When it comes to marketing activities measurement is really everything. If you can't measure your marketing initiatives how can you know if they're working or not? With the world becoming increasingly digitized it still amazes me how many companies pay 10's of thousands for radio ads or billboards on the side of the highway, only to realized they have no real idea of whether they resulted in a customer or not. The digital age has completely changed this. Click through rates, impression shares, and cost per lead have all become metrics that marketing is now based on. Every dollar spend can be tracked, analyzed, and improved upon. While traditional methods still play a large role in assisted living marketing, it seems that more and more marketing executives are realizing that digital is a smarter way to spend their budget. Unless you ask every person who calls how they found your community you'll have a tough time finding out if your traditional marketing is working. It CAN be done....but it's certainly not easy.
What Gets Measured, Gets Managed"
- Peter Drucker (Business Management Expert)
By scalable I mean easy to roll out to a larger audience. Many print ads or billboards can only be seen by a very specific segment of the population. And while choosing a specific segment is great, it's not easy to put up 100 other new billboards in the same weekend. With digital marketing, in particular PPC advertising for senior care, you can create an effective campaign in a certain geographic location and easily roll it out to other markets with the click of a button. You can adjust your daily spend amounts at the drop of dime and quickly analyze and increase spend in areas that are producing more results. The same is true for sending direct mail pieces. While this was once, and still is, a popular marketing tactic for senior living communities you can only send out so much mail at a atime. And the costs start to get extremely prohibitive when you add in the paper and stamps. Add this to issue #1 (that it's tough to measure) and you can see why more people are moving budget to digital marketing.
(Great Visual from KVR Web Tech on the Differences in Marketing)
Lastly traditional marketing methods are typically tied to the size of your budget. This is no big deal if you're one of the top 10 assisted living companies in the country who control approximately 1/3rd of the $60 billion industry, but if you're budget concious and need to make smart choices it's goingto be tough to compete with a direct mail campaign from say Sunrise Senior living. Content marketing on the other hand can have exponential results outside of the initial budget they took to make. Take a simple blog post. Once published a blog post can continue to attract new traffic and leads through your website for YEARS to come. It still gets indexed in search results and still lives on the web. Or consider a piece of video content that goes "viral." This one time outlay of money to produce the video could get shared hundreds, even thousands of times for FREE! This is obviously a prime example but it proves the point. At Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan said it best "Inbound marketing is relative the size of your brain, not the size of your wallet." This means you have the power to create an amazing marketing piece that gets shared everywhere and doesn't cost you a dime! Never in history have the smaller guys been able to to compete in this way with the big companies with bigger budgets.
Hopefully this post was able to point out some of the issues with the traditional "outbound" marketing methods imployed by many assisted living communities. While we don't advocate companies to completely stop these methods (because believe it or not they are still relatively effective at getting new residents) we simply suggest that more companies allocate more budget towards digital or inbound marketing tactics. Digital marketing is extremely measurable, easily scalable, and relative to the size of your brain not your wallet.