that prospect and help move them to the bottom of the funnel. Which is the whole point, right?

Content Offer Ideas That Motivate

Ah, we’ve reached the bottom of the funnel (BOFU). People are poised to make a decision (which is why this is also referred to as the “decision” stage.) The content you create for this stage should help motivate folks to choose your community.

Invite them to lunch.

Send an engaging invitation (via email or snail mail) and invite them to lunch. Entice them further by highlighting the menu and including a recipe card with the most popular dessert your chef makes. 

You could even make this offer last longer by sending them home with a branded doggie bag filled with leftovers or lunch/supper for the next day. 

Ask them to spend a weekend. 

Remember the days of touring colleges and how you could sometimes spend a whole weekend to get a feel for the school, its community, and all of its offerings? The same concept can work for senior living. 

If you host people for an entire weekend (and do everything that goes along with that—assign them a tour guide, make them feel welcome by including a packet of activities, etc.), it can give them a true sense of what it might be like to live in your community.

Give away a free month if people move in by a certain date. 

We see this offer with rentals outside of senior living. But the thing is: Everyone loves free stuff. And if someone signs by a certain date and they get their first month free—that can be a very enticing content offer. 

And to make this a tangible content offer . . . you could create a special mailer or email that you send to those folks who are truly in this stage. For example, you make this offer to folks who’ve toured your community more than once and have indicated it’s between you and another community. With the offer, you could include a branded promotional item, like a keychain.

Bonus Tip: Outsource for Added Oomph

The above list is a starting point. You and your team can come up with other ideas—or you can outsource the content development to a senior living agency like ours that specializes in all things content marketing. Get in touch and let’s chat about your marketing.

Effective Inbound Marketing

Effective Inbound Marketing Tips for Senior Living

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Looking for effective inbound marketing tips to attract more traffic to your website, increase conversions, and close qualified leads into happy move-ins? Keep reading.

Inbound Marketing Tips: Tend to Your Website

One of the biggest mistakes communities make with their senior living website is that they treat it like this once-and-done static thing. But an effective website—meaning one that attracts the right traffic and converts the traffic into leads—needs to be dynamic. 

Which is why you need to . . .

  • Monitor search performance. Is your site ranking for the right keyword phrases? Are there any gaps? Have new phrases entered the mix since you conducted a deep dive? Note: The answers to those questions will likely be “yes,” and that’s OK (and kind of our point). Search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t a once-and-done thing, either.
  • Pay attention to underperforming pages. Are people going to the page, but bouncing off quickly? Or maybe they spend time on the page, but they don’t click the call-to-action (CTA)? You might need to adjust the offer, layout, overall content, keyword focus, or all of the above.
  • Add fresh custom content. We’re not talking about more stock images or “fluff” content. We’re talking about custom content that reflects the unique experience that your community offers. Think resident photos, stories, videos, seasonal recipes from the chef, the views of the grounds from different vantage points and at various times of the year. You get the idea.

Want an objective opinion about how your site is performing—and what you could do better? Get our website audit.

Inbound Marketing Tips: Get Blogging

Blogging offers so many benefits. As HubSpot notes, blogging can help:

  • Drive traffic to your website, especially through long-tail keywords (relevant phrases with less overall search volume, but that still offer solid ranking opportunities)
  • Educate people who are in that all-important awareness stage
  • Convert anonymous website traffic into leads
  • Improve link building, both internally and via backlinks (a must for healthy SEO)

The key with blogging is having a smart strategy that guides your efforts. You also want to blog consistently, create content that people can’t find anywhere else, and promote and repurpose your content across other channels.

Inbound Marketing Tips: Think Beyond Your Website

Sure, your senior living website serves as your digital marketing hub. But it’s not the only player in town. When it comes to inbound marketing, you must consider your entire online presence. And at the top of that list is your community’s Google My Business listing. Note: We did an in-depth post on everything you need to know about GMB. 

From there, you should pay attention to your overall senior living reputation management—think of all the various review sites and directories (like Care.com and A Place for Mom). Your listings need to be accurate, current, and compelling (just like your website). 

Download our Hubspot for Senior Living Guide

Inbound Marketing Tips: Don’t Treat All Leads the Same Way

We know how tempting it is to get a “lead” and for sales to take over and work that lead. But guess what? That’s the old way of doing sales. (Circa 2000.) The digital landscape has changed how people buy—and, as a result, how businesses should sell.

Prospective buyers have access to all the information they need to inform their purchases, thanks to websites, blogs, and, most importantly, other people. (Think friends, family, and review sites.) 

So that anonymous website traffic that comes to your site and converts into leads? Those folks are savvy. They don’t want to be sold to—at least, not until they’re ready. And some most certainly aren’t ready. They might just be getting started and doing their research. They might not be prepared to make a decision for a year or two—and no amount of haranguing from your sales reps is going to change that.

