A senior living community's website remains an underrated way of drawing people to your business. They can generate senior living leads and turn your website into an educational resource for potential residents. Content marketing for senior care can have a longstanding and major impact on a communities bottom line. However creating content regularly takes a lot of time and effort. One of the best ways to stay on top of your content marketing efforts is to create a content calendar.
What Is A Content Calendar?
A content calendar is a list of items that you want to be published on your website. Content types will vary, depending on your business. The content types that you can expect to use on your website include:
- High-quality blogs posts
- How-To Downloadable Guides
- Informational videos and testimonials
- Downloadable Checklists
- Informational Whitepapers
- Social Media Posts
- Etc
The idea here is to create a diverse and engaging portfolio of information that provides your potential retirement community residents with a educational materials. By creating educational content you'll not only generate more traffic but you'll also become known as a thought leader in your industry.
A good content calendar should also avoid articles that are too similar to other pieces of information on your site. For example, two blogs on how to pay for a retirement community are redundant. A good content calendar helps avoid this problem by streamlining your content publishing and ensuring that everything is efficient and well-managed.
(ScreenShot of a content calendar template in excel. You can choose to setup your calendar in a variety of software tools or calendars. )
How Content Creates Leads
Each time you publish a new blog post or piece of content you're effectively creating a brand new opportunity to rank for a new keyword or phrase. The more content you have around a certain topic the higher your website starts to rank in search results and the more traffic your website will generate. Choosing target keywords ahead of time is a crucial step in creating a content calendar. By having a gameplan for keywords that you want to rank for you'll be able to strategically create a calendar that will increase your ranking for these terms.
Once you've drawn traffic to your website with things like blog posts you'll need to convert them into leads. The way you do this is by creating more robust downloadable content that's gated on a landing page. A landing page includes some basic information about the content offer as well as a form to collect the visitors information in return for the downloadable content. The form on the landing page typically only includes the most basic information. The longer th form, the less likely a person will be willing to submit it in return for the content. Typically only the person's name, company, and email address are required for downloading a piece of content.
“Content is the emotional and informational bridge between commerce and consumer.”
- Jay Baer, President and Content Marketing Strategist, Convince & Convert
When Should Content Be Scheduled?
A content calendar should be focused on publishing content on a nearly daily basis. There's always content you can publish about new features, ammenities, news and information that are relevant to your community. Additionally, you also need to add more educational content that actually helps your potential residents in the decision making process of choosing a community.
For example, a blog entitled “Top 5 things to Ask When Touring an Assisted Living Community” could be especially helpful for somebody in the research phase of the decision process. The beauty of content marketing is that you're providing information that people are already searching for. You're helping them while at the same time generating more visits to your site, more inbound links, and more leads.
Creating a content calendar is a great way to strategically plan out your content marketing strategically. Instead of posting randomly you can post content that optimizes your website for keywords that you're trying to rank for. Take the time to create a calendar for upcoming 6 months or year and you can more accurately predict and measure the success of your marketing campaigns.
