What marketing leaders need to maximize digital marketing spend
If you are a marketing leader within your senior living community, you know there are countless ways to spend marketing budget on digital channels for lead generation.
How do you market to those who are interested in your community and who will be the right fit? How do you get your message to break through the crowded digital space?
OppGen has worked with a number of senior living communities, and our method for lead generation has proven to boost occupancy rates and return on advertising dollars.
Start the conversation
Families who are researching senior living communities for a loved one are doing so more and more through digital channels. Providing as much valuable information about the community, culture, and care as possible is key in building credibility with them.
For example, including detailed images of your facilities and amenities can help potential residents picture themselves in your community. By using videos, health improvement stories, existing senior experiences, and proving to instill a true sense of community can make an impact on prospective senior living residents to move them from an evaluation to a consideration stage in their journey.
Identify residents that fit your senior living community
Every community and the culture it depicts is unique. In order to run an effective senior living campaign, it’s vital to know who your audience is. If you have a detailed resident persona in place, it can help narrow in on who should your campaigns resonate with the most. Gone are the days of blanket targeting. Offering personalized experiences to prospects helps in turning engagement or online traffic into real occupants.
Keeping the needs of your clients at the top of your mind can also help build trust with them over time. Start to address the needs of the persona through the marketing materials you provide them. When it is a good fit, there needs to be an optimized experience for future residents to take the next step and either submit their information on a form or call to schedule a visit.
Serve local seniors targeted ads
Once you have the specifics on who the best prospect is, you can start to use multiple advertising channels to replicate that demographic and psychographic intelligence that we mentioned earlier. Targeting options such as age, gender, net worth, interests, education, and marital status to name a few can help refine the prospective audience.
Identifying where these audiences live online is the next step in determining a successful senior living marketing strategy. We have found the following digital advertising channels to be extremely effective in generating high quality leads for senior living communities:
- Google Search
- Google Display Network
- Local news publications
With the audiences and channels identified, you have to ensure that the overall prospect experience is streamlined to maximize engagement with your senior living community.
This starts with writing great advertising copy. For a channel such as Google search, your ads should be highlighting value propositions that your ideal senior living resident cares about the most. These ads can also be used to qualify future residents by including a starting price. For a social media advertising channel such as Facebook, there is more flexibility with video rich media or carousel images that allow you to showcase the community.
Once an ad is clicked, your website or landing page should be streamlined to encourage visitors to take the next step and initiate a conversation. For example, having information such as answers to frequently asked questions help with building trust and enables users to establish if your community is a good fit for them or their loved ones.
Follow-up and engage
Committing to a senior living community is a big decision for any family and can take from a few weeks to a few months. To keep your community at the top of mind, retargeting your online ads to those who have visited your website and not converted or bounced all together may be a good option. Retargeting leverages cookies to target ads to consumers based on their previous browser history.
Website visitors who are retargeted are 70% more likely to convert. With retargeting it’s important to think about these ads through a customer’s perspective. What type of ad would they want to see to improve conversions?
It’s important to have a designated salesperson, sales team, or team member whose only responsibility is to follow up with incoming digital leads. Following up with digital leads is critical to the success of the campaign. The goal of your senior living community should not only generate high-quality leads, but to provide a sales road-map to follow up, nurture, and convert these leads into new residents.
Commitment to your senior living community’s growth
If your senior living community is interested in implementing new digital marketing strategies or expanding on your current efforts, we can provide you with a free digital market analysis. This analysis will allow our team to evaluate your current online efforts, along with your business data, and deliver actionable recommendations for where to invest your digital budget.
Start the process by visiting our website and fill out the form. Please be as detailed as possible. Our team will be following up with you to discuss the next steps and sending you your complete digital market analysis.