Why would you waste your time calling these people and trying to engage them in a sales discussion? Because that’s exactly what it would be: A waste of everyone’s time.

Instead, doesn’t it make more sense to focus on people who are further along in the sales funnel, like the ones who are truly sales-qualified and a good fit for your community? Of course it does.

And that’s precisely why you shouldn’t treat all leads the same way. What this means is that your sales folks will be working with fewer leads (rather than every lead that comes in). But they’ll be working with better leads while the other leads—the ones who have potential, but who aren’t ready for a sales call—continue to get nurtured over time through email lead nurturing.

Inbound Marketing Tips: Have a Social Media STRATEGY

Facebook will be turning 20 in 2024. LinkedIn, believe it or not, is even older. Social media is no longer this new-fangled thing that people casually play with. Social media has grown up and evolved over the last two decades. As such, you can’t be casual in your approach to social media. 

Like everything else, you need an overall senior living social media strategy, one that . . .

  • Defines your goals for each platform (because your objectives for, say, LinkedIn will be different from Facebook)
  • Determines who will be in charge of creating content
  • Has a plan for deploying content organically and via paid means
  • Puts processes in place for monitoring results
  • Makes sure the social media plan works in harmony with other content initiatives

Bonus Tip: Take Advantage of Outsourced Marketing Support

Given inbound marketing’s complexity, it can be extremely challenging for senior living marketing and sales teams to manage everything on their own. Outsourcing some of the work to a reputable agency (like ours!) can be an excellent way to make sure that your senior living community is following all the tips we outlined above. 

Get in touch and let’s chat about your digital marketing needs.

gated vs ungated content

Senior Living Marketing Strategy: Gated Vs. Ungated Content

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When it comes to developing a SMART senior living marketing strategy, one of the biggest decisions you must make is whether to gate your content. Here’s what to keep in mind.

What is gated content?

As its name suggests, gated content requires formal access. Most often, the content resides behind a website form. To access the content, a person needs to supply specific info, like their name, email address, and phone number.

Why would businesses gate content anyway?

The main reason businesses gate content is so that they can continue marketing to the people who download the content. For example, if someone downloads a piece of content from your senior living website—maybe it’s a floor plan, brochure, pricing info—they’re signaling that they’re interested in what you’re selling. No, they might not be ready to move in tomorrow—or even a year from now. Or they might be looking on behalf of someone else, like a parent. 

Here’s the thing, though: If someone takes the time to download your content, that action suggests a certain level of interest in what you’re selling. 

Businesses capitalize on this interest by staying in front of these people and continuing to market to them. The “gate” enables businesses to do exactly that since the gate is a website form that captures a person’s email address. With the email address, the business can stay in touch with prospects by sending them more info that will (hopefully) keep the prospects engaged with the brand. (This is known as email lead nurturing.)

OK, given all that, why would a business ever offer ungated content?

Ah, this is where it gets interesting. If the goal is to continue to market to people who’ve shown interest in your senior living community, why would you ever offer content “in the clear”—meaning without requiring the person to fill out a form?

Not all content deserves to be put behind forms. Take a blog, for example. If you have a blog on your senior living website, you’re offering compelling content (we hope!), but you’re giving it away in the clear. Why? Because you trust that the person who’s reading the content is capable of taking the next best step for them, whatever that is. 

Another good example is case studies. If someone is interested in reading a case study—what you might call “resident stories”—about your community, why on earth would you put that content behind a form? 

If someone wants to read a case study about your community, that suggests a high level of interest. If the case study does its job well and satisfies the questions/concerns the person has about your community, chances are good the person will contact you for a tour or to speak to a sales counselor. 

Keep in mind, too, that the way people buy things today is much different from the way they shopped even ten years ago. Buyers are now in control of the sales process, not the other way around. In fact, buyers will often engage with a company’s website and other online assets (like social media or review sites) multiple times before showing any interest in talking to a salesperson. 

If someone has no interest in being “marketed to,” they’ll ignore any methods you use to try to reach them. (And they might possibly think less of your brand as a result of all the pushiness.) If you “require” their info on a form and they don’t want to give it, they might supply a dummy name and phone number—and a “junk” email address that they only use to download stuff. They might back away from your site altogether and see if they can find the information they’re looking for in some other way—or from someone else (like a competitor), which kind of defeats the purpose, right?

So when it comes to the best senior living marketing strategy for my community, what should we offer: gated or ungated content?

We typically recommend a mix of gated and ungated content. Why a mix? Well, we do believe certain content, like a 5-page guide on understanding how to finance senior living, offers excellent value. So it’s understandable that someone would have to surrender something—like their name and email—to access the premium content. In other words, it’s a fair “ask.” 

Certain pieces of content, like pricing requests, suggest someone might be farther down the sales funnel and closer to making a decision. Having their info makes sense because they might be more inclined to talk to a salesperson. 

