By Susan Saldibar

One thing you can’t afford to get wrong right now is marketing. You can’t go back to what you were doing in 2019 when your rooms were full. You need some badass marketing right now to redefine who you are and claim your rightful place on an altered playing field.

This takes more than traditional marketing skills. That’s why Aegis Therapies (a Foresight partner) decided to take their insider knowledge and marketing savvy and roll it into Healthcraft Creative Solutions. It’s a set of marketing and analytics services that leverage a combination of hard-to-interpret data, messaging, and access, all assembled from years of working in the middle of this industry.

I spoke recently with Aegis’ Hal Price, SVP Sales, Marketing & Communications, and Cathy Berry, Senior Marketing Director. For those who know Aegis, you know marketing is nothing new to them.

“We actually started doing marketing for clients over ten years ago,” Hal tells me. “We created a line of customizable collaterals promoting their ability to provide great rehab in their buildings. It became a really popular feature,” he says. But they realized they had connections and data to better identify populations of patients, families, and referral sources – something operators really need right now. That’s when they expanded their services to include demographic analytics. And it’s provided in the form of data that shows where the best opportunities are to bring value to senior living providers.

Aligning Services with Messaging

Cathy described their three focus areas:

  1. Brand positioning: Re-designing your mission, vision, value proposition and developing new key messaging. “People come to us and say, ‘I’m really struggling, we’ve lost census, people are moving in with adult children. How can I re-position as not just a great place, but a safe place?’” Cathy says. Healthcraft gives them answers.
  2. Opportunity assessment: “We hear marketers tell us, ‘I know I have good outcomes but how do I visualize that and tell a story?’ So we use the data to craft stories that are relatable for referral sources and consumers,” Cathy says. As an example, this might mean taking a few views of data and putting them into chart form to show visually why your community is a great choice for short-term rehab. Visuals are powerful, and Healthcraft uses them frequently. 
  3. Optimization strategy: This involves leveraging your brand with the Healthcraft market data and devising a roadmap to achieve the goals, which usually include things like generating more move-ins, building up online reputations, and getting good reviews through custom collateral development and social media campaigns.

Data-Driven Marketing

Hal acknowledges that there are plenty of marketing providers out there. But he feels they’ve created an altogether new space with Healthcraft. “We dig deeper to look at where you excel and where you have a need to improve. That’s the data we collect,” he says. “Then we can use that data to target better messaging to referral sources, community centers, hospitals, and so on. We’re unique in taking our analytical service and combining it with strong creative.” 

By the way, you don’t have to be an Aegis Therapies customer to have these services. They are refreshingly agnostic as to therapy providers. For Cathy, it’s all about opening doors. “We want you to be successful, whether you use Aegis as your therapy provider or not,” she says. “We want to help you get more move-ins.”

There is no set way of working with Healthcraft, Hal points out. They’ll work as your in-house marketing department or on an as-needed basis. As for deliverables, they’ll produce analytical reports, handle projects, work locale-by-locale, or work with referral sources.

And they know the terrain. They’ve lived it, so they “get it”, as Cathy says. “We understand the industry. That’s what people are attracted to,” she says. “We know we’re doing something right when they tell us, ‘With you, it’s so easy. You get it. You’re here.’”

You can find out more about Healthcraft HERE. You might also want to check out the Aegis resource pages where you can get the latest updates on everything from marketing to therapies to CMS to PDPM and beyond.

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