The pandemic shook occupancy rates for senior living communities. Given the dire circumstances of quarantines and lockdowns, such a decline was clearly no surprise. Clearly, marketing ideas to improve senior living occupancy are sorely needed.
“How can I get more move-ins?” is being voiced by senior living communities more urgently than ever. In a way, it’s almost ironic that move-ins would be a problem.
At this moment in time, the real estate market is on fire. It’s never been easier to sell a home (and over the market price). Yet, seniors aren’t necessarily ready to make the move in the kind of numbers that CCRCs and assisted living centers would prefer.
At this point, it falls to your senior living marketing agency to increase the number of qualified leads coming to your website. Are they up to the task?
7 Marketing Ideas to Improve Senior Living Occupancy
1. Outpace Competitors With 10X Content
10X Content is about creating content that’s at least 10 times better than other online content concerning the same topic. Once your web pages accomplish this, it’s far easier to rank highly on Google for certain keywords.
Create content that seniors will actually want to read from the headline all the way to the final sentence. The better you engage readers, the more likely they’ll further explore your website and take the next step of contacting your senior living community.
Content must do more than simply inform or educate. It has to reach readers on an emotional level. It has to motivate them to read the next paragraph or, better yet, take the next step. This is one of the most powerful marketing ideas to improve senior living occupancy available to you.
2. Take Possession of Your Local SEO Away From Lead Aggregators
Lead aggregators try to dominate local SEO results everywhere they can. In many markets, they do this easily because senior living communities don’t try to dominate local SEO results themselves. Fortunately, your senior community can achieve top-ranking Google results.
On average, Dreamscape Marketing has found that SEO on your website achieves the same results for around 38% less than lead aggregators. The cold, hard truth is that these organizations are simply beating you at local SEO. Then, they’re selling your leads back to you at a premium.
As you consider marketing ideas to improve senior living occupancy, taking control of your own local SEO results is one of the best things you can do.
3. Monitor Social Media Chatter & Reviews About Your Senior Community
What are seniors and their adult children saying about your community online? What aren’t they saying? These are important questions, and you need to know the answers.
If the reviews are great, you need to call attention to them. If some are poor, you need even more good reviews to minimize their effect.
4. Improve Your SEO Strategy to Achieve Higher Rankings
Don’t be fooled into thinking that PPC is all that matters. Organic SEO results should always be your ultimate goal. A senior living PPC campaign is an effective aspect of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. However, it’s just one part.
Achieving a great organic senior living SEO campaign means committing to the monthly creation of fresh, relevant content. That’s what Google wants to see. It’s also what viewers want to see.
5. Utilize Current Residents in Your Marketing
Your greatest goodwill ambassadors live in your senior living community. These people can serve as an invaluable resource for connecting with other seniors who may be hesitant to take the leap and sell their homes to move in. Their words and images can serve as powerful influencers in your marketing.
Whether it’s testimonials on your website or internet-savvy seniors on social media, leverage the residents who love you for your marketing strategies. There’s nothing better than word-of-mouth advertising.
6. Don’t Let Leads Brought In Through Marketing Fall Apart in Sales
A marketing strategy can bring an enormous stream of qualified leads to your door. However, if the sales process can’t handle these leads correctly, these qualified leads will move on to another senior living community or they’ll decide to remain in their own homes.
An understaffed sales department may wait far too long to get back to callers who have left a message or sent a form from the website. The longer these leads are left waiting for a response, the greater the chance they’ll consider another community instead.
Sure, you can have great marketing ideas to improve senior living occupancy. However, losing qualified leads further down the sales funnel negates those efforts.
7. Integrate Tracking With Your CRM
Don’t depend on hunches about your marketing efforts. Instead, know for sure what’s working and what isn’t. Integrating tracking with your senior living CRM makes this possible. Doing so will empower you to:
- See every single lead in a central location
- Customize the way your call information is populated
- Correlate call information with your pre-existing workflows
- Gives your admissions people data that enables them to convert prospective residents faster
- Carefully analyze phone calls contained in lead reports
- Definitively pinpoint which digital marketing campaigns are working (& which aren’t), based on easily verifiable data
What are the Best Marketing Ideas to Improve Senior Living Occupancy?
Even the right marketing strategies can fail if the wrong digital marketer is implementing them. The stakes are simply too high to trust your marketing to just any digital marketer.
Dreamscape Marketing, a leading healthcare digital marketing company, has the deep SEO, PPC, and senior living branding strategy you need to increase move rates. Contact us today at 888.307.7304 and let’s talk about marketing ideas to improve senior living occupancy in your community.