Suppose you were going into the senior living business and wanted to give yourself the highest probability of marketing success what would you do?
Last week I sat down with Andy Cohen, founder and CEO of Caring.com, a Senior Housing Forum Partner, to talk about how senior living communities can most effectively take advantage of internet leads. Today most senior living consumers do their initial senior living research on the web. In practical terms what this means is that consumers use the web to select 2-5 senior living communities to go visit and the vast majority of them choose one of those preselected communities based on phone conversations and site visits.
The Big Question
As we were talking I asked Andy this:
Suppose you were going into the senior living business and wanted to give yourself the highest probability of marketing success, what would you do?
Getting It Right
Andy’s first response was to assure me he was not going into the business of competing with his customers (I knew that). He then gave me a list of three things he would do. I was surprised because none of them actually involved becoming a Caring.com partner (though he did think that was a good idea).
- Build Your Online Reputation – Senior Living may be one of the very last business segments that treats online reviews as if they don’t matter very much. The reality is that, regardless of the business you are in, online reviews matter. If reviews are important to choose a one night hotel stay, a place to have lunch, the purchase of a camera or even a relatively inexpensive hard drive, imagine their power in making a senior living decision for a parent or grandparent. The caring.com data shows that senior living communities with reviews get more clicks and more requests for information. Most importantly they have a much higher move-in rate. The best part is that building your reputation costs zero dollars.
- Build a Nice Website that Reflects Your Brand – This means two things that seem contradictory. Don’t go crazy building an expensive fancy website. Build a website that reflects what makes you special and unique. Tell stories, use testimonial videos of residents and resident families. Tell people what your prices are (This will be the subject of another article).
- Have an Internet Specialist – Caring.com has done a lot of research on how fast senior living communities respond when they receive an internet referral. Only about half of the communities respond within 24 hours . . .
Let me emphasize that: only half of your marketing teams respond in 24 hours.
And yet . . . this is the big rub, if you respond within 5 minutes your chances of closing a sale go up by a factor of 10.
Equally compelling is that, if your community is the first one to respond to a lead from an internet referral site like Caring.com, you are 5 times more likely to get the move-in than if you are number two or later.
If you would like to learn more check out this 5 minute tutorial on how you can maximize internet sales by DEI.
Steve Moran
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Hi Steve, I’m interested in learning what you mean by the term “Internet Specialist”?
And I’d like to add to the topic: If You Were Starting From Scratch How Would You Market Your Community?
I’d build strong relationships with local “non-compete” senior care services and providers. Then I’d promote the heck out of our expertise via online and offline.
I’d especially focus on building post-acute care services and promote the heck out of those with the local health care system. I’d want to know “what do you need from us” to help you avoid readmission penalties and other goals?
Then, I’d build an educational site with all my local providers and include the health care system(s) giving older adults and family members ALL the information/education tools they need to remain safe, independent and healthy.
Bottom line: Give folks what they want – help them accomplish their goals – both consumers and providers – you’ll be respected, appreciated, and depended upon to care for patients and loved ones.
I absolutely agree with your bottom line, Carol! Very well-stated. We mean well in this industry and yet we get distracted from the simplicity of “give folks what they want” and “help them accomplish their goals.”
Carol, the idea that providers should create networks makes perfect sense to me. It is a great idea.
Steve
Great topic! I agree with Andy’s responses – to this question. However, as an owner-operator, my question is how to maximize occupancy and accelerate fill rates preferably with higher functioning residents. Achieving these goals does require effective marketing. However generating more leads is not a goal in and of itself. Actually too many leads can be counter-productive if processing those leads distracts from sales conversion efforts. A question that we have been tracking (www.sherpacrm.com) is how many leads per vacant unit does each community have/need? For example, if a 100-unit community has 10 vacancies and 1,000 Active Leads, there are already 100 Leads per Vacant Unit. Why would we think that the next 10 sales are more likely to come from additional “new inquiries” rather than from 10 of the Prospects already in the lead base? Does it make sense that the community will fill faster if it had another 1,000 or another 10,000 leads? I don’t think so.
We have found that increasing the probabilities of higher occupancies is directly tied to sales behaviors that increase conversion ratios – not simply the number of leads!
http://www.nic.org/SeniorsHousingandCareJournal/articles/NIC_2012_Journal_Measuring_Success_in_Seniors_Housing_Sales_Prospect Centered_Selling_with_the_Stages_of_Change_Model_ExecutiveSummary.pdf
Hi David, there is no doubt that how you nurture the leads you have is an important topic and I suspect it is not being talked about enough. I would add that having an internet specialist is or could be a great part of that part of the puzzle.
Steve