Are you hoping to increase your senior living community’s digital marketing budget? The reality is you won’t get a green light from the C-suite unless you can clearly communicate, with solid evidence to back up your claims, that your efforts do indeed drive revenue.
As a senior living marketing agency, we used to face this challenge every budget season with our own clients. But once we realized the challenge often stemmed from how we presented our results, we were able to develop a presentation that effectively communicated the value we brought to the table.
If you’re a senior living marketer struggling to prove that your digital marketing efforts are driving occupancy and revenue, this article is for you. In it, we’ll identify what too many marketers leave out when presenting results, which executive-level metrics you should always include, and the role sales data should play in your presentation.
By the end, you should have a solid blueprint for what you need to include to put together a winning argument for an increase in your senior living digital marketing budget.
Takeaways: What the C-Suite Needs to See from Your Digital Marketing Results
- Skip the marketing jargon and focus the presentation on occupancy, revenue, costs, and ROI.
- Highlight the metrics leadership cares about, including cost per lead, tour, and move-in.
- Use pipeline data to reveal where prospects are advancing and where they are getting stuck.
- Include CRM and sales data to give leadership a complete picture of marketing and sales performance.
Table of Contents
The most common traps when presenting results to the C-suite
The role sales data should play in your presentation
How SLS makes its clients look good to the C-suite
The most common traps when presenting results to the C-suite
Weighing things down with marketing-speak
You don’t need to impress the leadership team with your marketing acumen. Throwing around jargon and acronyms like TOFU and GEO distracts from what the C-suite wants to know: Are your digital marketing efforts driving occupancy, and therefore, revenue?
PRO TIP: Every slide in your deck should communicate something the C-suite cares about. When creating a slide, ask yourself if what you’re putting in does exactly that. If the answer is no, delete it.
Giving too much data
Sometimes more data is just that: more. Sure, we senior living marketers love geeking out over all the data, but the C-suite doesn’t have time to absorb endless charts, graphs, and dashboard screenshots.
Our job is to turn complex data into an interesting and compelling story that they can understand and follow. They should also feel comfortable asking questions, and the only way they can do that is by not experiencing cognitive overload from too many numbers.
- PRO TIP: We always link to the underlying data and reports when presenting, but the deck itself only summarizes what the data is telling us. If someone from leadership wants to dig in, they can do so via the links.
Focusing on meaningless-to-them metrics
C-suite leaders are astute business executives. Most have MBAs and other advanced degrees. They’re smart, driven, and primarily interested in costs, results, and ROI rather than more obscure-to-them marketing signals.
They want to know the cost per lead, tour, and move-in; the ROI of each marketing channel; the status of the pipeline; and where prospects are getting stuck. Give them what they want.
- PRO TIP: Identify the metrics that primarily have internal value, such as impressions, clicks, likes, shares, bounce rates, time on page, and sessions, and eliminate them from your deck. These signals have value to the marketing team but not to the C-Suite.
Hiding the not-so-great results
There will be times when parts of the report aren’t positive. Reasons for this can vary. For example, maybe there were unexpected changes to the algorithms, a competitor became more competitive, or Google changed the 3-pack to a 2-pack. Sometimes a campaign just doesn’t work, or a digital ad experiences fatigue. Not to mention that marketing is incredibly dynamic right now (hello, AI!).
When there’s bad news, own it, explain why you think it happened, and share the plan for moving forward.
- PRO TIP: Make sure you have access to the CRM and can see what happens after the lead is assigned to the sales team. For some reason, the C-Suite often has an inflated perception of sales performance. Have you ever heard someone from the C-suite say, “If you get prospects in the door, the sales team will close them”? Yet wherever we share CRM data showing a poor tour-to-move-in conversion, the C-suite is often truly shocked. But that shock is a good reminder to them that the burden isn’t fully on marketing’s shoulders. To get the best results, sales and marketing must align themselves and work in harmony.
