It’s a given that marketing strategies in any kind of industry change over time. Nonetheless, a pandemic, simply put, has been a game-changer in senior living marketing. We can’t deny that much of how marketers plan and execute their strategies have it in mind. It’s a given considering senior living falls under the healthcare umbrella.
And it’s not like the pandemic is the sole catalyst for change. People are getting older. They’re also opening up to new avenues and platforms, mostly found online. This can’t be more apparent in the growing number of hours that seniors spend online on various devices. As much as 80% of seniors in America (those 55 and above) are online.
How can you reach out to this growing market with essential factors in mind? These 10 strategies proven to work well in 2021 should give you a good idea.
Pay more attention to your message
It’s not just about highlighting that your community offers great bingo, arts and crafts, and other unique activities. Many will undoubtedly find these activities interesting. However, they’ll more than likely be more concerned with, one, how you’re going to assure their safety, and two, whether there are people in the community that they’ll be able to connect and be friends with.
- People will want to be able to interact with others with whom they share these interests. This underscores the importance of communicating this information to your prospects.
- When it comes to safety, be fully transparent on how your community ensures everyone’s safety, especially in the face of the pandemic.
The point is to always remain doubtful of the message you’re trying to send out. Chances are, it needs to be tweaked and optimized for your current prospects to resonate with it.
Double-check for key weaknesses in your funnel
Where are the points that indicate resistance, or worse, failure? How are your prospects moving through it? Are you struggling with the nurturing part or, like most, conversions?
If you don’t take the time to examine and correct your sales funnel, you’ll never be able to safely say that your campaigns are at their best potential. Once you pinpoint the weakness, that’s when you should start formulating a goal for tackling it. If you need to improve your nurturing, for example, you’ll more than likely need to start creating content like videos and social media posts to achieve that.
An assisted living marketing software may be able to help you in this regard, for it’s intended to optimize funnels.
Consider long-term marketing
When we say this, we mean you have to start prioritizing the stories that your community can tell younger people, who themselves may very well become your clients in the long run. This is especially true if you know that your residents have very compelling stories to tell. Don’t let such an opportunity slip from your grasp because not all communities enjoy such a privilege.
- Highlight the stories of how truly transformative and enjoyable senior living is in your community.
Start or continue blogging
Next to email marketing, blogging remains one of the most tried-and-tested strategies that pay off for many senior living communities in the long run. It’s one of the main foundations of senior living SEO, so there’s no beating it, as long as SEO continues to be relevant. It more than likely will since SEO paves the way to sustainable marketing.
When planning and writing your content, do your best to connect with real people.
- Who do you think are the people that will read your content? What are their personalities?
- Are they introverted or extroverted?
- What do they know about senior living?
These questions point to one thing: know your audience.
Get to know your audience more, dispense needed information. Don’t rush
This is, perhaps, one of the most important points that any senior living marketer shouldn’t miss. Many rely on chatbots that, for example, immediately ask clients what level of care they’ll need. But, let’s say, what if the prospect doesn’t really need care and only wants to socialize or take part in interesting activities regularly?
The point we’re trying to drive is that you should, from the get-go, do your best to make your prospects feel that you actually care about knowing them on a deeper level. Taking the time to make them feel they’re understood can go a long way.
- Don’t be too sales-y and appear overeager for a sale.
- Let your relationship build naturally by getting to know them more and sharing vital information about your community that they’ll find useful.
Prioritize getting fresher feedback and keeping your ratings high.
According to studies, most people rarely rely on and trust reviews that have been around for a while. This is why encouraging your residents to share new feedback should be an ongoing process.
Show your proactive stance to maintaining quality by responding to both positive and negative reviews. Take care of your community’s ratings on various review websites because most people still tend to favor the highest rated services once they’re sorted based on total rating.
Focus on sustainable marketing
We mentioned this above, but what does it really mean? Basically, it means doubling up your marketing even when the times aren’t as hard as they are. Besides SEO, you can also rely on these proven digital marketing techniques:
- PPC campaigns are one of the best forms of Senior Living Advertising you need to continually capitalize on. If you can target specific markets such as memory care, then don’t hesitate to do so.
- Developing your own app can pay off too, especially when improving communication.
- Content marketing via social media and, of course, blogs, should be continuous, too.
Automate your email marketing
Assuming you already know how to craft engaging messages, you’ll be able to save plenty of time and effort by automating the sending process. We’ve already highlighted the importance of consistency when we underlined the vital role of sustainable marketing.
The same goes for email marketing, too. However, it can be hard to maintain consistency without automation to help you. There are many emails marketing systems out there that do this for you. You only need to figure how to schedule your emails properly, so as to ensure that your audience will be actually engaged and not annoyed.
Use social media data to the fullest
Don’t let it just remain stagnant or under-utilized. Facebook alone is a goldmine of data, and there’s no shortage of analytics tools that center on social media data. The key is to pay more attention to granular insights.
If you really want to know your audience, you can’t miss this step. What do your followers love? Knowing the answer to that should give you all the information you need when figuring out the exact content you should be creating.
More importantly, this data gives you all the opportunity in the world to strengthen your relationships with your audience.
Know your numbers
Many marketers make the fatal mistake of ignoring the math in their marketing. It could actually mean the difference between a campaign’s success or failure.
- For instance, what if your last campaign fell short simply because you under budgeted? What if you’re actually already sitting on a winning strategy but failed to give it the proper financial backing it requires?
- Are you really aware of the exact cost per lead and cost per move-in?
Knowing the math paves the way to more efficient campaigns. More often than not, that boost is all they need to get them over a seemingly stubborn hump.
Conclusion
Overall, senior living digital marketing has been vastly transformed not only by the pandemic but by its target market as well. Seniors are becoming more aware of what they truly need from a given community, after all. What’s good is that marketers continue to adapt.