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The Five Most Important Resident Marketing Trends

The Five Most Important Resident Marketing Trends

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In 2017, LeadingResponse marketed to, and surveyed, more than 250,000 prospective residents, their adult children and caregivers to gain insights, and generate new move-ins for their senior living community clients.  During this hot topic webinar, you’ll learn more about the amazing data and results that were born out of this initiative and how to use that information to dramatically improve your occupancy.

What You Will Learn:

  1. Provide the latest resident marketing trends
  2. Discuss best practices based on data to generate new move-ins
  3. Gain consumer behavior details that increase your conversion rate
  4. Learn more about very targeted efforts to yield the strongest qualified leads
  5. Discuss the difference in behaviors between face to face leads vs digital leads
Download Slide Deck Presentation Download Special Report Download the Trend Report
What Happened? How to Improve the Customer’s Experience Webinar

What Happened? How to Improve the Customer’s Experience Webinar

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Marketing, sales and operations have a blind spot into the offline customer journey once a call lands with the sales channel.  Learn ways to deliver a consistent, branded customer experience to improve revenue performance.

You’ll learn:

  • Inbound call handling best practices
  • Understanding where breakage occurs in the customer journey
  • How to effectively score all inbound customer calls
  • How to optimize media to drive more opportunities
Download Slide Deck Presentation
SENior living marketing

Get the Most from Your Paid Advertising Budget: Consider Call Analytics

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Marketers in the senior living space face a challenge: They often can’t tie their marketing spend directly to its impact on their organization’s bottom line. The thin amount of data they receive shows their online campaigns are generating calls. But how many are from actual prospects? And how many calls are being properly serviced? This is where call analytics can help.

Baseline data—the number of clicks, calls, or visits—isn’t enough to run a thoroughly optimized campaign. Worse, baseline data can be misleading and costly. Senior living marketers need to identify, understand, and, perhaps most importantly, communicate to company stakeholders how their campaigns support the company’s bottom line.

Not All Call Analytics are Created Equal

Basic conversion analytics, such as click-through rates, form fills, email response rates, and call duration, may not tell the whole story. For example, when you run a Google Ads campaign, you’ll know exactly how many calls you received from the ads. What you won’t know is why the calls were made.

Take this real-world example, which illustrates our point: When family members want to reach a resident at a senior living property, they typically search online for the property name. Often, a paid search or display ad renders first. So, the searcher clicks to call the facility. In short, the ad did its job and delivered a call; it’s just not a new customer call as intended.

How prevalent is this? One Marchex senior living client found that over 20 percent of their paid search budget was consumed this way. In other words, one out of every five calls was from residents’ extended families. The calls were not driving new business, as intended. At a few bucks a click, this wasted spend can add up quickly and consume a budget.

Another contributing factor in wasted ad spend can come from inside the residence. A Marchex property management client found that 40 percent of their $100,000 monthly budget went to residents calling for maintenance. Call analytics helped the client improve their bid strategy, resulting in thousands of calls that actually drove new leases.

Call Analytics Help Align Marketing, Sales, and Operations

Adding call analytics into a senior living company’s marketing mix also delivers benefits to sales and operations. Marchex solutions facilitate reporting by surfacing call data by individual location. Once operations has visibility across multiple locations, they can identify opportunities to fix breakage in the customer journey, enable targeted agent training, and address other operational improvements.

Sales can gain insights into how agents perform. For instance, they can determine how closely agents follow sales scripts. Or they can learn how agents respond to callers (or whether they answer the phone at all). In fact, Marchex analyzed millions of senior living industry calls over a twelve-month period and found that 23 percent of calls to senior living companies go unanswered.

Finally, call analytics deliver insights that help marketers take an active leadership role in the company. With call analytics, you can prove value more effectively than basic analytics and help justify marketing and ad budgets. You can also provide value to operations and sales. Best of all, at the next annual budget meeting, you’ll able to offer data-driven results that demonstrate how your marketing is positively impacting the bottom line.

To learn how your marketing, sales, and operations can benefit from call analytics, download our one-sheet for senior living marketers and Call Conversation datasheet →

Marchex is the leading provider of end-to-end call analytics solutions, with the deepest and broadest set of applications for mid-market and enterprise businesses on the market today. The best customers are those who call your business. Marchex helps you understand who called and why, so you can turn more of these callers into customers. Learn more →

NEED HELP TRYING NEW IDEAS? WE’RE THE APP FOR THAT! 🙂

Seriously, we’ve been in your shoes, and we can help. We keep our eyes on the latest and greatest technology, including call analytics, and get a sense of if and how it could work for the senior living industry before we recommend it to our clients. Get in touch and let’s talk about how we can help.

Blogging Basics: Three “Must Do” Tasks & One DO NOT!

