Digital marketing is in a near-constant state of flux. Every year, there are new trends, techniques, and tricks for getting the most out of your marketing budget. As a result, your digital marketing strategy needs to be updated from year to year to ensure you’re keeping current with best practices and effectively supporting your business goals. If you were to compare your digital marketing plan for 2022 to your plan for 2012, there should be some significant differences. So what senior living marketing trends from 2022 are here to stay?
Technology has changed considerably in the last few years, and digital marketing strategies have evolved to keep up. But best practices aren’t the only piece that’s new—people’s behaviors and interactions with technology have also changed a great deal over the last decade. In 2012, a mere 16% of seniors used social media.1Today, that number has increased to more than 45%. And chances are good you’re using social media more today than ten years ago, too.
Yes, technology has changed. And your ideal audience has changed right along with it.
Senior Living Marketing Trends for 2023
There are always new trends in marketing, but some have more staying power than others. Here are a few trends we started tracking at the beginning of 2022 and their status now.
1. Personalization
Our first senior living marketing trend is all about getting personal. Personalization has played an increasingly prominent role in digital marketing over the last several years. Consumers are tired of generic advertisements. They want to experience marketing that doesn’t feel like marketing.
Instead, they’d rather have conversational, personalized ads that sound like you wrote the copy just for them. People are much more likely to respond to marketing customized to their particular interests, or that provides solutions tailored to address their specific pain points.
Personalized campaigns also perform better than generic, cookie-cutter promotions. One study found that 72% of consumers act on personalized ads.2
Businesses engaging in customized marketing tactics say the most significant benefits are customer experience, visitor engagement, and conversion.3
2. Engaging Artificial Intelligence
Running high-impact personalized marketing campaigns is challenging. But evolving technology and increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) tools are helping marketers create increasingly personalized campaigns. In the past, marketers needed to rely on extensive note-taking, cumbersome files, and a lot of long hours manually going through market research data to get to know their target audience. Today, marketers can leverage AI technology to inform their digital marketing across content creation, chatbots, and search functions.
AI uses big data to understand user behaviors, motivations, and intent, which takes the guesswork out of digital marketing strategies. As a result, many thriving companies have either already adopted AI-based features online or plan to in the near future. Companies currently using AI report improved customer experience, increased efficiency, and lower costs.
3. Chatbots
Did you interact with a bot today? If you contacted customer service, you probably did! In the last several years, chatbots have taken over online customer service. At this point, all signs point to their adoption and relevance increasing. Chatbots automate customer service and can answer about 80% of standard questions, allowing human sales representatives to focus on hot leads and prospects with complicated questions.4
Consumers love chatbots because they can quickly answer basic questions at any hour of the day. In fact, 80% of consumers say they’ve had positive experiences with chatbots.5 Marketers love chatbots because they provide efficient customer service. Experts estimate this type of AI will save companies 2.5 billion hours of customer service by the end of next year.
Chatbots can also help you gather data and understand trends and hot topics in your target market. By taking a deep dive into the questions visitors to your website are asking your chatbot, you can get a better picture of the type of prospective resident and senior living searcher looking into your community and reading your content.
4. Prioritizing Privacy
Online privacy standards are changing at lightning speed. Third-party cookies, which used to be the bread and butter of digital marketing, will become a distant memory in 2023.
Tracking customer behaviors via third-party cookies has played a crucial role in retargeting advertisements. But even though third-party cookies are disappearing, retargeting ads will remain. But in the future, marketers will be much savvier, employing AI and big data tools to retarget their ads accurately.
5. Content Segmentation
Market segmentation has been a digital marketing trend for quite some time, but what about content segmentation? Content segmentation is the trend toward creating specific pieces of content for specific audiences.
In the case of a senior living community, you should create different content to target female leads versus male. Or you might use one version of an advertisement to appeal to older baby boomers with a different version targeting adult child decision-makers. Just as you need to segment your market, the actual marketing copy you publish needs to be personalized as well.
Ready to take advantage of 2022’s biggest digital marketing trends and prepare for 2023? Dreamscape Marketing can help. Schedule a strategy session at 888.307.7304 to get started.
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