Senior living facilities need to be strategic with assisted living marketing practices.
Today’s standard marketing channels—social media and online advertising—tend not to work without a solid marketing plan. Here are some smart tips to help your assisted living marketing plan so you can promote the excellent care you offer at your facility.
Marketing for your assisted living facility is not an easy venture. First, the general topic is something many people tend to avoid until they are forced to find care for a loved one. Second, competition has been growing along with the aging Boomer population. This generation is in increasing need of care, and many explore assisted living solutions for their parents or other family members.
As the need for assisted living grows, so does the need for assisted living marketing solutions. It’s no longer a matter of standing out because you’re the only facility in the area. Today, there are many more facilities available than in the past. People are living longer than ever before, and in direct response, more people are working to find solutions for the assisted living communities’ needs.
Thus, while assisted living marketing is more challenging, today’s world of technology offers solutions that can help your senior living center stand out.
First, let’s take a quick look at your assisted living marketing plan.
Yeah, we know. Don’t worry, though—we’re here to help!
Updates to marketing plans are critical for every industry—not just senior care. This means there are plenty of tried and true tips, tricks, procedures, and best practices that can easily be adopted into your updated assisted living marketing plan.
However, we don’t want to give you another overwhelming task list of marketing ideas. Instead, here are the top three concepts (and our tips) to consider when building your assisted living marketing plan.
1. A Website That Converts
Your assisted living facility’s website is going to be the central hub of your online marketing—a factor that cannot be emphasized enough.
Everyone does everything online these days (almost). It should come as no surprise, but even the Boomer generation is online, and they expect more than a basic web experience born out of the late ’90s.
All of your assisted living marketing efforts should be connected with, redirect to, and ultimately, drive online traffic to your site. Your website should not only be kept up to date regularly, but it should be an authentic experience for visitors.
Thus, your facility needs a website that is both User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design optimized. In plain English, these design factors refer to the experience your website visitors have interacting with your website.
- Visual Design – the internet is mostly visual. People expect things to have a clean, modern look and use an exciting and engaging design that is easy to understand at a glance. The better your website looks, the longer users will want to interact with it.
- Intuitive – people are used to clicking, tapping, swiping, and scrolling when it comes to interactivity. Your website should focus on making these basic UI controls as easy and intuitive as possible.
- Responsive Web Design – no matter what device users are viewing your website on, your website should be coded to look its absolute best across all platforms. Bigger, prominent buttons that users can tap is critical. Easy-to-read fonts and backgrounds are a must, especially for users reading content on your blog—and yes, you need a blog! (More on blogs later).
These are just a few of the qualities your assisted living facility’s website should focus on.
Ultimately, your website should be attractive to look at, have content that your visitors find useful, and it should answer your visitors’ questions before they think to ask them.
Your website should encourage users who want to learn more about your assisted living facility while continuously moving them along the marketing funnel. It should be easy for them to contact you, and there should be multiple ways for them to do so on each page of your site.
By making your website simple to use and easy to navigate, it will naturally stand out among the competition and help you to convert more residents and their families.
2. Create Awareness Through Digital Content Creation
Content creation is a broad-stroke term that encompasses many things in marketing terms. Being a digital content creator includes blogs, email marketing materials, social media posts, video, and vlogs (video blog), to name a few.
In truth, this can be both easy and very, very hard. Without a solid marketing plan that includes a content schedule, content calendar, content producers, and writers, your assisted living facility will have a tough time attracting attention online.
You need more than a beautiful, intuitive website. If you don’t have regular content driving traffic back to your website, search engines (like Google) are going to have a difficult time getting potential visitors to your site in the first place. This content should be original, well-written, occur with regular frequency, and be optimized for search.
There are a wide variety of potential channels with which to release your content, and not all are going to work for your assisted living marketing plan.
Social media is a great way to reach people, but finding the right platforms for your particular brand of content is a continually evolving challenge. Your assisted living facility may or may not benefit from a Facebook page, but could thrive on Instagram with heartwarming captured moments at your facility.
Perhaps your vlog about how your assisted living facility has the best features receives a lot of engagement through Twitter, but not so much on Snapchat. Or maybe your video collection of funny moments with facility pets should be embedded on your site through YouTube rather than posted directly to your site.
Finding out where your target audiences are online and producing regular content that they want to engage with is time-consuming and challenging work. Hiring professionals to create, manage, and distribute your assisted living facility’s content is a good idea, and it may be more cost-effective in the long run.
These professionals will be responsible for the work and delivering the results of their work. This will give you a good idea of what content is working, how much traffic your website receives, and what the conversion rates look like among visitors of your site, allowing you to adjust your assisted living facility’s marketing plan to improve and engage more of your target audience continually.
3. Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Known as SEO and PPC, respectively, these marketing solutions work to get the attention of search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. In SEO, your ranking on the search engine result page is of crucial importance.
Here’s how it works:
- A person has a question in which they need an answer.
- They go to Google to ask a question.
- Google displays a search engine results page (SERP) with what Google thinks is the best answer. These are ranked 1-10 on the first page. Everyone sees the first page, first.
- The person clicks on one or more of these links based on which seems to provide the best or most intriguing answer.
There are incredibly complex, ever-changing algorithms and technology behind the near-instant results that are displayed. All of this is driven by one major priority: To give the user the best possible answer to their questions as quickly as possible.
There are a few good ways for you to improve your online visibility through SEO and PPC with tools like Google My Business, Google Analytics, SEO Analyzer by Bing, and Google Marketing Platform for small business, to name a few.
There are many SEO and PPC tools available—many of which are free—for you to use to help improve your SEO.
However, it is essential to keep in mind that SEO and PPC are fields of marketing that many professionals dedicate their careers to. Staying abreast of the most recent changes, trends, and best practices is just one part of the job. Understanding how to be most effective with keyword research, content integration, monitoring, tracking, and reporting results, and understanding how to make content more visible are just a few other aspects of SEO that make online marketing a full-time career.
Ultimately, SEO and PPC are critical to your website (and content) success. You can do a lot on your own, especially if you have someone on staff dedicated to managing your online visibility through SEO and PPC best practices. But…you may want to leave this to professionals who are experts in this advanced field of marketing.
Overall, an investment in SEO and PPC can lead to significant online growth. Growth will drive traffic to your site and help potential customers decide to entrust your senior care facility with their loved ones.
Getting Started With Your Assisted Living Marketing Plan
While there are a lot of ways to market your assisted living facility, these are the top three marketing concepts that will impact your success the most. Most of your assisted living facility’s marketing is going to be tied to your online presence.
By improving your website, your content strategy, and your SEO and PPC practices, your assisted living facility will be more visible to potential customers searching for the right care for their loved ones. More visibility will drive more traffic to your site, increase bookings for tours, and help familiarize potential customers with your care center’s activities, services, staff, and grounds. A positive online experience goes a long way toward converting interested clients.
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