If your Assisted Living Facility community website has not been designed to serve as one of the best members of your marketing and sales team, you’re missing out on valuable opportunities every day.
Your website should automatically be doing things for your community, like pulling in traffic from prospects who would make a right-fit resident, engaging current residents, convincing people to book tours, and reducing vacancies.
Speaking of it this way almost makes the website sound like it’s alive, but that’s how it should operate for you. It should be designed to encourage visitors to take specific actions that significantly increase the likelihood that they or someone close to them will become residents.
This is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) for Assisted Living Communities.
Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, will help guide future residents to come to know your facility and feel informed and confident that they have chosen the right community for their needs. There are many ways to improve your CRO to attract, engage, and retain residents. and conversion rate optimization tools you can use. Let's look at some of your community goals and how conversion rate optimization can help you reach your goals.
Increasing Community Awareness
Inbound marketing is a great way to draw in customers and attract them to your website. Inbound is about creating content, such as blogs, social media, videos and more that speak to the concerns of your audience— which often consists of your residents, your prospects, their adult children, their friends, and many other family members. Sometimes, convincing a prospective resident is like convincing a village.
You should frame your content around the benefits of assisted living, its challenges, and questions you come across when discussing your community with possible residents. Tie in experiences and activities offered at your community so that people can gain a better understanding of what makes your community different from the rest or what may be an incentive for a prospect to leave their home. Remember, your unique benefits are some of your strongest selling points.
Hotjar can help your team measure the effectiveness of your content by allowing you to visualize the interactions a user has with your website, this can include user clicks, form completion, and even scrolling speed. You’ll know right away what aspects of your website are resonating with people, and which are not.
Incorporate SEO, hashtags, and keywords so that your content can be found on social media platforms and rank higher on search engines. When time is taken to do this, as people search for answers to their questions about assisted living, your content will appear first.
Organic SEO is a powerful tool that can naturally lead searchers to your community's website. Using your content to provide valuable information is also how you gain trust, and the more of an authority on assisted living you appear to be, the more people will believe that your community is the right choice for them.
Attracting Right-Fit Residents
Now that you’ve attracted people to visit your community website, there will be some who are the right fit and some who are not. When looking for the ideal residents best suited for your community, observe the prospects who become leads and observe what they have in common with your right-fit residents. What commonalities can be found in their actions, preferences, and personalities? Grouping them as different ‘personas’ in your marketing efforts can help you learn to cater to their needs.
On the pages where you’ve posted blogs, videos, and other content for your residential prospects, use these pages to connect a related offer using a call-to-action banner or link to the offer. These offers can include everything from an informative eBook, to a PDF of a monthly cost breakdown or even a personal financial consultation in exchange for more information about your prospects, like their passions, income, and health concerns. Offers allow you to learn more about what motivates each lead and gives you enough background information to qualify them further through a CRM tool.
Marketing autiomation and CRM tools, like HubSpot, track every interaction each prospective resident and their loved ones has had with your community and allows you to get a better picture of their interests, challenges, and goals. This will allow your team to approach them in a way that will resonate more deeply.
For example, while people are taking a number of things into consideration, some people are definitely more motivated by the cost of things while others are more concerned with whether the atmosphere of your community aligns with their chakra. Then, there are those who are focused on more tangible things, like the housing itself and if it fits their standards.
It’s important to present content that speaks to the different types of personas that arise in your research, because people who feel heard and feel as though they can still be their best selves and grow in your community, are people who will likely get in contact with you.
Engaging Prospective Residents Online
Use the information you’ve gathered to keep the conversation going. One way to do this is simply by providing them information that is complementary to what they were already seeking.
If someone reads a blog related to mental healthcare, email them more related content and give them the option to sign up for more. If someone inquired about booking a tour, but hasn’t yet, follow up and ask why. If someone has a passion for learning new things, send them a list of the activities you offer. You can use tools like HubSpot to set this process up and have it run automatically.
HubSpot is a great tool for measuring and tracking which content is creating a connection with your intended audience. If people are showing interest in a particular topic, or typically visit your site a certain day, or are most active on a particular social media platform, capitalize on that more in your marketing approach to make more of an impact.
Pay attention to what people say makes your community stand out or was the reason that your community became one of their top choices. Use them as selling points. Expand your approach to new social channels and markets that seem promising. Have you ever thought to sponsor a game of bingo in your area and offer an introduction to your community in return?
