The Internet has given every buyer the opportunity to research options and the world of senior and assisted living is no exception. Nowadays, residential prospects like to engage in their own research, scoping out potential communities long before they choose to get into contact.
This researcher, who is often a child of a future resident, will usually have one strong demand first and foremost—to have all their questions answered. They want all the information they need to be assured they’re choosing the best community for their parent(s).
In the past, this was often a tedious demand to meet, but marketing automation has simplified it tremendously. If your website can serve as a model representation of your community, then that will make your facility seem more knowledgeable, trustworthy, and caring to your average website visitor, giving you an edge on other communities—and that can often make all the difference.
Marketing automation can help your team take a proactive approach to catering to your prospective residents by improving your ability to anticipate their needs in a way that saves your team time and effort. Let's review some use cases.
Senior and Assisted Living Community Marketing Automation Strategies
Blogging
Marketing automation can be used to schedule blogs and other multimedia content to be posted at strategic times to attract prospects to your website. When writing blogs, try to think about the questions typically asked by prospective residents at each stage of their journey.
There’s a period of time where they will want to learn about the concept of assisted living in general. Shortly after that, they’ll delve deeper and solidify a list of criteria they want in their ideal assisted living community. Finally, they will select the best facility that meets or exceeds their criteria.
Your blogs need to address the challenges, goals, and concerns of these prospective residents and their family members at each of these stages in order to have the highest outreach potential.
Blogs can cover everything from finance and planning to senior healthcare tips. You can also use blogs to show the culture of your community, such as residents sharing their personal growth stories or a play-by-play of a fun community outing.
Marketing automation tools, like HubSpot, can make this process easier by providing blog templates, allowing your team to schedule blogs to be released in advance, organizing them according to a specific topic, and sending out automated follow up emails to those who show consistent interest in particular blog subjects.
Don’t forget to make your content easier to find on search engines with keyword tools like those found in Google Analytics and Search Console.
Website Monitoring and Tracking
As people visit your website, your goal should ultimately be to encourage them to take some kind of action, like filling out a contact form or scheduling a tour. This will show that they are on the road to seeing your community as a viable option. In order to do this, you need to learn more about what motivates this prospective resident, so you can gently guide them to this path.
You can learn a lot from observing your prospects on your website with monitoring and tracking software like Hotjar. You can find out what prospects are interested in with Hotjar's recording and heat mapping tools which can help you improve your website conversion rates.
You can also use it to take note of trends in their behavior, like through visualization of their clicks, how much time they spend on a certain page, and any other interaction they have with your website. This process can help your team pick up on trends, their motivation, and their personal taste, which your team can then use to modify and improve your content.
As these prospective residents browse, your team can also use the information gathered to group them based on their needs and wants. Then you can use marketing automation to provide these groups with more of the content they seek.
For example, if someone expresses interest in a tour but does not schedule one, on the same page could be links to further content that could convince them—like videos of residents engaged in activities, a resident showing off how they customized their room, dining options, or a blog on explaining the benefits of scheduling a tour to gather information.
Lead Capture
Lead capture requires a bit of trust building to convince prospective residents to provide their contact information so that your team can offer them something or remarket to them to eventually convert them into a resident. Forms are an excellent way to measure if this is successful, because while some people will readily hand over their information to your email list, most will need a little more incentive.
For example, say you have a special offer available for your fitness programs. You could link to this offer on any content on your website that touches on a similar subject—such as health, fitness, and improving wellbeing.
As visitors take in the related content, they will gain trust that your community will help them improve their health and they will feel more comfortable providing your team with their name, budget, and other contact information. This will help you reach out to them in more meaningful ways with information tailored to their interests and financial constraints.
This is why creating blogs and other media for your community is so important. It helps build trust that your community knows how to care for its residents and when prospective residents fill out the forms linked to this content it shows that they have gained that trust.
Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing takes the leads you’ve captured and provides them useful information until they are ready to become residents. Email marketing automation will help you follow-up with prospective residents in a way that anticipates their concerns and shows them why your community is the solution.
Marketing automation will also help you save time with email templates, workflows, and/or sequences organized by campaign, targeted towards a particular type of prospective resident. This is why it’s important to pair marketing automation with Customer Relationship Management software, or CRM, like HubSpot, which will track every interaction a user has with your community, so you can sort them for a more targeted and tailored approach.
Sending prospective residents emails that aren’t relevant to them is sending emails that don’t get opened. You’re also likely increasing the chance that your community will be seen as a nuisance more than anything with your emails being sent on a one-way train to junk mail. This is why nurturing your promising prospects with relevant information of interest is a much stronger approach.
You’ll know their main concerns and can address them with why your community is equipped to handle them. That way, as soon as someone shows interest in a particular blog topic, fills out a financial consultation form, replies to a survey, or interacts with your community in other meaningful ways, you can use this information to provide content that shows them why selecting your community is their best option.
Social Media Posting
Social media helps tie everything together. It’s another avenue to attract residents as you can use it to share blogs, videos from your community like fun group activities, testimonials, special offers, and answer questions.
This virtual representation of life at your community helps prospective residents mentally step into the shoes of your current residents, envisioning what their lives would be like there. It also helps raise awareness of your assisted living facility to the general public and build a loyal audience.
You can monitor and track users via social media as well. Software like HubSpot can easily pick up which of your posts are resonating among your residents and prospective residents alike. It will help your team target potential residents who would be best suited for your community.
If your community specializes in memory care, your social media marketing campaign should reflect that with strong content and your social media manager answering questions related to it. When your team is informative and helpful concerning the strengths of your community, your social media will naturally attract qualified leads.
Social media also helps the friends and family members of residents and prospective residents alike check in on their loved ones and feel involved. Schedule post to inform them of events and activities. Re-post pictures from both residents and staff with their permission. Social media is all about engagment. Nothing gives stronger evidence of the warmth and happiness found in a community than the residents and staff themselves.
Plus, when your community actively engages the loved ones of your residents, this can make them feel more comfortable and trusting of your community. This can often become a deciding factor in their acceptance of your community as a solid choice.
Marketing automation for the proactive approach
Marketing automation is essential for the modern prospective resident who takes a proactive approach to researching assisted living. It helps you put your best foot forward, so that you can create tailored content that attracts the residents most suited for your community in a way that simultaneously builds their trust.
Marketing automation also allows you to monitor and track residential prospects to fine-tune your approach, and encourage them to not only get into contact with your community via such pathways as forms, but it can follow up and stay in front of them with lead nurturing emails, blogging, and engaging social media content that shows why your community is THE BEST CHOICE.
