Forget contacting your potential residents, pitching your brand message, and expecting them to buy in – this is no longer effective for any company, let alone those in the senior living space.
Instead, get real value from your campaigns by creating a personal and rewarding experience. This is where engagement marketing comes in, a customer-centered approach that can increase your brand awareness and revenue.
This quick guide will take you through the basics of this increasingly popular concept and how to get it right.
The Value of Engagement Marketing
Engagement marketing streamlines your interactions and activities to enable an experience that meets your resident's expectations.
The process encompasses practical strategies and techniques focusing on boosting participation. Thus, your community will be better positioned to build great relationships with prospects, current residents, and browsers on your digital platforms.
Your strategy should be centered around your customer needs. But also importantly, it should be measurable, allowing you to gather input, feedback, and valuable performance insights to pivot your strategy accordingly.
A successful engagement marketing strategy benefits you in the following ways:
- Enhancing your community's brand authority – Focusing on lead engagement can enhance your domain's authority, raise your SERPs ranking, and enhance your overall content marketing efforts.
- It helps you understand your right-fit resident – Whenever a target user engages with your brand, it becomes a two-way interaction. Their action can provide valuable insights into their attributes and behavior, helping you create a semi-fictitious profile of your ideal resident.
- The approach optimizes your strategy – Understanding your ideal resident's profile naturally leads to an optimized strategy. Gathering more audience data allows you to tweak your campaigns to align more closely with them.
- Organically expands your brand's reach – A successful digital campaign shouldn't only include huge ad investments. You'll boost your channel's relevance and reach organically by improving your engagement rates.
To enjoy all these benefits, you should adopt some practical methodologies. The next section will guide you in these.
Best Practices for Enhancing Your Senior Living Community Engagement
Now that you're familiar with the benefits of engagement marketing, you're probably wondering how to leverage this strategy in your community. Like any other campaign, you need a strategic approach with a plan for continuous optimization.
The following mindset can help you implement the strategy successfully:
Focus On Creating Great Resident Experiences
Resident experience is core to resident engagement. A recent survey found that 84% of organizations prioritizing interaction with their brands reported increased revenue.
This makes a lot of sense. You've probably had a bad experience that made you vow never to return!
Delivering a great experience requires you to map out how you interact with residents. Research extensively, note the weaknesses, and make the necessary enhancements.
Create A Relatable and Meaningful senior community Brand
Besides creating a smooth and efficient user experience, successful resident engagement requires creating a brand personality they will love to encounter and engage with.
Prospective residents must know your brand exists and offers a community that's focused on meeting their needs. Therefore, be intentional about showing that you care before connecting with prospective residents to "pitch your community."
Find effective ways to let your company's character shine so prospects can learn about it, note its relevance, and engage with it.
Focus On Resident Retention
It's more cost-effective to retain residents and get referrals from their friends than to acquire new residents. Happy residents bring in more revenue, share your brand more often, and are highly likely to recommend your senior living community to friends and family.
Resident retention aligns with engagement. None exists without the other. Therefore, implement effective strategies to satisfy your residents throughout their interaction lifecycle.
Leverage Conversational Marketing
Today's complex digital marketing space also comes with high expectations. For instance, prospective residents want to connect with your community anytime and anywhere and expect you to address any issues almost immediately.
Of course, providing this kind of engagement around the clock isn't possible, but conversational marketing automation tools can simplify things. For instance, AI-based chatbots can answer prospective residents' questions outside of office hours. Provided their issues are addressed, your audience won't have a problem chatting with a bot.
Measure Resident Engagement
Monitoring and evaluating resident engagement performance gives insight into your audience's interest and responses on your platforms. Thus, you can implement activities that deliver better results.
Here are three metrics to consider:
- Conversion rates – Conversion actions like form completion, downloading a brochure, or scheduling a community tour indicate interest and engagement with your CTAs (calls-to-action).
- Time on page – The time a visitor spends on your site indicates their level of engagement with your content. Optimize your top-performing pages for more engagement first and then take time to revise the less engaging ones.
- Video view completion – The number of users watching your videos (testimonials or community tours) from start to finish indicates whether your brand story and content are effective. A higher completion rate means the video is effective.
We Can Help You increase Your senior living Community Engagement
The above approaches can go a long way in boosting your senior living brand's engagement levels. But you'll achieve even better results when you partner with a reputable growth agency.
Our experienced team members are passionate about senior living. We have the knowledge, expertise, and tools to boost your occupancy rate.
To learn how to market your senior living community better, download our eBook.
