It’s no secret that the American population is aging. The National Council on Aging notes, that by 2040, 78.3 million Americans will be over the age of 65. As the population of aging adults continues to grow, new senior living communities and assisted living facilities are popping up across the US, existing providers are expanding and the marketplace is become quite crowded. Increased competition, heightened demand and an opportunity for significant business growth all point to the need to market with intention, clarity and impact. So, how can a senior living marketing agency help?
Honing Your UVP
Standing out in a crowded and competitive industry requires a laser focus on what makes your community unique. Location? Amenities? Best in class staff? Something that none of your neighboring competitors can offer?
Defining your senior living community’s unique value proposition is critical but it’s only one piece of the equation. The next step is deciding how to articulate that point of differentiation to internal and external stakeholders. With a senior living marketing agency in place to support your team, you can expect clear articulation of this value to impact nearly every marketing and communication asset in your portfolio. Expect to work collaboratively on refining existing assets and creating new assets to ensure these values reach target audiences in meaningful and memorable ways.
Prioritizing Reputation Management
Think of a senior living marketing agency as your brand’s watchdog. As the monitoring arm of your marketing team, an agency can both work proactively to disseminate positive messaging and stories that support your mission, vision and values, and help to mitigate any damage that may result during a crisis. Your senior living marketing agency can also help analyze how your reputation stacks up against the competition.
With reputation management a top priority, you can expect a senior living marketing agency to prioritize developing mechanisms for collecting stakeholder feedback, monitoring your organization’s reputation across various mediums, crafting transparent communications, maintaining a strong and well-optimized digital footprint, and being highly responsive to stakeholder feedback.
Mining for Stories
Storytelling is essential for humanizing information and developing strong connections between your facility and its target audiences. Effective stories are aligned with an organization’s UVP and overall brand strategy. With a senior living marketing agency on board, organizations gain a partner who can help to dig for untold stories that reinforce key brand values, showcase overlooked aspects of the organization, highlight new programs and spotlight offerings that enhance residents’ quality of life. Your agency partner can help with not only identifying and telling these stories, but implementing mechanisms for ongoing story collection.
Optimizing Your Digital Footprint
What does your senior living facility’s online reputation look like? And, is it accurate? From websites to online reviews and everything in between, maintaining and optimizing an organization’s digital footprint is a multifaceted endeavor.
Among the core elements of an optimal digital footprint are:
- A user-friendly website that prioritizes accessibility for all visitors
- A diversified social media presence that tailors content to the parameters of the specific platform and the attributes of its audience
- Online review management
- Keyword optimized website content
- News items (PR) that appear across relevant websites and other online news channels
While optimizing one’s digital footprint is a multistep and multichannel process, a senior living marketing agency can help with creating a strategic blueprint to guide this effort and managing it straight through the execution and evaluation phases.
Creating a Clear Path for Lead Gen
If five independent assisted facilities within a 10-mile radius are all vying for the same prospective residents to call their location home, how will you capture interest and nurture leads? What features, values and offerings should be showcased to set your venue apart from the competition?
An effective lead gen strategy focuses on the needs of each audience – prospective resident, family members, decision makers, centers of influence and more – and tailors content and communications to appeal to those individuals’ needs. It is also mindful of where various individuals are in the sales process – discovery, awareness, consideration, ready to buy – and nurtures them through the various phases with educational information that adds value.
Making Data-Driven Marketing Decisions
Data plays an integral role in ensuring resources are allocated to the most effective and impactful marketing channels. From Google Analytics to email opens and social media engagement stats, there is a wealth of metrics available to help inform a strategic senior living marketing program.
A senior living marketing agency can help your community to leverage this data to make marketing more impactful. Here are a few examples:
- Review the most visited web pages to ensure lead conversion opportunities are prominent
- Revamp under trafficked web pages to improve the user experience
- Use analytics from A/B tests from email marketing and social advertising to refine messaging and imagery in future campaigns
- Identify lead gen sources (website referral traffic, most common sources listed on inquiry forms) and devise strategies to amplify the impact of those sources and channels
Senior living communities have a unique opportunity to amplify their presence in the marketplace and grow their share a voice at a time when demand for their services and supports are rising. Seizing this opportunity to stand out from the crowd with a strategic, audience-driven marketing campaign can enhance the organization’s reputation, support lead generation and ultimately help to fill vacancies within the community. With the right senior living marketing agency on board, the potential for increased market share is nearly limitless.