But other content, like case studies and blog posts, work well as ungated content. This type of content enables the buyer to self-identify if your community is right for them or their loved one. At which point, they can then raise their hand if they want a sales counselor to contact them.

What are some of the biggest mistakes communities make with ungated and gated content?

The biggest mistake people make isn’t whether to gate a piece of content. The biggest mistake involves the website forms (if the content is gated) and the resulting follow-up process. Here’s what you should keep in mind.

For first-time downloads, keep forms short. 

When we say “first-time” downloads, we mean exactly that: The person is downloading content for the first time on your website. (Good marketing automation software will know if someone is a first-time downloader.) 

On the forms, ask only the essential info: first name, email address, and a question with multiple choice options: Are you searching for a senior living community for yourself or a loved one? (The multiple choices would be: Myself, Loved One, Neither.) 

Notice that we don’t recommend asking for phone numbers for first-time downloaders. This is deliberate. Most people do NOT want a phone call the minute they submit a form. (Something that happens WAY too often in our industry.)

Implement progressive fields on forms for subsequent downloads. 

Often, website visitors who are in the education stage will download multiple pieces of content at once or over a period of time, like days or weeks. When you use progressive fields in forms, you can “program” the form to serve up new fields to the person—meaning required info they haven’t filled out before. So each time they download a piece of content, they will have a new item or two to fill out on the form. 

Why use progressive fields on forms? It’s less overwhelming for people to provide additional information over time rather than up front on one lengthy form (or worse: over and over again on various forms). You can ask different questions with each form they fill out—and the answers will provide further insight into who they are, where they are in their buying journey, and whether they are a marketing-qualified lead or sales-qualified lead for your community. 

Because let’s face it: Not everyone who fills out a form on your site is going to be a good senior living lead.

If you do ask for phone numbers, don’t bombard people with phone calls the minute they submit a form. 

We know that we’ll probably lose the “don’t ask for phone numbers” debate. OK. But if you ask for phone numbers, make sure your sales team or call center doesn’t dial up people the minute they download a piece of content. The sales team should have a strategy for identifying who might be a suitable candidate for a phone call (this involves segmenting leads into two main buckets: marketing-qualified vs. sales-qualified).

Enter people into appropriate lead nurturing email campaigns.

We’re big fans of thoughtful email lead nurturing. The keyword, however, is thoughtful. You need to have a sound senior living marketing strategy behind each lead nurturing campaign you create. 

Put some thought into the various workflows and journeys people are on along with the type of content people are downloading. All of those things will help determine the various email lead nurturing campaigns you need to create—and how you’ll decide which prospects should go where. (This is why strong marketing automation software, like HubSpot, is critical.)

Don’t overwhelm people with multiple email workflows, either. This goes hand-in-hand with the above. If someone downloads a bunch of stuff at once (a common experience), then you need an overarching strategy for the logic behind the workflows. This can all be done within your marketing automation, but humans still need to think through and supply the logic to the software.

So, for example, if someone downloads your pricing comparison guide, your floorplans, and the seasonal dining room menu—and each download has its own email lead nurturing workflow—you shouldn’t allow that person to be in all THREE email workflows at the same time. Talk about overwhelming! 

Instead, there should be logic for these situations. Perhaps the pricing guide trumps the other items since it suggests that someone is comparing prices/options between your community and your competitors. So the lead nurturing workflow for the pricing guide might be the most sensible one for the person to enter. You’d have the automation logic set up in such a way that it funnels the person into that workflow and not the other ones. 

Need help thinking through your senior living marketing strategy?

We love working with senior living communities and helping them develop buyer personas and smart content strategies. Get in touch and let’s chat about your content marketing needs.

Digital Marketing Strategies

Digital Marketing Strategies for Senior Living: Get Blogging

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When it comes to digital marketing strategies for senior living, one of the most effective is blogging. And yet one of the biggest mistakes we see when a business—any business—undertakes a blogging initiative, is not having an overarching content strategy in place first. 

So let’s discuss what it takes to create an effective blog on your senior living website.

Think strategically.

As we mentioned above, you need to develop a strategy for your senior living blog. And not just the blogging itself, but the ongoing promotion and monitoring, too.

Questions to ask yourself and your team: 

  • How often will you blog?
  • Will you have one writer or a content team working on blog posts?
  • Who will be in charge of developing the blog editorial calendar?
  • Who will be responsible for laying out the blog? Selecting images? Performing quality control?
  • Who will do the keyword research?
  • Who will monitor results?
  • Who will promote the blog via social media channels?
  • Who will be responsible for revisiting older blog content and revising or unpublishing? (More on this in a moment.)

Treat keyword research as a first step, not an afterthought.

