Creating lead generation transparency is unique in senior living yet critical to each community’s efficiency and productivity. We will pull back the curtain with statistics on lead management, lead validation and conversion rates.
What to schedule a demo or learn more? Click here for more information on SeniorVu services →
Content marketing, when done correctly, can help you attract and convert website visitors into qualified leads, scheduled tours, and move-ins.
But what content should you create? Most people immediately say “blog posts.” While blogs are a great tool to improve SEO, increase traffic, and engage visitors, you need to do more than simply “blog” if you want to generate leads, tours, and move-ins.
Your site probably has lots of ungated content, meaning people can access it without giving you their info. Your blog posts are examples of ungated content.
But offering premium content—something people can’t get anywhere else that is “gated” behind a form—motivates visitors to give you their contact information in exchange for the valuable content. From there, you can continue to nurture the prospects along their sales journey. So what should the premium content be? Think guides, e-books, “how-to” articles, and checklists.
A good place to promote your premium content is through a call-to-action (CTA) at the end of a blog post (e.g., “Get our free guide on aging well!”). The blog posts are the bait, your prospects are the fish, and the premium content serves as the hook.
Keep in mind that it’s important to have a variety of premium content because prospects will “bite” on different content based on their stage of readiness and interests.
Your landing page is where the premium content “lives.” This the “gate” part in gated content. The landing page should include:
Don’t overwhelm prospects with too many required fields! This is a first date, so simply ask for first and last name and email address. In terms of how to create and host landing pages, we recommend HubSpot because they offer progressive profiling so you can ask additional questions with every opt-in form. As prospects take more premium content, you get more information such as preferred location, their role, and desired lifestyle.
Remember, marketing’s job is to “plate up” sales-qualified leads (SQLs) to the sales team. Each landing page represents a piece of content related to the sales funnel. Your sales team will be especially interested in prospects who opt into content that indicates they’re sales-ready. And by knowing what content the SQL has downloaded, your sales team can have a more productive conversation when they talk to the prospect on the phone or meet face-to-face.
Congratulations, you took an anonymous website visitor and converted them to a lead – great! Now, it’s time to nurture these leads to create face-to-face or voice-to-voice interactions with the sales team.
However, if you reel in the fish too quickly, it will get spooked and drop off the line. That is what happens when you send every lead directly into your CRM. Instead, use a marketing automation platform that will create automated workflows to provide additional content and offers (e.g., tours, lunches, home visits, events) that are relevant to the lead based on the “bait” that reeled them in.
For example, if someone downloads a piece of educational content on tips for aging well, this suggests they are at the top of the sales funnel and perhaps just beginning to learn about senior living options. How you nurture them will be a lot different from the way you nurture someone who’s downloaded a guide on how to finance different senior living arrangements.
If you follow these three steps, you will establish your brand as a thought leader and you’ll continue to bring prospects back to your website throughout their journey. Best of all? You’ll be serving up SQLs that your sales team can take across the finish line.
If you need assistance setting up these systems, please contact us or call 888.620.9832.
We are a data driven world. It can be good or it can be overwhelming. This webinar will highlight three scenarios where data is used to make intelligent business decisions, improve current assets and increase referrals to your communities. Learn how to use incidence data and medication data to improve your business results.
What to schedule a demo or learn more? Click here for more information on VisionLTC services →
Senior living sales and marketing departments spend a lot of time developing prospect personas and mapping out their journey. But what happens once a prospect becomes a bona fide customer? Their journey doesn’t end once they move in.
As a resident, they begin a new journey, one that can be happy, sad, or meh (depending on many factors). Senior living sales and marketing departments MUST pay attention. If you don’t, you could be losing out on a great referral source. (Happy residents talk up their experience and refer others.)
Take some time understanding the customer’s journey AFTER they say yes. Look for ways to build on what’s working. And address any issues, even if they fall outside senior living sales and marketing.
Lead nurturing is the purposeful process of engaging prospects by providing relevant information at each stage of the buyer’s journey. You want to actively move the prospects through your marketing and lead generation efforts, to the point where they become leads. In this webinar, we discuss how to nurture leads. Strategies include targeted content, multi-channel nurturing, timely follow-ups, and personalization.
Inbound marketing is the tool used to meet today’s customer where they spend most of their time – on the internet. Inbound marketing is all about attracting prospects through relevant and helpful content. It allows senior living communities to add value at every stage in your prospective resident’s journey. It pulls together content marketing, blogs, events, SEO, social media and more to attract prospects to your website.
Let’s talk awesome marketing strategies for senior living. To start, who remembers that great jingle from the 1970’s: “Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun”?
For all of us who grew up with that catchy song, we knew it was about the McDonald’s Big Mac. The special sauce was the magic. It was the distinction between a plain old hamburger and a Big Mac.
OK, so what’s this got to do with your senior living community?
Keep reading…
Special sauce is a good way to explain how you’re different from your competitors. In other words, your special sauce is what sets you apart.
For example, consider Walmart. Its special sauce is simple: pricing. Everything that Walmart does is specifically about keeping their prices low. Apple’s special sauce is innovation. Nike focuses on their product line. They are the gold standard in athletic wear.
Not sure? Not to worry. The following marketing strategies for senior living will help you create the perfect special sauce recipe for your community.
1. Operational Excellence
Offering quality services at an affordable price—that’s what everyone wants, right? A great example is our friend McDonald’s. It offers a simple, budget-friendly menu. It also maintains consistency in taste, swift service, and efficiency.
2. Product Leadership
This competitive strategy focuses on bringing superior products to the market. Also, the products should ultimately create great experiences for customers. Consider this from a senior living marketing perspective. For example, is your wellness program outstanding? Do you offer a unique dining experience? Talk about them!
