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."
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.
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.
You can deliver your community's unique message the very moment your customers need you, pay only when they click on an ad and have complete control over your spending budget.
This is entirely possible with Google Adwords pay per click advertising. Being able to reach a potential client the exact moment they need you makes pay per click advertising one of the most powerful lead generation strategies around.
Google places is a great way for a senior living community to get free exposure on Google. If you're not familiar with what Google places is, they're the listings with the raindrop icon next to them when you do a local search.
Google allows users to leave a review, and the number of reviews gets displayed beside the listing. The more reviews your community has, the higher the number displayed, and the higher the chances a potential new resident or adult child will see the listing.
Here's a story of how powerful a highly reviewed Google places listing can be.
I recently visited my sister in Brooklyn NY who lives in the trendy Williamsburg area. We spent a Saturday exploring new areas outside of Williamsburg, and ended up in an unfamiliar area. It was late and we were getting hungry, so we wanted to find a new restaurant.
I did a search on my phone for restaurants near by.
Below is a screenshot of the search results for “restaurants in Brooklyn”. Notice the restaurant with 1,870 reviews and a Zagat score (restaurant review site) of 26/30.
Can you guess which restaurant we went to? The amount of positive reviews separated it from everyone else on the page. It did not matter if this listing was the last one on the page either. What I was looking at was the reviews from honest people.
