A lot of thought and effort go into successfully marketing a senior living community and its services. While there are multiple moving pieces associated with advertising and marketing your operation, you don’t have to do it all yourself. In order to increase senior living occupancy, Roy Barker, of Moore Diversified Services and seniorlivingsalesandmarketing.com offers advice on 9 ways to automate or outsource much of your marketing and sales processes so you can focus on building relationships with prospects and their families.
Email Marketing
Email marketing continues to be one of the most lucrative ways to get the word out about your senior living operation. By building your email list using an automated platform, such as MailChimp, you can send targeted emails to your potential residents and their families. What’s great about these types of platforms is that you can create your response emails in advance and schedule them to autosend so you don’t have to keep checking and responding to email when someone signs up to be notified of your services.
Content Writing
Website content is an important consideration for potential clients and their families. Senior living facilities need to continuously put out fresh and relevant content in order to continue to stay top of mind for seniors in their area. In order to increase financial margins from senior living operations, marketing departments and managers must produce massive amounts of content. Because producing so much content is exhaustive, you can hire a content writer and assign them topics or titles for your website content. You can find content writers on Craigslist or Freelancer.com.
Content Calendar
As part of your content management strategy, you will need to set up and follow a content calendar so you can plan your work and work your plan for getting the word out about your senior living community. A simple calendar can do the trick, but there are several free planning programs such as Trello and Asana to help you plan and manage your content.
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Social Media and Reputation Management
Social media allows potential residents and their families to peer into the life of senior living communities so they can get a feel for what it is like as a resident. If you don’t have time to prepare and publish your social media marketing campaign, you can assign it as a duty to one of your existing staff; you can outsource it by hiring a part time social media campaign manager; you can contract an agency to manage it for you; or you can use an online scheduling platform in which you prepare and schedule social media posts up to 30 days in advance. Platforms such as Hootsuite or Buffer are great for social media scheduling. Prospects and their families want to work with senior living operators that have a reputation for providing quality care in a comfortable setting.
Video Marketing
Creating videos can take up a lot of time for a senior living operation. This is best outsourced to a professional. If you can’t afford to hire a professional videographer, contact your local college and ask for a student in the audio/visual department. Many students will appreciate the opportunity to work with actual clients to build their portfolio, and senior living operations are a current topic with lots of areas of interest.
SEO
Roy Barker knows how important it is to have properly designed SEO services so people can find your company and community online. This one is best left to the professionals. There are many things to consider including keyword use, negative keywords, and geolocation needs to name a few. Professionals know how to execute all these strategies properly and in a timely manner. SEO is more sophisticated today than ever. Using older tactics such as “keyword stuffing” can land you in Google jail, damaging your online reputation through deindexing of pages, loss of page rankings, and diminished searchability.
Design/ Visual Content
When it comes to designing your brand, you will want to outsource this to a professional. Senior living operations requires a certain level of professionalism, compassion, care, and integrity that needs to be conveyed in the marketing and branding of your company or community. If you want to get it right and not drive yourself crazy worrying about which shade of blue your logo should be, hire a professional. This is usually a one-time job and won’t cost you an arm and a leg.
Lead Management
Finding qualified leads is important to every senior living operator, but managing them is crucial. While customer relationship management systems CRMs are a must have today, they must be utilized to the fullest potential in order to maximize their effectiveness. Maintaining everything by hand is much too burdensome due to the sheer volume of leads and touches required. Depending upon which study you read, it can take between eight and twelve touches to turn a prospect into a resident. A good CRM will help you automate the process of storing contact information, categorizing leads, keeping track of contact history, personalized notes relative to each contact, and scheduling future contacts opportunities to name a few. Utilizing a great CRM system will help your marketing team take leads from prospect all the way to resident.
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is easy enough to set up, but you really do need to know what is required in order to get the most bang for your advertising buck. If you spend too much time trying to figure out the intricacies of Adwords or Pay-Per-Click services, you will find yourself frustrated and out of money with nothing to show. If you want fast results, hire a professional Adwords consultant.
Automating and outsourcing some or all of these marketing functions will not only add a level of professionalism to your outreach, but also free up the marketing team to focus on what really counts, building personal relationships with viable prospects. While we need website content to convey information, SEO to be found on the internet, and emails to communicate with prospects, residents are won or lost based on the relationship developed with the real people at your community.