Effective content marketing is part science, part art. The writers serve as the artists, crafting compelling copy that engages readers and satisfies whatever query sent them to the blog post in the first place. The science part involves doing the keyword research—and understanding what that research is telling you.

It’s not enough to simply plug a search term into a keyword tool, grab the phrases it spits out, and write content around it. You might have been able to get away with that a decade ago, but today, there’s too much competition. You need to dig deeper and work with the various features within the keyword tool.

Good keyword research tools, like SEMrush, provide deep insights into:

  • Searchers’ intent. For example, someone searching on “how much do senior apartments cost” has a much different intent than someone who searches on a senior living community’s brand name plus the word “phone number.” The former is about education. The latter is about finding a specific piece of info that they likely need to use right away.
  • Competitors’ keyword phrases. You need to know what your competitors are ranking for. From there, a good SEO tool can help you determine whether you stand a chance of outranking them—and what you might need to do to achieve that goal.
  • The best keyword phrases to focus on if you want your blog posts to rank well. And guess what? The best phrases might not necessarily be phrases you’d choose. For example, if you operate a senior living community with assisted living in Naples, Florida, you might not like using the word “facility.” But guess what? The phrase “assisted living facilities in naples florida” is searched on 480 times A MONTH. You might need to rethink your stance on the term “facility,” given that’s what people are searching on. 

Note: You shouldn’t necessarily task your writers with in-depth keyword research and analysis. While many writers know how to expertly weave keyword phrases into content, fewer understand how to do research or interpret results. 

Invest in custom content.

Why bother having a blog and doing all the keyword research if you’re going to post boring, generic content? (Or worse—blogs posts that content mills churn out.) 

While using content mills or cheap, inexperienced writers might cost less up front, you’ll ultimately be wasting money. How so? Well, the blog posts won’t deliver the results you’re looking for. In essence, you’ll be blogging simply to check off a box. And that’s not the sort of digital marketing strategies for senior living that we recommend.

Instead, invest in custom blog posts. And by custom, we mean content that people won’t be able to find anywhere else, like your competitors’ blogs. 

Keep in mind that all senior living communities are essentially selling the same products: maintenance-free senior housing with various amenities. But the experience in your particular community? That’s unique. And that’s what you need to capitalize on. 

For example, no one has your community’s chef, right? You can create a whole bunch of blog posts around your chef, the dining experience in your community, the most popular recipes, and the like.

Think this sort of content is irrelevant? Think again. Take a look at these search terms:

Off the top of our head, here are some quick-hitting titles that you could take advantage of using the above phrases:

  • 10 Ways to Spot the Best Senior Living Dining Programs
  • Best Senior Living Dining Programs: How to Evaluate (provide expert tips from your chef and dining room staff on what to look for—and red flags—and why they think yours is great)
  • X Secrets of the Best Senior Living Dining Programs (you could interview your chef to get their take on the secrets)
  • Senior Living Dining Menus: Our Approach to Holidays
  • Senior Living Dining Menus: Our Approach to Special Diets
  • Senior Living Dining Menus: Our Approach to Entrees

OK, you get the idea. All of the content above can help attract the people doing a search on that content . . . and by putting your own custom spin on it, you’ll make the content much more memorable, engaging, and effective.

Use other media within your blog posts.

Compelling senior living blog posts aren’t simply filled with words. They include other media as well, like real photos (not stock images), videos, gifs, charts, and so forth.

Going back to the above example . . . you might create a picture-based blog post around your senior living dining room, like the décor, how you match table partners, and any other special embellishments. 

Repurpose content (constantly).

Content creation should never be done in a silo. For example, if you have a blog writer and a social media writer, they should work together—or, at the very least, be aware of what the other person is doing. Because the wonderful thing about a good piece of content is that you should be able to easily repurpose it across multiple channels. 

For example, that blog post title: “10 Ways to Spot the Best Senior Living Dining Programs” could be turned into a guide that you offer as a download on the website page that talks about amenities. You could do a series of Facebook and Instagram posts where each post covers one of the 10 ways (this would give you 10 different social media posts from that one article). You could create a PPC campaign around the term “best senior living dining programs.” People would be directed to a landing page where they could download your guide. If they download, they’d be entered into an email nurturing program. You could create an infographic of the 10 ways and offer it as a download.

Bottom line: If you’re investing in awesome custom content, make sure you maximize that investment by repurposing the content.

Continually promote your blog posts.

If you’ve been doing any regular blogging, you’re probably good about promoting a blog post when it’s hot off the virtual presses. But what about those blog posts from three months ago—or three years? You need a system for continuously promoting your content. (Which is why the person in charge of your blog should collaborate with the folks in charge of your other channels, like social media platforms.)

Tackle underperforming, old, and outdated blog posts.

If a blog post isn’t getting the desired results—maybe it’s not getting enough eyeballs or people are quickly bouncing off your site—see if you can improve it. 

Maybe you need to . . . 

