Selecting a senior living facility can be a daunting decision, filled with concerns ranging from mixed emotions to finances. Establishing trust, transparency and top-notch expertise is crucial for senior living facilities. This is where content marketing becomes a vital tool. By creating valuable and informative content, senior living facilities can build brand awareness, establish themselves as a trusted resource and, ultimately, attract potential residents and their families. Follow these tips to make the most of content as part of your senior living facility marketing strategy.
Understand Your Target Audience: Senior Living Market Research
It’s not enough to know who your target audience is — understanding their challenges, motivations and priorities is key to connecting (and converting) them. Your marketing efforts will miss the mark if you only pay attention to basic demographics. Instead, go one step further and evaluate what influences — positive and negative — motivate prospective residents and other decision-makers to choose your senior living/assisted living facility.
Market research is a strategic way to gain an in-depth look at which audience is looking for what features and amenities in nearby facilities – allowing you to then develop value propositions and content that directly align with those priorities and in turn both grow and speed up your sales pipeline. Thanks to digital channels, market research isn’t the massive investment or time-consuming process it once was. Interested in learning more? Let us know.
Create Valuable and Informative Content
The key to using content marketing to build trust, transparency, and top-notch expertise in the senior living industry is to create content that your audience values – information that is relevant to their needs and concerns. A few examples:
- Address common concerns: Identify common concerns that your target audience may have, such as the cost of senior living, and create content that addresses those concerns.
- Use storytelling: Use storytelling to connect with your audience and make your content more engaging. Share stories about your residents and staff members to give your audience a glimpse into life at your facility.
- Be transparent: To build trust from the start, discuss your facility’s policies, procedures, and pricing during initial conversations with prospective residents and families. This is a great way to start off on the right foot and create a positive customer experience.
Optimize Your Content Strategy
A high-impact senior living content strategy involves more than a simple outline of content pieces. The strongest approach takes into account how these pieces will be used to maximize engagement. The decision-makers for your facility likely range in age and interests, which means an omnichannel approach plays an important role in marketing success.
In addition to multiple platforms, a multi-format content strategy is important. Leverage a combination of blog posts, videos, social media ads, paid search, and email marketing to surround your audience on all sides with captivating content that motivates engagement.
By broadcasting a variety of content across multiple channels, you can present each prospect with the content that appeals most to them and caters directly to their needs and interests. The more touches you generate, the more awareness you build and the more likely your audience is to take the next stop.
Promote Your Content
The best way for your content to gain traction is to circulate each piece on multiple channels, especially digital platforms. A large and growing number of individuals evaluating senior living arrangements use the internet to research local retirement homes and senior living options.
In addition to senior-friendly outreach, your content should also reach the secondary decision-maker: Adult children. When adult children fill out online lead forms, the odds of their parents moving in increases up to three times.4 Keep in mind this audience may be active on different platforms than your older audience.
Now more than ever, senior living decision-makers are searching for new options online — it’s up to you to find them and present a convincing message that captures their interest. An omnichannel marketing strategy reaches all of these audiences at the same time on the platform that appeals most to them, effectively engaging each decision maker with the content and messaging they need to reach out to your team.
Analyze Your Results
A major advantage of a multi-channel digital marketing strategy is the ability to track your progress, see what’s working, and make adjustments accordingly. Use a CRM to monitor your campaigns in real-time and tailor your efforts to those that drive the most engagement. While web traffic, email opens, and social media engagement are all informative results, the chief metric to track is your conversion rate. If your campaigns aren’t generating leads that directly increase occupancy rates, it’s time to reevaluate your strategy.
Identify where your prospects are getting stuck in the funnel, which audiences are more or less likely to convert, and which formats and channels are boosting awareness and conversions. With this information in your arsenal, you’ll know exactly where and how to make the most impactful changes to your strategy.
Be consistent.
Consistency is key when it comes to effective content marketing. Developing and executing a content calendar and creating a steady stream of valuable and informative content that speaks to the needs and interests of your target audience can be daunting. That’s why working with a content partner that specializes in senior living – including assisted living, retirement communities, skilled nursing facilities and more – is such a benefit. As experts in the field, our copywriters, SEO specialists, digital marketing strategists, website gurus, and email marketers do this every day. Learn how it works.
Interested in seeing how the right omnichannel marketing strategy helps senior living organizations grow? Our newest case study focuses on our work with a New Jersey-based assisted living facility that faced challenges with a declining referral pipeline. Download it here.