The way that people market assisted living services is changing. A recent care.com study found that 73% of the time it's actually the children of the seniors who are conducting research on which facility to choose for their parents. And the more interesting fact is that they're conducting this research almost exclusively online. This new trend is only going to increase as the population ages and it will become more and more important to utlize your website as a primary tool for marketing and selling your facility and services. If you know anything about online lead generation you know that good leads start with a large volume of good-quality, well targeted website traffic. We've put together a quick list of 5 assisted living marketing ideas you can use in order to generate more qualified traffic to your website.
1.) Create Great Content to Attract Visitors
If you're reading this post then chances are your assisted living facility already has a website and probably an active blog. Creating and publishing valuable, relevant content to your website is imperitive when trying to generate high quality traffic to your site. The idea behind great content (and inbound marketing in general) is that your potential clients are already out there searching online for information to do with your business. They might be searching about "how to know if my parents need assisted living" on Google and are actively looking to educate themselves on the process of putting their parents in a home. When these potential clients are searching for this type of information you want your website to be the one providing it to them. The way to do this is by providing valuable content that will help educate this potential buyer throughout their buyers journey. For example, you could create a blog post or ebook titled "5 ways to know if your parents need assisted living." This post title will not only resonate with your potential client but they will come to see you and your facility as an industry expert and thought leader; and when it comes time to make a decision on which facility to choose yours will be the obvious choice.
2.) Optimize Content Around Specific Keywords
While great content is king, its keywords that will enable your content to get discovered. Keywords are the search words or phrases that people use when they look for a particular product or service online. By adding those keywords into your blog posts, page titles, and various other places on your website you can increase your chances for showing up for that term in search results. The more keywords that your website is optimized for the more chances you'll have of getting found by your potential clients online. Targeting and optimizing for spoecific keywords is a key component of getting found online; and thereby generating traffic.
*Inbound Marketing Methodology Funnel
3.) Leverage Social Media To Promote Your Content
Your clients and their families are using social media more and more to share content that they find valuable. While social media marketing alone won't get the job done it's an excellent way for you to spread your new website content to a larger audience and cast a wider net. While an older person may or may not have a social media account, their younger family members do, and often use social media as a medium for sharing content with other. For this reason you need to stay active on social media and at the very least promote your new website content by publishing links to your blog posts across your different channels.
4.) Create an Email Marketing Campaign
While email marketing is often known as an annoying form of "outbound marketing" you can choose to use it only as a lead management and nurturing technique to share content that you think your subscibers will find valuable. Only by sharing valuable and relevant content to your subscribers will your email marketing campaign be worthy of their attention. Develop an email campaign which will give your prospective clients and families good information plus drive them over to your website to obtain more information about your assisted living facility. The email marketing campaign should provide the legal opt-out clauses and the ability to leave the email list (you do not want to spam potential clients and turn them off). At the same time, your campaign should not be too frequent and flood your clients' email accounts. Through Hubspot's marketing automation software you can setup much of this process to be automated through email nurturing workflows; but that topics for another blog post.
5.) Consider Highly-Targeted Paid Advertising
Paid search can be useful and cost effective, because in many cases, you pay only for the clicks that go straight to your website. You can use targeted keywords and have your facility come up when someone searches for the keywords. This is a much faster way to get your website seen by potential customers as you can simply pay to be on the first page on search results for specific terms. Pay per click advertising or PPC can also be very effective as it allows you to get very granular in the way you target your ads. You can choose to only show your ads to people in a specific geographic region who search only for a specific term. Using facebook ads you can target even further by using their age, gender, economic status or a number of other demographics to get as narrow an audience as you choose. In these cases, it pays to consider your demographics and what platform is best to advertise on.
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