  • Adjust the keyword phrase
  • Reformat the blog for easier skimming
  • Revise the content because it veered off course
  • Rewrite the article completely because it was written poorly the first time around

Sometimes, of course, content simply becomes old, crusty, and outdated. Don’t be afraid to remove outdated content that’s no longer serving you. In fact, doing so can actually boost your site’s rankings. (Just make sure you follow best practices.)

Call us if you need help with your digital marketing strategies for senior living blogging.

Maintaining a compelling blog is a huge undertaking. If your staff is already stretched too thin, consider outsourcing this work to an agency like ours. We understand the senior living industry, SEO best practices, and how to create compelling blog posts. Let’s talk about your blogging needs!

Content Marketing for Local SEO

Content Marketing for Local SEO: What to Write?

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When it comes to developing content marketing for local SEO, your approach should be the same as any content marketing initiative. (For the purpose of this post, let’s pretend we’re promoting an awesome senior living community in Austin, Texas.)

Why the heck do I need a content strategy? Why can’t I take a keyword phrase and write a blog post or something?

There’s no law stopping you from taking a keyword phrase like “is Austin a good place to retire” and writing a blog post that answers the question. 

After all, the phrase “is Austin a good place to retire” has a monthly search volume (MSV) of 90 and low keyword difficulty (KD). This means the blog post—if written well—stands a good chance of ranking high in search engine results. Plus, it’s got that whole “content marketing for local SEO” angle covered since it’s talking about Austin, right?

Sure, the blog post could rank well over time. Yes, it talks about retiring in Austin. And someone searching on a phrase like that is demonstrating an interest in making a move to Austin.

But so what? 

If someone lands on that one blog post, what are they supposed to do next? How does that blog post fit in with all your other content, like the guide on financing senior living or the video about your community’s new yoga studio? And how does that one keyword phrase work in the big picture with all the other viable local search terms your keyword research uncovered?

You’re probably starting to see it now . . . why you need an overall content strategy.

OK, so now I need a local SEO content strategy and a regular SEO content strategy?

Nope. You need one overarching content strategy. Your strategy will address content marketing for local SEO and content marketing for other relevant topics (e.g. financing senior living).

This is starting to sound complicated. Where should I begin?

Content marketing can feel daunting when you’re considering the big picture and all the different types of content you can create, from videos to podcasts, blog posts to guides, social media posts to digital ads—and that’s just the beginning.

But remember that your content strategy needs to support your overall sales and marketing goals. Those goals typically center around the number of marketing-qualified leads, sales-qualified leads, and move-ins your team needs to bring in each year (or each quarter or month, or however you measure these goals).

As we all know, compelling content drives everything in today’s marketing landscape. It will:

  • Attract people to your online channels (website, Google My Business listing, social media platforms)
  • Turn qualified traffic into marketing-qualified leads (MQLs)
  • Nurture MQLs into sales-qualified leads (SQLs)

Maybe you’re starting to see it now: Your overall content marketing strategy needs to account for those three tasks: attracting the right people, converting them into leads, and nurturing the leads to close. (Or if you like the sales funnel visual, you can picture it that way: top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel.)

Ideally, you should have a master content marketing calendar that highlights all the initiatives supporting these goals. The calendar doesn’t’ need to be fancy. You can use Google spreadsheets or project management software like Monday.com or Asana.

Month by month, you’d include all the various content marketing initiatives and label or color-code them according to whichever part of the funnel they’re for. (And yes, there will be overlap, which is OK—nothing is ever truly linear.)

How does content marketing for local SEO fit in?

You should produce content around local search terms every month along with content that’s focused on other relevant keyword phrases. We’ve been making this point a lot in our own content lately, so we’ll say it again here. Remember this nugget: All search is local search. (Read more about what we mean in our best tips for local SEO.)

Again, producing content geared toward local SEO will happen at the same time you’re producing other content (like evergreen content or content about related terms). In other words, you should always have a good mix of content marketing for local SEO in your month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter marketing strategy.

OK, but what should we write about in terms of local SEO?

Let’s use another keyword phrase we pulled from SEMrush (our keyword tool) that would work for our fictional senior living community in Austin: Retiring in Austin TX (170 MSV, 24 KD). MSV stands for monthly search volume. And KD stands for keyword difficulty.

Retiring in Austin, TX – here are three quick-hitting content ideas:

  • 10 Things to Know Before Retiring in Austin, TX
  • Why Retiring in Austin, TX is a smart idea
  • Thinking of Retiring in Austin, TX? Read this first

When developing content marketing for local SEO, aim to get the biggest bang for your marketing buck. Always try to repurpose one topic across different channels. 

For example, you could write a blog post called “10 Things to Know Before Retiring in Austin, TX.” 

From there, you could . . .