3. Service Quality
Delivering consistently superior customer service is the recipe for this special sauce. The secret ingredient? Service resolution. After all, nobody’s perfect. But being able to listen to the customers’ problems so you can work toward a positive resolution is key. Virgin Airlines is a great example of a company that offers full service flights and outstanding customer service.
4. Relationship Differentiation
This special sauce is all about your associates and team members. Their interactions with the customer demonstrate competence, courtesy, credibility, reliability, and responsiveness. This avenue is closely related to service quality. But where service quality mostly focuses on processes and systems, relationship differentiation is all about the people.
The hiring process at Zappos is a great example of how they maintain their relationship differentiation. The recruitment process is like a courtship. They woo people who fit into their culture and who are good people.
5. Reputation Differentiation
Some companies set themselves apart by their reputation. This can be difficult for newer senior living communities, but even they can succeed in establishing a quality reputation through strategic partnerships. In other words, alliances with hospitals, medical staff, and industry thought leaders can establish a company as an expert.
DuPont, for example, has a strong reputation, employing engineers, scientists, and sales reps with solid technical or educational backgrounds.
We have decades of industry experience, so we know how to create a special sauce that will be unique to your community. Let us help!
My dad would always tell me, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” And when it came to my 1979 beat up Dodge Aspen, his advice made perfect sense. But when it comes to your senior living website, you must anticipate the broken bits (ideally, before they happen or just as they’re happening) so you can nip them in the proverbial bud.
How?
By conducting regular website audits.
Even your website needs a yearly physical to see how the systems are running. A website audit will help you determine your website’s technical performance. Think framework and infrastructure, page speed/load time, and navigation—all of which affects the user experience (UX). When auditing your site, pay close attention to the following:
By conducting an SEO site checkup, you’ll be able to identify any missed SEO opportunities and remedy any mistakes.
A website audit enables you to re-evaluate your lead generation and conversion funnels.
Ready to find out how your senior living website is doing? Get started here.
Vitality Senior Living wanted to build a senior living website of the future. We worked with them to integrate website design and function to align with their sales culture.
We created buyer personas and mapped the buyer’s journey based on three stages of readiness: Research, Planning, and Action.
First, we created a buyer persona for the adult daughter and the older adult prospect and mapped out motivations, obstacles, priorities, wants, and needs for each. Then, we were able to plan the right content that would be valuable to each persona. In addition, we could organize the blog and resources by stage of readiness.
For example, a prospect in the beginning stages of Awareness and Research usually wants to know where they will live, what they will do, who will take care of them, and if they can afford to live there. Someone in a Planning or Action stage needs to know how they are going to downsize, which community will be the best fit, when to make the move, and how to have the conversation with the family. Once we completed this, we created a blog calendar and the writers got to work. We moved on to the next step – engagement.
Vitality didn’t want to use traditional senior living labels, such as seniors, assisted living, or memory care. Instead, they wanted positive age-neutral descriptions, such as older adult, lifestyles, and choice. As a result, we had to get creative in using keywords to drive search engine optimization.
To engage website visitors, we included several Senior Living SMART partners in the development of the website.
Vitality wanted to automate lead nurturing strategies for all of the leads that are earlier stage. An “earlier stage” lead is a person who is not ready to tour or talk to a sales person, but they’re still expressing interest. Vitality also wanted to be sure that “urgent” leads quickly went to the sales team.
As a result, we recommended integrating the website with HubSpot (for automated nurturing). We also recommended integrating the site with their senior living CRM (they use Sherpa) to connect leads in an Action Stage to the sales team for face-to-face and voice-to-voice relationship building.
The new Vitality website is attracting more of the right traffic, engaging them longer, and speaking to (and converting) them throughout their journey.
Want to take your senior living website to the next level? We’d love to help! Request your free 30-minute brainstorming session or fill out the form below to get a website assessment.
Ready to find out how your website matches up? See how your site is performing with our instant report that you may save and share.
Five seconds. That’s all the time most people spend on a web page before exiting, according to Jason McCloud, now Director of Digital Marketing at Benchmark Senior Living, and presenter at the 2016 Senior Care Marketing Sales Summit (SMASH). Luckily, there are easy ways for senior living websites to effectively capture anonymous site visitors and convert them to leads, McCloud noted.
The most important takeaway from this session is to optimize visitors’ time with a three-step strategy: Design your landing page for conversion rate optimization, add compelling imagery and calls to action, and conduct A/B testing to pick the design that produces the most favorable responses.
Use eye-tracking “heat map” software as a “quick and easy way” to assess where website visitors look. People generally scan web pages in either an “F” or a “Z” pattern. Providers should design their landing pages accordingly.
In addition, consider how folks are going to scan: The right information needs to be in the right place. Place logos in the top left corner, with a prominent call to action and other important information in the web page’s “hot spots,” where people’s eyes—followed by their mouse—are generally drawn. And when it comes to information, less is more. Stick with the basics: Company logo, relevant photos, a phone number, pricing.
Most of the tracking software is affordable, according to McCloud, and some even offer free 30-day trials.
Design should revolve around what shoppers want to see: What the community looks like, and how much it costs. Here is McCloud’s advice for images and design:
If there are two web page designs that you’re having trouble choosing between, test them both. For example, if you’re not sure whether to utilize the F or the Z pattern design, you can experiment to see which one gets better conversion rates.
McCloud also suggested testing each design for one to two weeks, then choosing the data-driven winner. Converting existing web traffic into a lead is more valuable than spending resources on trying to generate more traffic.
If you drive traffic to your page without capturing people’s attention for more than five seconds, you’re flushing money down the drain, McCloud said, advising providers to “work on bettering conversion rates before spending more money to drive traffic.”
We’re experts in marketing and senior living website design. Plus, we have decades of senior living industry experience to boot. Let’s chat about your website.
