- Senior Living SMART

If you want to have an excellent senior living marketing strategy, you need an excellent content strategy. Content can take many forms—emails, landing pages, blog posts, and one of our favorites: premium content.

In today’s article, we’re going to answer commonly asked questions about premium content.

What is premium content?

Simply put, premium content is (usually) long-form content that lives behind a website form. You might also hear the term “gated” content. If a website visitor wants to access the content, they need to give something in return—most often their name and email address.

What are some examples of premium content?

Any piece of content could be premium content. While premium content is usually long-form, it doesn’t have to be. The content’s value is what ultimately matters. For example, a prospect might consider a one-pager on your community’s pricing to be extremely valuable.

That said, examples of premium content include the following:

Brochures
Case studies
Checklists
Ebooks
Guides
Infographics
Pricing lists
White papers

Why is premium content critical to an effective senior living marketing strategy?

Premium content is critical to a senior living marketing strategy because it can help define where someone is in their buying journey. From there, we can “score” them. Are they a marketing-qualified lead or a sales-qualified lead?

For example, someone who downloads a free guide from your site on “Questions to ask when you begin researching senior living options” is likely in a vastly different place from the person who requests pricing for your community.

The person wanting the guide isn’t ready for a sales interaction. They are still in the research stage. So if a sales rep called them, the rep would be wasting everyone’s time. Not to mention, the rep might label the lead as “cold” or “dead,” which wouldn’t be accurate. The lead simply isn’t ready.

The person wanting your community’s specific pricing is probably closer to making a decision. So a follow-up call from the sales rep would likely yield better results—such as a tour or a sit-down conversation.

But what about that person who downloaded the guide? They’ve engaged with content on your site and they’ve shown interest and curiosity in senior living. We’d call them a marketing-qualified lead (MQL). And because we have the person’s email address, we can continue staying in front of them by sending them helpful information via email. All of this can happen seamlessly behind the scenes via marketing automation.

Bottom line: Sales reps should only work leads that are truly sales-qualified. Meanwhile, the marketing automation can continue to nurture the marketing-qualified leads. And it all begins with the various kinds of premium content you have on your site, and who engages with what.

So when I create premium content for my senior living community, do I have to think about different types of content for MQLs and SQLs?

Short answer: Yes. But the longer answer goes like this. It’s better to think about content according to your different types of buyers and the various points they’ll likely hit on their journey.

For example, a seventy-year-old couple who is just beginning the process of thinking about downsizing and moving into a community is in a different mindset than the adult daughter who needs to find a place for her eighty-nine-year-old mother with dementia. What types of content would be helpful to each persona? THAT’S how you have to think about it.

Oh, boy. That sounds confusing. Can you break down content development into steps?

We sure can!

List your buyer personas. (Need help? Check out our guide on persona development.)
List the various points they’ll be in their respective journeys—research stage, consideration stage, decision stage.
Then, list the various types of content that would help each persona in each stage.

Yes, you’ll likely have some overlap between certain personas/stages. But this gives you a rough idea about how to approach this senior living marketing strategy.

Wow! That sounds like A LOT of content to develop.

It is, but keep in mind we’re big fans of repurposing content.

So let’s say you write a guide called “10 Financial Mistakes to Avoid When Considering Senior Living.” Once you write the guide, you can use snippets in other channels:

Blog – do a series of 10 blog posts, one on each mistake
Tweet/post different mistakes on social media and link to the complete guide
Do a podcast about the mistakes
Do a 10-minute video—one minute for each mistake

You get the idea. You can use one good piece of long-form content in multiple ways. So while the initial content is an investment (we recommend using a professional copywriter), the ROI will be huge.

Can Senior Living SMART help my community write, design, and publish premium content?

Absolutely! Not only do we create premium content that gets results (in other words, conversions!), we can also help you implement marketing automation. (Including lead scoring and lead nurturing.) Contact us for a complimentary brainstorming session!

1. Senior living blog posts and premium content provide additional opportunities to attract people to your site and engage them with helpful info.

The more paths you can give people to enter and explore your website, the better. And that’s precisely what premium content and senior living blog posts do.

Remember, most people begin their shopping online these days. A basic 10-page or 20-page senior living website isn’t enough to cover all the information people are searching for. But every blog post you write is considered a website page. Every landing page you have for a free download, like a guide or infographic, is considered a page. And ALL of these pages are excellent ways to help attract site visitors and convert them into leads.

Google also likes a deeper website with lots of helpful info: “If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site.”

2. Blog posts and premium content provide a great opportunity for long-tail keyword optimization.

A long-tail keyword is one that’s hyper specific, but doesn’t have a ton of monthly searches. That’s OK, because the specificity of the search term often indicates someone’s eagerness to buy sooner rather than later. For example, someone searching on “yellow sneakers women wide width size 8” indicates a certain level of interest beyond someone who simply googles “women’s sneakers.”

Armed with a solid list of long-tail keywords relevant to senior living, you can optimize your blog and premium content so that it helps capture the people conducting these long-tail searches.

3. Blog posts and premium content can speak to a specific point in the buyer’s journey—and to different buyers.

Some of your core pages—like your home page—need to speak to everyone. It’s the home page, after all. It needs to be welcoming to everyone who lands on it, regardless of who they are or where they are in their journey.

But a guide that that discusses the differences between independent living and assisted living is speaking to someone earlier in their journey. The one-sheet on your community’s pricing is speaking to buyer who is in the decision making stage.

Having different types of content that speak to different types of buyers at different points in their journey is not only helpful to your prospects, but also your marketing and sales teams. How? Well, marketing and sales will be able to score the leads appropriately based on the types of blog posts and premium content the prospects read and download.

In the example we used earlier, the person learning about independent living and memory care would be a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) since they’re still in the educational stages, while the person who requested pricing would be a sales-qualified lead (SQL).

5. Blogs and premium content give you a great place to show your community’s personality and unique point of view.

In a previous article, we mentioned that one of the challenges facing senior living communities is that most (if not all) are essentially selling the same thing—and your core web pages won’t differ too much from competitors’ web pages.

But with a blog and other premium content, you can begin to differentiate yourself simply by how you talk and the approach you take to common questions (or objections/challenges).

In fact, we’d argue that more and more senior living communities need to get into this “personality-driven” content. Write a blog post on a day in the life of your…activities director, nurse practitioner, head of dining, you get the idea. Include candid photos and real quotes. Or create a guide on “How 3 Real Families Helped Ease Their Parents’ Angst About Moving into Our Community.”

THAT’S the type of content people won’t see anywhere else because it’s unique to your community. It’s honest, and it tackles the stuff that’s in the back of so many people’s heads.

The communities that start producing truly original, heartfelt, honest content are the communities that will succeed the most this decade—and a blog and premium content are a great way to disseminate this sort of material.

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