  • Create a video for your YouTube channel on that topic.
  • Share one point each day for 10 days across your social media channels.
  • Host a podcast on this topic.
  • Create digital ad campaigns around the keyword phrase and send people to a dedicated landing page where people can download the “10 things to know” in a nicely designed marketing piece. (Then, you could nurture them over the long haul.)

See how much mileage one keyword phrase has when you take a step back and develop a strategy for it? (Need more ideas? We wrote an in-depth article about how to incorporate local search terms into blog posts. Again, each blog post could be repurposed across other marketing channels.)

Wow! I think I’m starting to understand content marketing for local SEO. But I could still use some guidance.

That’s why we’re here! It makes sense to work with a senior living marketing agency like ours in developing your overall content strategy. From there, you and your team can run with it. Or we can help you with content writing, too. Let’s chat about your community’s specific content marketing needs.

Local SEO Tips

Best Local SEO Tips for Your Senior Living Marketing Strategy

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When it comes to the topic of best local SEO tips for your senior living marketing strategy, we probably sound like a broken record. But if you want your community or communities to effectively compete in today’s ultra-competitive landscape, you must pay attention to local search. 

Why local search optimization is so important

If you’ve spent any time reading about local SEO, you’ve likely heard the saying that ALL search is local search. Because optimizing for local search first means you’re automatically optimizing for overall search, period. 

Of course, in the senior living industry, optimizing for local search matters for another reason: PROSPECTS CARE ABOUT LOCATION. And yet too often we see communities ignoring location-based keywords and defaulting to generic optimization techniques with the hope that Google will “figure it out.”

Listen, Google is smart. But you’ll increase your chances of Google serving up your content to the right prospects if you take the time TO TELL GOOGLE where your communities are located. 

Need some local search stats to convince you? Here you go . . .

  • 92% of searchers will pick businesses on the first page of local search results. [Source: SEO Expert Brad]
  • 82% of local searchers follow up offline via an in-person visit, phone call, or purchase. [Source: Duct Tape Marketing]
  • 61% of mobile searchers are more likely to contact a local business if they have a mobile-friendly site. [Source: HubSpot]

Oh, we could go on and on, but hopefully you get the idea. So let’s talk local search, specifically the best local SEO tips to weave into your overall senior living marketing strategy.

Best local SEO tips: Create a strong Google My Business listing (or listings).

We recently provided lots of tips for Google My Business listings, so check it out. But the short of it goes like this: Google controls the universe (or, at the very least, the search universe). Google uses your Google My Business (GMB) listing to inform your company’s entire presence across Google, including all related products from Search to Maps.

Keep in mind that you will need a separate Google My Business listing for each senior living community’s location. Depending on how many you have, that can be a lot of work, but agencies like ours are familiar with the ins and outs of GMB, including bulk location management. Let us help.

Bonus local SEO tip: While your Google business profile is the most important one to focus on, if you’ve got time to spare, set up your Yahoo! and Bing Places for Business profiles as well.

Best local SEO tips: Make sure your social media profiles are location-specific.

It’s so easy to get lost in tweets, posts, pics, and TikToks while overlooking the critical “About” sections in each social media platform. Don’t underestimate their power. Because social media profiles do rank in Google.

As marketing guru Neil Patel notes, “While social shares may or may not affect a web page’s position in search listings, your social profiles definitely influence the content of your search results. In fact, social media profiles are often amongst the top results in search listings for brand names.”

If you have multiple locations, get creative—and take advantage of any baked-in tools. Just as Google My Business allows you to easily manage multiple locations from one dashboard, Facebook’s “Locations” lets you do the same thing. 

As Facebook explains, “With Facebook Locations, you can connect and manage all your business locations on Facebook. Our free tool lets you quickly add new store Pages, edit information for existing stores, and manage your locations from one central spot.”

For Instagram, as of the writing of this article, you’ll need to set up separate Instagram accounts for each location, but you can manage them all from one single device.

We wouldn’t necessarily recommend having multiple Twitter accounts (that would be too hard to maintain and likely unnecessary for our industry, at this time). For something like YouTube, you could have your main channel and then create location-specific “playlists” for each location. (Yes, YouTube is important. Remember who owns it: Google.)

Like everything else in marketing, you need to think about social media strategically based on the marketing resources you have in your various locations. Bottom line: Make sure you properly optimize every account you do have for local search. (Guess what: We can help! Let’s discuss your social media strategy.)

Best local SEO tips: Run location-specific pay-per-click (PPC) and social media ads.

Running location-specific PPC ads is a great way to build awareness for your various locations. Paid ads will supplement and support organic listings (including your Google My Business listing). 

When you run social media ads, particularly on Facebook, you can create location-specific campaigns that target people within a certain radius of your location. (You can even target specific zip codes in addition to other attributes, like age and gender.) Instead of running the same generic ad to all your locations, location-specific campaigns will sound much more personal, timely, and intimate.

