Top marketing tools to grow your assisted living community

To successfully market your assisted living community in today’s competitive environment, you have to take full advantage of tools and technology that can help. There are many options available, designed to help you boost brand awareness, attract prospects, convert more leads, and schedule more personal tours. But which ones are best for your needs?

Based on our marketing work with assisted living communities and others in the health and well-being arena, we have pulled together this list of tools we have found particularly useful for businesses like yours. They are presented according to the four buyer’s journey steps that each of your prospects will follow on their way to choosing your community: attract, convert, close, and delight.

Attract

Every great marketing story begins with a solid plan. We can attest to that. Defining the who, what, and how sets the stage for efficient, effective implementation. We have found the following tools to be essential when it comes to defining your ideal targets, shaping strategies, creating conversion paths, and beginning to implement your plan.

Define Ideal Residents and Other Key Personas

  • Senior couple of tourists on a tripMakeMyPersona – This HubSpot tool makes it easy to develop buyer personas. This video explains why personas are crucial to your marketing program’s success and how MakeMyPersona works to help you create them.
  • Facebook Audience Insights – Facebook remains a powerful marketing tool. Facebook Audience Insights lets you use more than 30 criteria to zero in on your specific target audiences. We recommend you also review the HubSpot’s beginner’s guide.
  • Moz Local – it is essential that your assisted living community show up in local searches. This affordable tool allows you to monitor local listing to be sure they are complete and up-to-date.

Shape Strategies

Create Conversion Paths

  • Growth Driven Design – HubSpot has created a host of materials to help you learn about and use their tools. For example, Growth Driven Design is a step-by-step guide for creating and editing web pages in HubSpot.
  • WordPress – This is a good tool if you’re still in the early stages of establishing your community’s digital presence. The video tutorial explains how to set up a WordPress website in five steps.

Begin Implementation

  • HubSpot Marketing Dashboard – The HubSpot platform facilitates comprehensive, fully-integrated digital marketing. The dashboard gives you distilled, at-a-glance insight into website and marketing campaign performance.
  • Basecamp – This is an affordable, easy to use tool for collaborative project management.

Convert

Once you have the attention of your ideal prospect, you need to give them a compelling reason to engage further with you, so you can cultivate a one-on-one relationship. This can be a make-or-break point, so it is critical to understand who you’re talking to. That way you can directly address challenges you know they’re facing, and offer informational content that gives relevant solutions.

The tools we have found to be most effective for conversion focus on analysis. You want to identify the traits that differentiate your prospects, develop content that speaks to them, and compare their response to the digital assets you’ve chosen to use. With that data, you can tweak your marketing in real time to get the most effective results.

Differentiate Prospects

  • HubSpot CRM – It can be tough to get your marketing and sales teams to work together smoothly. HubSpot includes a free CRM that keeps everyone on track and uses advanced segmentation and workflow capabilities to improve lead generation and nurturing.
  • Salesforce CRM – This well-known and highly-sophisticated platform includes built-in artificial intelligence, a mobile interface, and numerous other data-rich features.

Facilitate Conversions

Landing Page Optimization Concept Closeup on Landing Page of Laptop Screen in Modern Office Workplace. Toned Image with Selective Focus. 3D Render.

Analyze and Optimize

  • HubSpot Marketing Analytics – In order to make the smartest marketing decisions, you need pertinent data that you can review efficiently and use right now. HubSpot Marketing Analytics provide what you need, from lead analysis through loyalty-building. Read more about each of the key data points here.
  • Google Analytics – Google Analytics provides lot of useful data about who is visiting your website, on what type of device, from where, for how long they stayed, and what page they were on when they left. They also offer several video tutorials to help you get the most insight from all that data.
  • Lucky Orange – Knowing when and why visitors leave your website tells you where you need to improve. This tool analyzes every single page on your website, using dynamic heat maps and screen recordings.

Close

Using the tools we’ve described thus far gets you “in the door” with prospects. You now know what interests them. Using that information and a different set of tools, you can create and deliver high quality, well-targeted content. Beyond providing helpful information, though, your content should show the emotional side of your assisted living community – the personal touches, exceptional staff, and culture that make you unique, and uniquely desirable.

The tools we recommend at this stage focus on various methods of developing and delivering content, and – equally important – monitoring response.

Plan Social Media

  • facebook-instagram-logos-266246HubSpot Social Tools – HubSpot’s integrated inbound marketing platform gives you a single access point from which you can create content, add links, images, and calls to action (CTAs). You can also schedule and track all of your social medial content.
  • Hootsuite – This tool is designed to help you maximize your social media marketing. You can find, schedule, and manage your content and monitor performance results.
  • Buffer – This tool streamlines your social media marketing, making it more efficient and more effective.

Automate Email

  • HubSpot Email Marketing – This component of HubSpot’s content management platform allows you to create, personalize, and optimize your email marketing, both stand-alone emails and automated workflow series.
  • MailChimp – This email marketing platform helps you find your desired audience, build brand awareness, and engage prospects as you build relationships with them.

Manage Content

  • HubSpot Content Management – It is critical that your website be optimized for every type of device and every visitor. That can feel overwhelming, but HubSpot’s fully-integrated Content Management System makes it surprisingly easy to build and manage a modern website.
  • WordPress Content Management – If you’re building your website using WordPress, this guide explains all the content management options at your disposal.

Synchronize Advertising

  • HubSpot Ads – This is an add-on feature that allows you to precisely and automatically track the ROI of paid advertising you’re doing via Facebook, AdWords, or LinkedIn. This introductory video explains the details.
  • Google AdWords – Google offers several ways to engage with your top targets, including graphic display ads, YouTube video ads, text-based search ads, or in-app mobile ads.
  • Facebook Business Manager – This tool gives you a single, unified place to manage multiple Facebook business pages and ad accounts, as well as the people who work on them.

Delight

For most marketers, the ultimate goal is repeat business. They want customers to return (and buy) again and again. Things are a little different at your assisted living community. You want to attract residents who love your environment so much they would never consider relocating. But vacancies do occur, so your marketing must continuously supply new prospects. Current residents and their families and friends can help you attract new residents by helping promote your community.

There are tools that can help you stay in touch and help, encourage residents and families to provide testimonials and post great reviews, and directly refer other families to your community.

Manage Reputation

  • BrightLocal – This “customer experience” tool helps you encourage more online reviews as well as monitor, market, and manage them.

Build Loyalty

  • HubSpot Marketing Automation – Maintain communication with your residents’ loved ones, referral sources such as physicians or healthcare facilities, etc. through email workflows that provide targeted content such as helpful tips, the latest assisted living information, or special offers that keep these audiences informed and keep your name top of mind. Email workflows are delivered automatically, in sequence, over time.

The Ultimate Tool

As you have probably noticed by now, there are a lot of components to a successful digital marketing progra for retirement communities. As a HubSpot-certified partner agency, ClearPivot know how to harness the power of each of these components of inbound marketing to achieve measurable business growth. We have used this comprehensive, personalized marketing platform to attract, engage, nurture, and retain loyal customers, residents, and patients for numerous clients, with great success.

If you would like to increase your assisted living community’s visibility, simplify your sales cycle, and experience the benefits of seamless integration, we invite you to contact us today. In the meantime, grab our free A-Z guide collating everything we've learned in our time doing retirement community marketing. You can get your own PDF copy of the guide here:

Senior Living Marketing: An A-Z Guide