Engage prospects looking beyond your own social media channels. Search social media and answer questions related to assisted living—and not just those directed at your business. Responsiveness is attractive and shows people that your community genuinely cares about being helpful.
Scheduling Community Tours
Don’t just tell leads they can schedule a tour with your community; inspire them to do it. Instead of a typical tour, provide potential residents an experience. Use all the data you’ve collected in your CRM and ask prospects further questions to match them up with a similar resident who has similar interests and goals. When your prospect is there for the tour, connect them with their "resident twin". This will give them the best view of what their life there could potentially become.
While visiting, they can ask the residents questions and see how they themselves have improved and enjoyed your community's lifestyle, which makes the strongest impact. Allow the potential resident to join in on different activities and sit down for a meal of their choosing. Seeing laughter among residents and friendly, helpful staff in-person can really make a difference.
You can also provide brief tour experiences through videos. Record testimonials of your residents talking about your community and their own personal stories and growth. Stories of resilience are powerful and inspiring for people who want to make a change in their lives.
Show videos of the different types of activities your facility offers and residents engaged in them. Creating a steady supply of content can provide an immersive experience, build trust, and encourage more leads to take a step further, such as booking a tour.
After the tour, follow-up. Thank them in a personalized email showing that you’ve made note of their top concerns and can address them. This will show your community cares on a deeper level. Include any related content, like a blog that addresses financial concerns if those were expressed.
This is also a great opportunity to work them into a workflow that will periodically check in on them with relevant information to keep their interest and show your community is capable of providing solutions. It may not be the right time right now for them, but you can remain top of mind for when it is.
Reducing Community Vacancies, Growing Resident Wait-Lists
Taking steps to retain residents is just as important to growing a facility as attracting them in the first place. Retaining residents and inspiring them to become your best promoters comes down to one simple thing—help keep them happy.
Encourage the building of friendships. The more residents feel isolated, the easier it is for them to leave, so hire staff who naturally have a nurturing, kind-hearted nature. Friendly staff make people feel valued and loved and it builds a strong bond between residents and the community.
Activities like social events and games can also help grow friendships between residents and make them feel welcomed in the community. Actively post your activities on social media and distribute the information in-person so that people do not miss out. Team activities will help residents find friends among each other naturally.
Exercising is the key to happiness. It not only improves health, but it has been shown to improve mood and motivation as well. Encourage your residents to engage in any form of fitness, whether they are starting as a beginner or on a more advanced level. Maybe offer added incentives to your website, like a private guitar lesson for 4 weeks of exercise.
If you help them see your facility as a second wind at life that is—where they can get healthier and explore new ways to accomplish this—people will come to associate their improved wellbeing with your community and share their experience with other residents and loved ones.
Residents aren’t the only people who can promote your community. Don’t forget about the people who care about them. Continue to communicate with the loved ones of the residents after they've moved in. Their involvement in their lives doesn’t stop once the resident moves into the community.
Incorporate an email showing that you are open to coordinating with previous caretakers for any special medical care that may be necessary. This will not only help the resident transition to community but this will help their loved ones gain more trust in the capabilities of your facility as well.
On your website, provide them with information on how they can receive updates on their loved one. You can also email invites to their family and friends to spend time with each resident or talk to them. Provide them with the same updates of daily activities. Encourage family visits or group activities so that they can also experience all the wonderful things about your facility.
Never stop learning from their feedback. Hold meetings asking your residents for their opinions can improve their experience. Let them discuss it openly and then follow up to see how the entire community feels. Ask their input online. This can be done through forms on your website (online user surveys), emailing residents questionnaires asking for suggestions, or asking them on social media.
Revisit CRM information of residential prospects who previously may not have fit your criteria but do now. If your community is continually growing to accommodate new needs or tastes, there will always be more seniors out there who would love to call your community home.
CRO For The Win
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) helps your website handle your prospective residents at every stage of their journey to your community. It attracts them to your website and helps you determine and filter who would be the best fit for your community while building trust in your capabilities.
It helps you engage prospective residents with more personalized content and inspire them to book a tour. Your website should also show your current residents all the wonderful activities your community offers and provide them with opportunities to provide feedback.
You should also actively seek feedback from their loved ones and include them whenever possible, but especially when a resident is first moving in, so that everyone feels safe and assured.
You can use conversion rate optimization metrics to improve your website and bring all of these things together to provide an experience where residents feel independent, loved, healthy, and inspired to continue to live their best life.
If you're looking for help with conversion rate optimization, feel free to reach out.