Blogging Basics for a Killer Senior Living Blog That Gets Results

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Having a senior living blog is a popular strategy to generate organic traffic, enhance search results, and keep prospects on websites longer.

That said, blogging does take careful planning. So before you start typing, check out these best practices.

Develop Buyer Personas for your Senior Living Blog

There’s no point in writing anything if you don’t know who you’re writing for. That’s where buyer personas come in.

Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal prospect. The persona encompasses background, demographics, motivators, and other types of information regarding how the prospect goes through the sales cycle.

Building strong personas will help you better understand your prospects. In addition, it will make it easier to tailor content to them, no matter where they are in the sales cycle.

For example, prospects who are trying to decide whether senior living is right for them are in a much different place than prospects who need to move within 30 days. You might create a downloadable checklist for the former. For the latter, a moving guide might make sense. You get the idea.

Make sure you don’t create buyer personas in a vacuum. While the personas are fiction, you need to base them on real people. Interview current customers, prospective customers, and lost customers so you can create an accurate persona.

Invest in Keyword Analysis for Your Senior Living Blog

Keyword research will tell you how prospects are searching in your local market. The analysis provides a list of the most common and popular keywords, the number of searches initiated monthly, the difficulty in ranking for each keyword, and where your community and your competitors currently rank.

For example, “assisted living” will be extremely difficult to rank for, but “assisted living Boca Raton” will be easier and more targeted to the type of prospects you want to attract (assuming your community is actually located in Boca Raton!). Remember, the goal isn’t simply to generate more traffic to your senior living blog. The goal is to generate more targeted traffic.

Create an Editorial Calendar for Your Senior Living Blog

With your keyword research in hand, select keywords with the highest monthly search results and moderate or low “ranking difficulty.” From there, you can create your editorial calendar.

  • The first step is to integrate these keywords into your blog titles.
  • Assign each blog to one of your personas. For example, adult children and older adults are going to be interested in different topics, so it’s important to map your content to the right persona.
  • Align your content with various stages of the buyer’s journey. Some prospects are in the early research stage, some are in planning mode, and others are in crisis and have to make a quick decision. Each stage requires different content based on where they are in their journey.
  • Schedule two to four blogs per month for best results. Remember, you want to deliver fresh original content on your senior living blog.

Don’t blog about your residents, employees, or daily happenings.

Prospects are not searching for your internal news and events. Blogs are not about you – they are for and about your prospects. You can use your social channels, such as Facebook, to promote content about your residents and employees, or you can create a News section on your website for these updates.

Need more help with your senior living blog? Let’s chat!

11 Strategies for Promoting Content & Measuring Results

11 Strategies for Promoting Content & Measuring Results

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So, you’ve got your content teed up, whether it’s a guest post, a hot take, or a summary of a survey you conducted. You’re done, right? Not so fast!

Producing quality content is the first step. But now it’s time to share your content and to understand which pieces help bring leads—and ultimately customers—to your senior living community.

Here are 11 strategies that will help you promote and measure your content like a pro.

1. Write irresistible headlines.
Your content could be the best in the world, but it’s worthless unless you’re grabbing people’s attention and getting them to read it. Headlines are crucial for this very reason, and there are several rules for creating good ones:

  • Make them explicit and concise.
  • Don’t give away the whole article, but don’t hide what it’s about, either.
  • Trigger curiosity. Appeal to emotions.
  • Use numbers or percentages when possible.

2. Put your content in front of targeted eyeballs.
Share your content in an email to targeted prospects(hint:segment your database according to buyer personas, and only share content that will interest that particular persona). Share your content on social media as well. Putting your content directly in someone’s inbox is a simple way to reach them, while posting content on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn makes it easy for people to share.

3. Add tools to your promotions arsenal.
Use tools like Buffer to share content efficiently. Buffer allows you to queue up content you want to share on social media and then spaces out when that content is released throughout the day.

Want to learn more?

Get our FREE eBook

Download Today

A blog is a long-term marketing asset that will bring traffic and new leads to your senior living website. In this eBook, we will walk you step-by-step through the blogging fundamentals and show you how to start reaping the benefits of this valuable marketing and awareness channel.

Everything You Need to Know About Writing a Senior Living Blog

 

4. Embrace being a big fish in a small pond.
Don’t view the fractionalized senior living market as a threat. View it as a marketing opportunity to specialize in a niche.

5. Don’t date yourself.
When publishing articles that aren’t news-oriented,don’t include the date. With information that’s useful no matter when it’s posted, including the date may discourage someone from reading it as time passes.

6. Connect with everyone on social media.
Create a separate account if necessary on Facebook or Instagram for consumer-facing marketing and make sure to do the same on LinkedIn for referral contacts. It’s a content sharing platform—treat it as such. Content marketers benefit from connecting with each other.

