Senior Living Marketing and Sales: CRM Search Made Easy

Senior Living CRM Search Made Easy

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Choosing new senior living CRM software can be a daunting task. But it can also be an opportunity to discover new features that can enhance your sales culture. Below, you’ll find helpful tips for choosing a new CRM.

The Senior Living CRM Search: Make Your List and Dream Big

Before you schedule demos, make a list of what you like about your current CRM and everything that frustrates users. Create three lists: Must Haves, Would Be Nice to Have, and Non-Negotiables.

Here are some of the top considerations when researching senior living CRMs:

  1. Ease of Use: Like our prospects, we’re comfortable with the familiar. Change is difficult. We want our users to transition with ease.
  2. Better Reporting: With more robust reporting, you can increase transparency between marketing and sales teams. Look for a system that delivers what you want on all levels of reporting. Think basic user through leadership team.
  3. A Refined User Experience: Sales and marketing teams today don’t function on recording activity alone. There are many roles within the department. Look for a system that delivers an experience tailored to different roles.
  4. Simultaneous Support of Multiple Service Lines: Communities are no longer operating within the brick and mortar communities. Today, there are multiple lines of service, community outreach efforts, and census management functions. Each one has its own set of data fields, workflows, and supporting reports. Choose a CRM that can deliver on the expanding markets your community is either currently immersed in or considering for the future.
  5. Defined Sales Process: Senior living counselors are no longer order takers. Competition is fierce. Having a defined sales process that everyone follows is the key to success. Whether you want a pre-defined process or you want to build your own, make sure to implement a CRM that supports process. Bonus points if it can simultaneously support multiple processes or workflows that tailor the experience for your different service lines.
  6. Marketing Automation: Whether it’s simply having a more efficient way to send and track personal email or you’re seeking full-blown marketing automation, the future of senior living marketing and sales involves marketing automation. Select a tool that supports forward-thinking and emerging marketing trends.

Senior Living CRM: Fear of Data Migration

Make sure the vendor you select can seamlessly move your data, including your waiting lists and prospect activity history. Ask potential vendors the following:

  • Do you have a reliable process covering all data migration facets of extraction, translation, cleansing, and validation?
  • Will you perform analysis and inspection of the information to validate data quality? Will you pinpoint required data and highlight gaps in the data from the current system?
  • Are you well versed in detailed mapping and transformation exercises to define migration rules, cleansing routines, and final execution plans?

Senior Living CRM Training, User Support, and Flexibility

Learning a new system requires training, reinforcement, and on-going support. Here are some questions to ask before you sign a contract with a new CRM provider:

  • How do you train people on the new CRM?
  • What kind of ongoing support do you offer? Do we have to pay extra for it? (Think online learning center, live support, built-in knowledge base.)
  • Is the CRM flexible enough to support future changes users may want to make in data fields, workflows, and reporting? Can we make these changes ourselves, or will we have to pay you (the CRM vendor) for any changes?

Senior Living CRM Implementation: Embrace the Change

Regardless of which CRM you choose, you will experience a learning curve. Embrace this fact and go with it. Fear of change can be paralyzing and inhibit the ability to accept and retain new information. Remember, the impact of learning a new system will be far less scary if each member of your team is open to change.

Finally, don’t let the fear of change keep you from diving into the search. The process of vetting, selecting, and implementing a new CRM may take longer than anticipated. Budget at least 90-120 days for the process.

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Senior Living Websites: Why Do a Website Audit?

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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.

Why do a website audit? Here are three reasons why you need to make this a part of your ongoing web marketing strategy:

1. Improved website performance will lead to better user experience (and happier users make for happier leads/customers).

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:

  • Is your website mobile-friendly? According to @similiarweb, mobile drives 56% of all traffic.
  • Is your website error free? Dead ends and broken links can be frustrating to the user.
  • Is your page size below 9.5 mb? The heavier the site page, the slower the load time.
  • Do your web pages load within three seconds? Any slower and visitors will abandon your site, reducing conversions and sales.

