What if you could actually get good solid data on your site visitors . . . your prospects . . . that would allow you to better understand who they are, what they are interested in and looking for, where they came from and how often they visited?

You have to be online because around 70% of all senior living customers start their investigation of senior living on the internet.  They explore lead aggregation sites like Senior Housing Forum Partner, Caring.com and they meander around individual community websites trying to figure out three things:

  • Do they need senior living at all for them or their loved ones?
  • What type/level of senior living communities should they be exploring?
  • Which communities will land on the short-list of communities to visit?

The Big Challenge

You know people are visiting your website, because your internal traffic counters tell you that.  You might even have some sense of where they are coming from, but the rub is that after spending a lot of money and effort on your website, that is about all you get.

What if you could actually get good solid data on your site visitors . . . your prospects . . . that would allow you to better understand who they are, what they are interested in and looking for, where they came from and how often they visited?  

What if you could go beyond counting “clicks” and could instead measure the number of prospective residents who interact with any and all of your online marketing tools?

These things are possible and in fact are being done all of the time in the consumer world.  Not quite an exact comparison, but if you have a G-mail account and send an email to a friend about a trip to England you are thinking about, you will notice immediately the adds you are being delivered from Google will be about travel to England. While my wife thinks this creepy, I actually like it because if I am having to endure ads it might as well be ads for something I am interested in.

Big Data Comes to Senior Living

Lead InSite has developed a sophisticated platform that will transform your website into a much more powerful tool that will increase the number of serious prospects that prowl your website and improve your chances of turning them into prospects and ultimately residents.  Fundamentally their platform does three things:

  • They determine which visitors matter by focusing exclusively on those who are using your website to research a senior living decision. Their data analysis shows that researchers on average, comprise only 40-45% of your website traffic. They also help you see the connections between everything you’re doing online to attract them to your website, social media, blog posts, your listing on Caring, com, etc.
  • They are able to help you become more effective at capturing leads via your on-line submission form. They have discovered that on average, prospects visit a senior living website 3 times before they are willing to fill out a contact form.  They can help maximum the number of individuals who will take this step.
  • They are then able to help you and your website nurture leads that are already in your database moving them steadily toward a decision point by determining the optimal online experience most likely to result in a sale.

Real Life

From Patrick Collins, VP of Operations for WESTliving:

“We were dissatisfied with the number of leads we were capturing from our website . . . Our conversions rates have improved significantly since working with Lead InSite.”

From Kim Daly Nobbs, CMO, Willow Valley Communities:

“We find that Qualified Visitors who use our website are better educated about our community and make a decision more quickly . . .We’ve initiated a major re-design of our website , and its structure is primarily influenced by the insights we’ve gathered from Lead InSite, which have consistently led to an increased number of sales”.

Best of all, Lead InSite is impartial.  They’re not an ad agency or media provider.  They don’t build websites or sell leads. 

They are smart marketers and data scientists who strive to the objective voice that makes your team smarter.  While this big data approach to nurturing prospects does not close the sale or provide great resident care it does allow staff to focus on the really important stuff, caring for and getting to know the right prospects and families. We are just at the beginning of a new level of sophistication in the use of data and technology in the senior living community as witnessed by the introduction of Priorize a Senior Housing Forum partner that uses big data to help senior living do a better job of pricing their communities.

What are you doing to explore the use of big data in your communities?

Steve Moran

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