The most effective executive-level metrics to include when tying digital marketing directly to revenue and occupancy
How many prospects converted into a lead—and what that means
A conversion is when a prospect takes a meaningful action, like calling the community, booking a tour, scheduling a time to speak with a sales advisor, or downloading gated content. The prospect’s meaningful action shows they’re genuinely interested in your community, and they officially become a lead.
Sharing lead conversions is a metric that the C-suite can understand, but be sure to explain the different types: Calls, tours, and move-ins are considered sales-qualified leads (SQLs). Brochure/guide downloads and website chat engagements are considered marketing-qualified leads (MQLs).
Give them an example that illustrates the difference between MQLs and SQLs. Someone who downloads a marketing brochure but indicates they don’t have a firm timeline for moving would be a marketing-qualified lead. You would nurture them over the long haul with the goal of converting them to sales-qualified status when they’re ready to move. On the other hand, the adult daughter who booked a tour and needs to move her 90-year-old mother within 30 days would be a sales-qualified lead.
Here’s the thing you need to get across: Both MQLs and SQLs matter. The C-suite will likely focus on SQLs, but you need to educate them on the importance of MQLs to the overall health of the sales pipeline. Don’t gloss over this point. Educate, educate, educate.
Marketing channel performance
Break down each marketing channel and show which ones are driving qualified tours, deposits, and move-ins. We get that this will be easier said than done for some channels (like paid ads) rather than others (like social media). But do it for the ones where you have real data.
For example, you can calculate paid ads in terms of investment (you know the ad spend and management costs) and outcomes (the number of calls, appointments scheduled, tours, and move-ins you can attribute to the ad campaign).
Provide a report on MQL vs. SQL conversions by marketing channel to answer the question: “Which marketing channels are generating conversions?” Break it down by conversion type: calls, tours, and move-ins for SQLs, and brochures, guides, and chat engagements for MQLs.
Generalize the big-picture marketing ROI using this formula: divide total marketing spend (including any agency retainer fees) by total move-ins (excluding aggregators). Then calculate the resident lifetime value (RLV) generated by those move-ins by multiplying the number of move-ins by the RLV. That’s a money number that the C-suite will be able to comprehend and appreciate.
- PRO TIP: The resident lifetime value is the average monthly rent + care, multiplied by the average length of stay for each level of care.
Pipeline health
The goal is to show how prospects move through their decision journey and where they get stuck. This is often a combination of marketing data and sales/CRM data and should represent the number of prospects by stage and by marketing source:
- Uncontacted
- Pre-Tour
- Post-Tour
- Cold
- Lost leads by reason
- Deposit
- Move-in
This section should demonstrate both marketing and sales efficiency, lead quantity and quality, and sales response and follow-through.
The role sales data should play in your presentation
We can’t state this enough: Driving occupancy is a shared responsibility between marketing and sales.
Sales data provides insight into lead quality. The data also helps identify opportunities and serves as a diagnostic tool. The goal isn’t to assign blame, but rather to point out, using real data, where the sales team is winning and where there’s room for improvement.
Some of the reports we often reference include:
- “Speed to the lead” report. How long does a new lead sit before the sales rep responds? We’ve found that waiting 15 minutes to respond correlates with a 7% drop in inquiry-to-tour conversion. If you’re delivering qualified leads but the sales team isn’t responding fast enough, that’s a sales problem, not a marketing problem, and the C-suite should be made aware.
- Dwell time report. How long do prospects spend at each stage (uncontacted, pre-tour, post-tour)? This report can help diagnose inefficiencies in follow-up.
- Lead source analysis. This report helps identify where sales-qualified leads are coming from and the percentage that advances to tours, deposits, and move-ins. It can be useful, especially when trying to increase the budget for a specific area, such as paid ads.
- Sales funnel report. This report identifies the number/percentage of active leads at each stage, helping the C-suite better visualize the overall pipeline.
At SLS, we make our clients look good to the C-suite.
Working with a marketing agency like ours is an investment, and one we never take for granted. We make sure our clients have the data that proves to the C-suite that their marketing dollars are delivering a meaningful ROI.
Interested in learning more about how we operate and how we will make your day-to-day marketing job easier? Get in touch and let’s chat.