Best local SEO tips: Monitor and manage review sites.

Reputation management should be a cornerstone of your senior living marketing strategy. What people are saying about your community matters. According to Qualtrics, nearly all consumers (97%) use online media when researching products or services in their local area. And 93% of consumers say online reviews influence their purchasing decision.

You’ll want to monitor the “big guys” like Google reviews (which appear on your Google My Business listing) and Facebook. But don’t overlook other popular sites, like Yelp, and industry-specific listings, like SeniorAdvisor.com and Caring.com.

Responding to reviews can be tricky. The thing to remember is this: People leave reviews because they want to be heard and they want to share their experience, for better or worse. They’re not writing the reviews for you—they’re writing them for other potential customers. 

For positive reviews, you can say simply say thank you or give the equivalent of a “thumbs up.” With mediocre or downright negative reviews, be mindful in your approach. Be genuine in your thanks and/or acceptance of constructive criticism. Never be defensive. And don’t engage in any back and forth—take it offline.

Keep in mind that reputation management is never done. It’s an ongoing task, one that you have to work into your marketing plan.

Best local SEO tips: Be mindful of your main hub—your senior living website.

At the very least, you should have a page on your senior living website devoted to each location (and optimized for the strongest keyword phrase for that location). The page should be compelling! In other words, it should have more than just one or two pics and contact info for that location. 

Your blog is also a good place to highlight location-specific longtail keyword phrases. If you want to get super fancy, when people subscribe to your blog, you could have them choose a location they’re interested in. You could set up the blog automation so that the person only receives evergreen content or the location-specific content that matches the location they selected.

And don’t forget: Make sure you pay attention to how your site renders on mobile. As HubSpot reports, “Mobile web traffic has consistently accounted for about half of all global web traffic since the beginning of 2017.” It’s critical that your site looks great on mobile. 

Best local SEO tips: Work with a senior living marketing agency that gets it.

And by “it,” we mean search engine optimization and senior living. At Senior Living SMART, we have specialists on our team who can help with all aspects of local SEO. Even better? Everyone is passionate about senior living. Let’s chat about your community’s local SEO needs!

Marketing Tips

Senior Living Marketing Tips for Google My Business

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In a recent blog post on overlooked marketing opportunities, we mentioned Google My Business. We received some questions and figured we should provide more comprehensive tips for Google My Business specifically.

Let’s get to it!

[EDITOR’S NOTE: In early 2022, shortly after we developed this blog post, Google changed the name of Google My Business to Google Business Profile. We’ve kept the article below “as is” since everything still applies. The only thing that’s changed is the name.]

What is Google My Business (GMB) and why should I care?

Since its inception, Google has (amazingly) maintained its dominance of the search engine market. Statista reports that in September of 2021, “online search engine Bing accounted for nearly 7 percent of the global search market, while market leader Google had a market share of 86.64 percent. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s market share was 2.75 percent during that period.”

Any business that doesn’t pay attention to its presence within the Google universe does so at its own peril. And one of the biggest things that influences that presence is your Google My Business listing. Google uses it to inform your company’s entire presence across Google, including all related products from Search to Maps.

Keep in mind, too, that Google is always tweaking its algorithms so that it serves up better results for users. In late 2021, Google rolled out its biggest update to its local search algorithm in five years. The update is called Vicinity, and according to Bright Local, the update is all about targeting proximity as a ranking factor.

Bright Local says, “Although proximity has long been an important signal for local search results, it’s also been the case that businesses can optimize to successfully rank far from their actual business location. Through the Vicinity update, Google now appears to be clamping down on this, which will naturally make local search results more relevant to the user. In terms of the benefit to businesses, this gives them a greater chance to rank well in relevant local searches, as they’ll be competing less with businesses that are further away.”

Google My Business sounds more important to Google than it does to me. Do I really need to pay attention to it?

Short answer: Yes, you should. Think of your Google My Business listing as a second website—one that often gets served up long before anyone would organically land on your main website. Your GMB listing is tied closely to Google’s local search algorithm, which pays attention to a searcher’s physical location. (If you’ve ever done a search in Google and ended your search query with “near me,” like “Indian restaurants near me” or “bowling alleys near me,” you get the idea.)

The Google My Business listing takes up valuable real estate on the search engine results page (SERP), showing up in the right-hand sidebar on desktops and at the top of the results on mobile devices.

Like anything else with search results, what people can scan quickly from your GMB listing will determine whether they dig deeper into your listing or move on to a competitor.

The listing (on both desktop and mobile) will show the nuts and bolts automatically, like the name of your business, a few pics, location info, map info, and reviews. People can click in for a deeper look at more pictures, videos, reviews, and the like. 

An important point: Your GMB listing exists whether you’ve “claimed” it or not. If you don’t claim it, you risk having inaccurate info and a drabby, boring listing. By claiming your listing, you have the opportunity to manage and monitor it—and make it as engaging as possible.

