With so much growth in the industry senior living facilities are going to need to get creative in order to compete with the bigger players. The days of sending out mailers and cold calling are coming to an end as more and more buyers turn to the internet to help them form purchasing decisions. Inbound marketing for senior living facilities works simply because it levels the playing field. With this tactic each facility is limited not by the size of their wallets but by the their creativity and ability to produce valuable content for their website visitors. In the following post we'll dive into why inbound marketing works and why it may be an untapped opportunity for your assisted or independent living facility.
Inbound Marketing Vs Outbound Marketing
While I won't get too deep into in this article just know that Inbound marketing is permission-based marketing while outbound marketing is interupption based. Inbound attacts people to your website while outbound reaches out to potential customer directly. Examples of outbound include marketing via: TV, Radio, Direct Mail, Newspaper, tradeshows, Billboards, and Cold Calls. Examples of Inbound include marketing via: valubale content, SEO, blog posts, ebooks, social media, etc. To learn more about the vast differences read this article from Vital Design. Or checkout this cool infographic courtesy of Voltier Digital.
“Inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be. By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic that you can then convert, close, and delight over time.” -Hubspot
Goals of a Senior Living Marketing Director:
First lets look at the typical goals of a marketing or sales director at an assisted living facility and see how inbound marketing can solve them. As a senior living marketing director some of your goals or responsibilites may include things such as:
- Reaching occupancy goals at your facility
- Generating more & better quality leads for your facility
- Converting More leads into on-site tours and ultimately new residents
- Working within your budget to produce a clear ROI for your executive director
Inbound marketing can help accomplish all of these goals. Not only can it help accomplish them but it also makes it much easier for marketing directors to analyze and report on their marketing efforts. This makes it easy to show somebody like an executive or regional director that what they're doing is actually working.
How Inbound Marketing Solves These Goals:
Getting Found Online
Getting found online is step one in competing in today's environment. A study from Care.com recently reported that 73% of the time it's the children of senior that are researching assisted living facilities on behalf of their parents and they're doing it almost exclusively online. With these "adult children" being the key influencers and often the decision-makers in finding a senior living solution for their parents online channels must be a priority for your marketing efforts. Getting your facility found is the first step. Inbound marketing helps your website rank for different search terms, creates more indexable pages on your website, and encompasses marketing tactics such as Search Engine Optimization.
Generate More & Higher Quality Leads
Inbound marketing is based on generating targeted, high-quality leads; and the salespeople at your senior living community need
quality leads. As many as 50% of senior living facility leads now come from online sources and using inbound marketing best practices will help you to generate new, high-quality leads through your website even while you sleep! By offering website visitors valuable and relevant content (such as ebooks or downloadable guides) you'll be getting website visitors names and email addresses in exchange for the content. Once you have their contact information you can follow up with more content that you think they'll find useful. By doing this you're positioning yourself as a "though leader" in the minds of your potential customers, and when the time comes to choose an assisted living facility they will remember YOU as the company who helped them along the way. The content marketing component of inbound marketing is hugely helpful both in providing value up-front to potential customers as well as getting found in search results. By offering valuable content you immediately get prospects out of "sales mode" and get them in a completely different frame of mind; a state of mind in which you're simply helping them arrive at a purchasing decision by providing information on things they're already searching for.
Increase Occupancy Rates at Your Facility:
Increased occupancy comes as a results of more website traffic and more leads. When done correctly inbound will produce more (and higher quality) of both - and with the more leads you can pass to salespeople the more will results in new residents. At the end of the day this is typically the metric that will matter the most. No matter what the tactic if the occupancy rate at your facility is up - and you can tie it back to your marketing efforts - you'll be seen as a rockstar at your facility.
Deliver Clear ROI
Because of the nature or inbound marketing (being all online) it's very easy to track and analyze all the things you've done. As opposed to say posting an ad on a billboard with outbound marketing (in which you don't know how many people saw it, how many called as a result,etc) inbound marketing through something like a blog post or downloadable ebook are highly trackable. You'll be able to tell which keywords a person searched to arrive at your website, which pages they looked at, which content offer they downloaded, and how long it took to nurture them into becoming a customer. The entire sales process is trackable. This makes it great for both analyzing and reporting on your marketing efforts. This enables YOU to get the credit for each sale that come in through inbound marketing. There's no more guess-work. And by using inbound marketing software platforms such as Hubspot you'll be able to make clear reports on the ROI that you can show off to your executive or regional director.
To learn more about lead generation and inbound marketing download our free ebook by clicking the button below. We'd also be more that happy to setup a free phone consultation to map out a plan of how inbound marketing can get implemented at your assisted or independent living facility. Submit our form to request an exploratory phone consultation.
