A well-structured marketing plan is essential for ongoing success. It provides a road map that ensures all marketing strategies align with your community’s mission and work toward meeting your goals.
Creating a comprehensive marketing plan often yields better results and a higher return on investment. Conversely, the absence of a plan can lead to inconsistent results and impede your ability to reach your target audience.
Keep reading to learn more about the benefits of well-structured marketing plans and tips for building effective strategies for your community.
Having a structured plan in place can improve your marketing outcomes in several ways, including:
A consistent lead-generation strategy can speed up the sales cycle, fill beds faster, and increase revenue. Using a structured marketing plan can help your community build a strong sales pipeline by setting clear goals and better understanding your target audience.
With this in place, you can take a multichannel approach to reach your audience where they are, such as at home, online, or in the community. This strategy helps ensure consistency, expands your reach, and generates higher-quality leads.
The right lead-generation strategy also starts the engagement process early. For instance, you can use an email campaign to generate leads and gradually guide them through the buying process with follow-up emails.
Before you can start generating leads, you must build brand awareness. Seniors and their loved ones must know where your community is, what services it provides, and the benefits it offers. Using a comprehensive marketing plan can generate a buzz about your community.
For example, you can use various strategies to help drive community awareness, such as:
A well-structured marketing plan ensures you develop a consistent brand message that aligns with your community’s goals and mission. This, in turn, can boost brand recognition, build brand loyalty, generate referrals, and give your community a competitive advantage.
Without a comprehensive marketing plan, your community will likely develop sporadic strategies throughout the year with few results. The problem is that these various marketing campaigns aren't working cohesively to reach your goals. Instead, you may have one strategy focusing solely on generating leads and another on finalizing the sale. Unless these strategies work in unison, your prospects may be confused and look for other options.A structured marketing plan prevents this from happening. It ensures every marketing campaign, no matter what stage in the sales funnel, matches your community’s goals and mission. This can boost leads, sales, and revenue. It also helps build trust with your prospects, which can transform them into brand ambassadors. This combination can help grow your community through higher-quality leads, reduced costs, and improved revenues.
The first step in creating any marketing plan is identifying your target audience. Developing an effective marketing strategy can be impossible without first understanding your prospects' demographics, behaviors, and pain points.
The key decision-makers are those with the power to make or influence decisions regarding senior living care. They include:
Certainly, seniors are your prime audience. They're those in their retirement years looking for a low-maintenance yet active lifestyle. Typically, seniors are the ones making the final decision about their care and living arrangements.
Other key decision-makers are friends and family members. These are the seniors’ children, friends and relatives who help their loved ones make these tough decisions. Family members often don't make the final decision unless the senior is impaired. However, they have a lot of influence over the seniors and play a pivotal role in helping them make this choice.
You also don’t want to overlook community members who provide referrals. This includes organizations for seniors, physician offices, therapy and rehabilitation centers, and hospitals.While their influence regarding the final decision is limited, these community referrals are often well-respected by seniors. Studies show that 79% of seniors trust their health care providers. Just one positive comment from a physician, physical therapist, or contact person at a local Office for Aging could make a significant difference to the individual when choosing the right senior living community.
Once you know the key decision-makers, you can identify their needs, concerns, and wants. These factors are different for each group of decision-makers. While they all want a senior living community that offers a high quality of life and peace of mind, their views on these attributes vary.For instance, seniors may be more interested in accommodations, activities, flexibility, freedom, and dining options. On the other hand, family members may consider other factors, such as security, communication, convenience, and family engagement. Additionally, community members, such as physicians and hospitals, may focus more on the quality of health care services.A well-structured marketing plan includes strategies that address each of these concerns as it targets various decision-makers.
Personas are one of the best marketing tools for understanding your target audience. These fictitious characters closely resemble your key prospects and are extremely useful when developing marketing strategies. They give your team a better understanding of your prime audience's characteristics, behaviors, needs, and desires.Below are two prime examples of personas for Independent Living communities.
These personas can include everything from basic demographics and purchasing behaviors to pain points, beliefs, and values. Your marketing team can use various techniques to obtain these details, including current resident data, prospect data, surveys, and industry insight reports.With your personas in place, you can determine where your prospects are coming from and how much it costs to reach them. Then, you can use this information to prioritize your marketing strategies when developing a comprehensive plan.Ready to develop a well-structured marketing plan for your senior living community? Contact FIVENineteen today to learn more.