How does having a Google My Business listing help my senior living community?

It can increase overall brand awareness and name recognition. If your listing keeps coming up as people conduct searches on senior living communities in your area (and related searches—more on this in a moment), people will become more familiar with your name and overall brand, even if they don’t click through. Because of the real estate the listing takes up, a person can’t not see it. Sure, they might only give it a cursory glance, but a glance is still a glance—our subconscious minds remain at work. 

Your GMB listing also reinforces brand recognition for people who are already familiar with your name. They might be doing a search on your name—perhaps trying to get an address and phone number. A robust GMB listing will give them those things—but so much more, including reviews, pictures, compelling info about the community, and any recent news or updates (think COVID).

Check out the screenshot below that we pulled from a client’s GMB analytics.

The green area shows the “direct” searchers—people searching on the client’s business name and address.

But the blue shows the “discovery” searches—people searching on a category, product, or service related to seniors and senior living in that area. This high level of discovery is not unusual for Google My Business listings, provided they’re set up properly.

How Customers Search

Bottom line: A good Google My Business Listing can help people discover your business on that all-important first page of Google search results. That’s another psychological aspect at play: Whether right or wrong, people do tend to trust what’s served up on the first page of Google, especially items that are prominently displayed, like GMB listings.

Wow! That sounds great! So all I have to do is “claim” my Google My Business listing and add a few pictures? Or are there some other tips for Google My Business that I should be following?

Remember how we mentioned earlier that your GMB listing is like a second website? Well, just as you optimized your website for search, you need to optimize your Google My Business listing for search as well. And just like you do for your senior living community’s website, you have “on-page” optimization elements as well “off-page” optimization elements to consider.

Tips for Google My Business: On-page elements

The Google My Business interface is extremely user-friendly. Your job is to simply fill out all relevant sections listed in the backend of your GMB account—and to do so clearly and compellingly. The on-page elements refer to items that are customer-facing, meaning folks who land on your listing will see the info you provide.

Sections to pay close attention to:

  • Info section. The “info” section lets you provide all the forward-facing information about your community, like a brief overview, hours, and location info.
  • Pictures. You can—and should—add plenty of pictures. And double-check how they look on desktop and mobile. Follow Google’s guidelines regarding pictures. The recommended resolution is 720 px tall, 720 px wide. The minimum resolution is 250 px tall, 250 px wide.
  • Videos. People LOVE videos. If you have good ones, add them, particularly ones that highlight the lifestyle and vibe within your community. Follow Google’s video guidelines for maximum effect.
  • Reviews. You want to make sure you’re responsive to reviews. Thank people for giving positive reviews. For negative reviews, tread carefully—avoid sounding defensive or dismissive. And don’t repeat the same canned response to negative reviews. Humility can go a long way. So can offering a real person’s name and number to contact on your end. 
  • Questions and answers. If someone takes the time to ask a question, ANSWER IT! First of all, it’s only polite to do so. If one person has the question, we can guarantee many other folks do as well. Answering the question thoughtfully helps demonstrate your community’s responsiveness. And questions can be a great source of intel for you. The questions could inspire a blog post or info you need to add to the website.
  • Ongoing updates: You can post updates, just like you do on social media. So post a link to a blog, a premium offer, etc. Keep it fresh and share items regularly.

Accessibility attributes. This is especially important for our industry since it speaks to how accessible your communities are to people in wheelchairs.

Tips for Google My Business: Off-page elements

GMB TipsWhen we say “off-page,” we’re referring to the stuff behind the scenes (people searching won’t see this info). A good example is the category you choose. As Google explains, “Categories describe your business and connect you to customers who search for the products or services you offer.”

Identify a primary category (like assisted living). You can also add additional categories (think keywords) related to your business. See the screenshot from one of our client’s listings that we helped set up.

My senior living community has multiple locations. Can I have multiple Google My Business listings?

YES! Google understands that many businesses, from banks to hotels to senior living communities, have multiple locations and, as a result, need multiple listings. Google provides excellent step-by-step instructions for bulk location management (there are different steps for businesses with fewer than 10 locations vs. those with 10 or more). 

An important caveat: When you have multiple locations to manage, the work you need to do in Google My Business increases—and often by a lot. This is why we recommend working with a senior living marketing agency like ours. We can help you set up, manage, and maintain multiple listings with consistent messaging and accurate info.

Whew! That’s a lot. Where else can I learn about Google My Business?

Honestly, the best place to start is Google—it provides excellent step-by-step instructions if you want to go the DIY route. And, of course, working with an agency partner like Senior Living SMART also makes a whole lot of sense. We can either do it all for you or double-check and make sure everything is fully optimized. Having a second set of eyes never hurts. Get in touch and let’s talk about your senior living community’s presence on Google!