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A healthy brand supports trust with your target audience and attracts new potential residents — important factors for Senior Living communities in an increasingly competitive market. Conducting a brand health assessment helps you understand how your brand is doing and where you may need to shore up marketing and branding.
The guide below offers a general overview of conducting an effective brand assessment. Reach out to FIVE19 to discuss specific ways to help your community stand out online.
Before you invest in more lead-generation videos or change up your social media campaigns to connect with additional potential residents, you may want to understand overall brand health. Brand health is a measure of how well your brand performs in the market and encompasses factors such as customer satisfaction and loyalty, market position, brand awareness, and brand equity.
An in-depth understanding of your community's brand health helps you answer questions such as:
While there's not an easy plug-in formula to calculate brand health, some key components should be a part of any brand health assessment.
Brand awareness describes your target audience's awareness of your community and what it provides. Because Independent Living, Assisted Living, and other community options are options people may consider for a long time before making a decision, individuals and families must recognize and recall your community's branding. For example, when a family begins discussing whether Assisted Living might be right for their loved one, you want your community to come to mind.
You can measure brand awareness with tools such as surveys, social media analytics, and social listening tools that help you understand whether people are mentioning your brand. Pay attention to branded searches, too! If someone is searching for your community by name, it means they have brand awareness. You should see an increase in branded searches when you are running traditional media. If you aren’t seeing these numbers increase, it’s time to rework your media plan.
Your brand perception — how you perceive your community — isn't necessarily the same as how others perceive it. Understanding how prospective residents view your community compared to competitors can help you better communicate your value proposition.
Methods to assess brand perception include focus groups, online reviews, and resident and family feedback.
We hold immersion sessions with leadership, staff, and residents to learn what the experience is like to be a part of your community. This lets us get a true sense of what makes your community unique and accurately reflect that experience into your marketing messaging. Ultimately, it helps set your community apart and drives more engaged lead generation.
Brand loyalty indicates how likely existing residents and family are to recommend your community. It also relates to how likely potential residents are to choose another location after engaging with your brand.
You can measure brand loyalty by reviewing email marketing data, lead engagement scores, and social media metrics. While it's important to evaluate this factor if you can, it's not always easy to do so in saturated senior living markets, and it's only one factor in your brand's health.
Pay attention to your online reputation. Your Google reviews are especially influential for prospects and their families when deciding on a senior living community, and can give you a good sense of brand loyalty.
Take time to understand how your brand and the marketing efforts you use for your community fit into the overall market. You can use SWOT analysis to explore strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to your marketing. Benchmarking and market positioning maps are also helpful.
The step-by-step guide below is a basic overview of how to conduct a brand health assessment for a senior living community.
First, define your goals. Start with some concrete community marketing goals. Use SMART goal methods to create objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Your overall branding and marketing goals provide a yardstick against which you can measure brand health.
Some examples of SMART goals include, “We need to increase our age and income qualifies leads by 45% by X date,” or “We need to generate 15 positive reviews in the next 2 months to improve our brand reputation.”
Next, define what you wish to achieve with your assessment. Are you most concerned with overall brand health, or are you looking for performance information about specific efforts, such as social media campaigns?
Decide whether you need qualitative or quantitative data. In some cases, you may want both. Quantitative data, such as email open rates, social media shares, and certain types of customer survey answers, can be analyzed with statistical analysis tools. You can create charts and graphs in Excel to visually analyze the data or use automated marketing analytics to do that for you.
Analyzing qualitative data, such as review text, top keywords, or written customer feedback, takes more time but can give you specific insight into brand perception. You can also use automated tools to analyze this type of data and identify trends.
Begin data collection. You can start by pulling existing data from your CRM system. Talk to sales and marketing teams to find other sources of existing data, and consider launching surveys and focus groups to gather other information if needed. Data can come in the form of reviews, the number of lost leads, inquiry-to-tour and tour-to-deposit ratios, media attention, resident or family surveys, website traffic, form fills, and so on. Pay attention to anything that helps you see opportunities for improvement.
Interpret the data, taking into account context that may be relevant. For example, if you see a sudden shift in data in 2020, COVID-19 is an important context. If a new Independent Living community opens in your area, that may cause changes in your data.
One way to analyze your data is to consider the number of inquiries who come in for a tour. If that number is low, you may be targeting the wrong audience or giving a false impression of your community. If that number is high, but those tours don’t turn into deposits or move-ins, their impression of the community may have changed after touring. This may indicate it’s time for some aesthetic updates, or maybe involve some resident ambassadors who can help leads feel welcomed.
Identify areas where your brand health doesn't seem as strong as you might like. Think about the marketing campaigns and efforts that may help change that.
For example, if you have little to no branded search traffic, it is time to get your name into the market. A media plan, direct mail, or public relations campaign can help improve brand awareness. If you have less-than-desirable reviews online, your brand loyalty may be slipping. Work on a reputation management plan and review generation campaign to combat this.
Regular brand health assessments can help you identify important trends that drive smart marketing and branding decisions. FIVE19 can help assess your brand health and determine a path forward to generate more consistent, qualified leads. To get help with this complex marketing projecttask, reach out to FIVE19.