A target audience is a group of people with the same demographic profile. It is made up of traits like age, gender, income level, and geographic location. By audience targeting, you’re more likely to reach prospects interested in your communities with relevant messaging. Within senior living, reaching your desired audience is an especially unique challenge since you’re potentially striving to reach multiple audiences at once depending on the level of living to which you are marketing, the prospect and/or their adult children. Here are five digital strategies integral to reaching your desired senior living target audience.
Optimize your senior living community’s most valuable marketing asset. Because digital media is so fundamental to modern marketing, it only makes sense to ensure that your community’s website is optimized so that your prospects will find all of the great information. Because your website is one of the very first impressions almost of all your prospects will have of your community, you need to give them a great experience on the site. You, therefore, want to be sure your website:
SEO is the process of improving your website and its content to rank highly in search results. The more relevant your content is to search terms your audience uses, the more likely people are to find your site. In simple terms, SEO is a way to increase organic traffic and ultimately leads. SEM is the process of using paid strategies to increase search visibility. Communities pay for ads to appear as search results on search engine results pages. More seniors are using the internet, and therefore search engines, every year. This makes it imperative that your website is easy to find. If it isn’t optimized, your target audience is more likely to see a competitor’s site in their search results instead. They may not even realize that your business exists. On top of that, the adult children of seniors are often involved in helping their parents find the services they need. These adult children can be quite web-savvy, and are likely to use search engines to look for senior living facilities. A higher ranking will make it more likely that they’ll visit your website.
When done strategically, email marketing is one of the best ways to engage adult children and prospects looking to move into senior living communities. Whether done through Marketing Automation or by purchasing an email list, consistency is critical. Make sure you set up a continually-relevant email sequence that you will send to every new subscriber to your list at least each month for six months or a year. You can offer free downloadable white papers, infographics, videos, etc. Doing so helps build relationships with your subscribers because you’re offering valuable information while asking for nothing in return. This helps gain your subscribers’ trust so that when you do send sales offers or pitches, they won’t be annoyed. Treat your email recipients with the utmost of respect. Your email list is one of your most valuable marketing assets, and when managed well will bring you an amazing return on your investment of time and money.
These days, being online means more than just a website: you need to actively market your senior community online and it’s important to know which social media platforms this demographic prefers. The last thing you want to do is spend your time and resources posting on a platform your audience rarely visits. For this demographic, Facebook is a popular choice, and many use it to stay in touch with friends and family. According to a Pew Research Center survey, 68% of U.S. adults are Facebook users, and about three-quarters access Facebook on a daily basis. LinkedIn is also favored by this group, as many of them are still working professionals. At least 77 percent of Baby Boomers go online each month and almost half of them do so via smartphones or tablets. They also use laptops, tablets and smartphones with ease in order to research purchases – and one of the biggest purchases they may make in their lives could be choosing to live in your senior living community. In short, you need to market your community online, you need it to be easy for boomers and members of Generation X to find you when they search online. Once they reach your website, they need to be able to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, feel you are an expert at what you do and trust that you’ll take great care of themselves or their parents.
Building trust with your audience is important for any marketing campaign, but especially so with this demographic. The adult children of potential residents are wary of businesses trying to rip them off, in addition to having concerns about whether their family members will be well cared for. You can begin by sharing your credentials. If you’ve been in business for a long time, that builds credibility, so make sure people know about it. It’s wise to mention any awards or other commendations you’ve won on your website, too. On the flip side, if you’re a new business, don’t try to act like you’ve been around forever. Be honest and highlight the advantages of being a new community, such as your innovative care techniques. Overall, try to be as transparent as possible. It’s also worth noting that a strong website can go a long way towards making your brand appear trustworthy. Trust is gained by ensuring the website is built using today’s standards in speed and usability, is content rich with a focus on the targeted keyword theme and that there is consistency in the business name address and phone number on all business listings and relevant directories.