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Marketing “Your Community” And “Senior Living” Can Lead To Terminal Failure



This is a guest article I wrote for RetirementHomes.com. 

First off, let me clear the air by saying I am not dismissing the idea of marketing. In fact, quite the opposite, I love marketing! But it is important to know the truth about marketing and how to create an effective message.

The other day I was visiting my parents, and sitting on the kitchen table, was a direct mailer from a nearby senior living community. As soon as I saw the mailer, I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I knew this community was throwing away good money.

I need to be blunt about something. A successful senior living community is dependent on cash flow, which comes from residents in your market…not from your community.

Can you guess the terminal mistake this community made?

They talked about THEIR community and what THEY do. Success does not come from your community. Marketing is about your prospect’s NEEDS, WANTS and DESIRES and never about your specific community.

Full article at: http://www.retirementhomes.com/library/marketing-your-community-and-senior-living-can-lead-to-terminal-failure/

Residents Are More Important Than Clicks



This is a guest post I wrote, that was featured on NewLifestyles.com. It's loaded with lots of great info and I would take a good read.

Imagine this scenario. You are on a gameshow competing with 8 other people for a $100,000 cash prize. You and the other people have no experience, but you’re asked to shoot a bullseye 70 meters away with an arrow. You have the choice to use a traditional bow and arrow like Robin Hood, or you can use a new compound bow and arrow that has a super powerful scope, is easy to operate and shoots incredibly fast and accurate.

This is a no brainer… Right?

You would choose the compound bow!

If advertising on Google is just like this gameshow, then why do many senior living communities choose the old Robin Hood type of bow and arrow with their online marketing campaigns?

Seniors and caregivers are on Google’s search engine to research their problems. Maybe an adult child is looking into the different options for their parents, wants to know more about a specific community, or their parent just had a bad fall and they desperately need to find a community.

Whatever the reason, if they click on your ad, you have less than 10 seconds to give this person what they are finding, or they will hit the back button.

Full article at: http://blog.newlifestyles.com/2013/02/13/residents-are-more-important-than-clicks-are-you-a-blind-archer-with-your-senior-living-online-marketing/

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2 Ways To Get Your Senior Living Community On The First Page Of Google’s Search Results



Have you ever had a conversation with an internet marketing company that went like this? "Well there's a number or complex technical factors that go into Search Engine Optimization including keyword density, meta data, link analysis, and latent semantic indexing."

After that conversation, you say to yourself, "They must know what they are doing because this just seems way too complicated and time consuming." 

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How Simplicity And Efficiency In Senior Housing Advertising and Marketing Boosts Response



There are many challenges when advertising senior housing in today’s environment. Not only do you face increasing competition, overcoming obstacles and finding out if the potential resident is a good fit for your community, but you’re dealing with an aging audience whose senses and mind are not as sharp as they once were. Every communication your community has with seniors needs to keep this in mind.

Imagine this scenario. A 70 year old widowed woman living at home who is starting to have trouble taking care of their daily tasks. She stubborn and thinks she can take care of herself forever, but her family is worried about what her future holds.

She is starting to find that daily living is getting harder. Tasks like laundry, cooking, cleaning, yard work, and bathing. She is slowing down, but home life is not. Plus her vision and is going, and her mind is starting to slip a little.

Now imagine she opens her mail and sees a brochure that reads like the one described below:

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5 Covert Ways to Increase Your Senior Housing Yellow Pages and Newspaper Ad Response without Spending Extra Money



If you’re anything like most senior living communities you know the importance of having a portion of your advertising budget reserved for yellow page and local newspaper ads. While seniors and their boomer adult children are catching on to the internet, Pew Research reports as of April 2012, only  just over 50% of seniors across the U.S. now are now online. This means many still use old fashioned books and newspapers as a resource instead of a booster seat for their grandchildren.

This is why it is important to maximize your marketing budget as much as possible. In this post, I show you how to maximize your yellow page and newspaper advertising, without spending any more money.

Running better performing senior living Yellow Page ads has a few benefits:

  1. More Contacts.  Better performing yellow page ads will undoubtedly provide more phone calls, appointments, and website visits than poor ads.
  2. Less Poor Quality Leads.  Poor quality leads are created by poor ads.  When a prospect doesn’t know what you can uniquely offer them in comparison to the competition, then you can’t qualify them as well with your ad. If you are generating poor quality phone calls, take a look at the source that generated the call and see if you can provide more differentiation in the ad.
  3. Higher Conversion Rate.  If you do a good sales and persuasion job in the ad, prospects will be more educated and prior to calling. You’ll notice less questions and an easier path to adding a new resident if your marketing is done properly.

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