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 FIVENineteen to discuss specific ways to help your community stand out online. 

Understanding Brand Health

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:

• Why are people considering your community — or why not?
• Are you leaving opportunities on the table to connect with your target audience?
• Are there any reputation issues you need to address? 

Key Components of a Brand Health Assessment

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

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. 

Brand Perception

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.

Brand Loyalty

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.

Market Positioning

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.

Conducting Your Brand Health Assessment

The step-by-step guide below is a basic overview of how to conduct a brand health assessment for a senior living community. 

Define Community and Assessment Goals

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.

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? 

Choose Your Methodology

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.

Collect Data

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. 

Analyze Results

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. 

Create an Action Plan

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.

Integrate Regular Brand Health Assessments Today

Regular brand health assessments can help you identify important trends that drive smart marketing and branding decisions. To get help with this complex marketing task, reach out to FIVENineteen.