2. Enhancing your search engine optimization (SEO) means your site stands a better chance of coming up in organic searches.

By conducting an SEO site checkup, you’ll be able to identify any missed SEO opportunities and remedy any mistakes.

  • Does your website have XML sitemap files? This tells Google and other search engines what pages on your site you want crawled and indexed.
  • Do you have a title tag and how long is it? The title tag is an HTML title that is used to briefly and accurately describe the topic and theme of an online listing. Your title tag should be no longer than 65 characters in length.
  • Are your page titles optimized? Remember, 60% of all organic clicks go to the top three organic search results. Optimize your page titles and use a compelling meta description to get off on the right foot.
  • Are you reviewing your keywords? Look at your keyword performance. Find out which keywords are giving you the biggest gains in traffic and leads and make sure you are adding relevant content to your website that targets those keywords.

3. Reviewing and tweaking conversion paths will help you boost overall visitor-to-leads and leads-to-customers.

A website audit enables you to re-evaluate your lead generation and conversion funnels.

  • Are you providing high quality content on your website that provides value to your prospects? Companies that blog get 55% more web traffic and 70% more leads than those that don’t. Blogging is the best way to reach your target audience with useful, educational information they’re out there looking for. Not to mention how much it helps your search rankings.
  • Do you have a variety of content that appeals to all your different prospects (e.g., potential resident, adult child), including where they are in their journey (e.g., research, planning)? Understanding your buyers by developing (and regularly revisiting!) personas will help you create targeted content that speaks to them and gets them to act.
  • Do you have a system of following up with your leads and keeping them engaged in your content and brand? Calls-to-action, marketing offers, and landing pages play a major role in the performance of your website.

Let’s Audit Your Website!

Ready to find out how your senior living website is doing? Get started here.

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Senior Living Website of the Future: A Case Study

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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.

Vitality wanted to accomplish the following with their new senior living website:

  • Provide the right content at the right time to the right prospect
  • Create a highly engaging site that would encourage visitors to stay longer and keep them coming back
  • Represent senior living in a positive light using vibrant images and positive language
  • Engage prospects in every stage of readiness, not just those ready to move in within the next thirty days
  • Allow prospects to self-select their stage of readiness, consume content created for that stage, and advance seamlessly through the journey
  • Automate lead nurturing campaigns for earlier-stage prospects while advancing prospects who are ready to engage with the sales team
  • Generate high quality, organic leads

Step #1: Personas, Stages of Readiness, and Content – Oh My!

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.

Step #2: Drive Traffic To the Site & Keep Them Coming Back

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.

  • Site visitors can take a Roobrik assessment. Each assessment takes 3 to 5 minutes and leads prospects to a personalized Care Fit Report that presents their best care options. Prospects can share their report with other family members or save it for later. This keeps them on the website longer and increases return traffic and conversions.
  • We also added interactive room planners for each community. This way, prospects in Planning or Action stages can choose an apartment style and design it by adding furnishings. These room planners by NextGenTools are the only ones that work on mobile devices and allow prospects to share their completed design on Facebook or email to other family members. This increases time-on-page by 6 to 8 minutes and creates a reason to come back to the website.
  • Future enhancements include adding live chat to improve conversion from anonymous visitor to qualified leads and tours. With SiteStaff, we are getting 40% conversion from chat to lead and 20% conversion from chat to scheduled tour!

Step #3: HubSpot & CRM Integration

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 results? A senior living website of the future!

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.

FREE 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.

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use big data, targeted events and direct mail campaigns to increase qualified prospects and drive occupancy

Using Big Data and Direct Mail Best Practices to Drive Occupancy

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By Valerie Whitman, Leading Response and Senior Living SMART

In this information-packed presentation, you’ll learn how to develop immediate move-ins and create a pipeline of exclusive, qualified leads. Reduce reliance on third-party lead generation and use big data, targeted events and direct mail campaigns to increase qualified prospects and reduce resident acquisition costs.

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