7. Be a fount of information.
Content marketing is a test of generosity. It costs nothing to give away your best advice and knowledge, and that’s how you’ll win the relationships that give you the links, the authority, the rank—all leading to getting qualified visitors on your website.

8. Use data to your advantage.
How much authority does your page have? Find out with tools like Google Analytics. Make use of available data and adjust your content accordingly.

9. Focus on what matters.
There’s a very long road between getting a “like” and making money. A very low number of social media interactions convert into leads. Your website is much more likely to get a visit from a Google search, so put the bulk of your energy into where you get the best results.

10. Share content that people want to see.
Look at what’s getting shared and clicked the most. Use Google Analytics to find the articles that will get people to subscribe to your newsletter. Put these items on your sharing list.

11. Know when to share.
Track your web traffic and email click-through performance to find out when people click on your content. So if you find your Facebook audience engages around noon on Fridays, but LinkedIn folks seem to get into your stuff on Wednesdays between one and four, schedule your posts accordingly. For further insights, check out this industry research regarding the best times to post on social media.

What tips do you have for promoting content and measuring results? Share in the comments!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Andy Crestodina

Andy Crestodina is the author of Content Chemistry: The Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing. Andy will be sharing his wisdom in two presentations at the 2018 Senior Care Marketing Sales(SMASH)Summit taking place Oct 1 – 3 in Chicago: Content Marketing Micro-moments: Turning Traffic into Leads and Leads into Conversions and Content Marketing 2.0. Drive your Content Engine in 2019.

Sign up for our free webinar “Content, Conversions and Lead Generation” on Thursday September 6th at 1:30PM EST.

Using Data to Uncover New Possibilities in Senior Living

Using Data to Uncover New Possibilities in Senior Living Webinar

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Using Incidence Analytics to Identify Market Need

Improving Senior Housing Performance with Precision Market Analytics

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 →

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customer journey

Senior Living Sales: Mapping The Customer Journey After They Say Yes

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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.

First, keep these things in mind:

  • There’s a lot going on. There’s a move that has to be coordinated, downsizing that needs to happen, financial matters to figure out, and paperwork to sign—lots of paperwork with lots of legalese.
  • It’s a significant change. The decision to move to a senior living residence is right up there with saying yes to a marriage proposal, choosing a college, and getting a new job. There’s stress and uncertainty. It’s a reminder that they are aging and need more help. They are giving up their home and familiar routines. Perhaps they’re afraid of losing personal control. Plus, they might be sad to leave their friends and community and become a stranger in their new environment.
  • They may be moving in after a crisis. Some residents are facing challenging situations, such as the following:
    • Severe health issue
    • Loss of spouse or caregiver
    • A decline in physical or mental health
  • It’s exhausting. Going through the decision process, planning the move, and then doing the actual move-in can be physically and emotionally exhausting for both the resident and family.

Second, figure out how senior living sales and marketing can you create a customer journey that supports residents and their families?

You want to create a journey that provides an empathetic, positive experience. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

  • Do your research! Talk with residents and families and learn from their move-in experience. Did you provide a move-in gift or welcome package? If yes, did they find it helpful? If not, what was lacking? Can the senior living sales and marketing teams work on a better welcome package?
  • Look at your touchpoints and channels. What interactions do you have with residents and families during the move-in process? What are the methods by which these touchpoints happen: in-person, emails, phone conversations? Bottom line: the senior living sales rep shouldn’t disappear once the customer has signed. Remember, YOU are the person they know best. Greet them and their family the day they move in. Make a point of checking in on them over the next thirty days. Ditto with their family. If they bring up any issues, don’t say “Oh, I’ll look into that” and then forget. FOLLOW UP.
  • Think about how the customer feels during each touchpoint. Go through each touchpoint and think about how the customer may feel. Are they scared? Emotional? Confused? Disappointed? What are ways for everyone to come together to address these things?
  • How can you make that experience better? Look at opportunities to make the process easier. How can you reduce some of the stress and uncertainty? How can you make the process consistent and scalable? Are there best practices in your organization?
  • Get ongoing feedback and commit to ongoing improvement! There’s always room for improvement. Build on what’s working and fix what’s broken.

Interested in learning more strategies for exceeding prospects’ expectations?

Let’s chat! We’ll spend 30 minutes brainstorming with you.

Request a Session
senior living marketing

[WEBINAR] Senior Living Websites: Attract, Engage & Nurture Prospects

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Senior Living Websites Should Attract, Engage, and Nurture Prospects

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.

Interested in learning more strategies for exceeding prospects’ expectations?

Let’s chat! We’ll spend 30 minutes brainstorming with you.

Request a Session
INBOUND MARKETING

What is Inbound Marketing? And Do I Need It? [Webinar]

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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.

 

senior living marketing

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.