It’s January 2019, and it is my favorite season of the year: goal-planning season.
This is the month where the Craft & Communicate team annually goes through all of the previous year’s data to begin setting into place an effective and strong content marketing plan for the months ahead. This is what we call proactive marketing.
This is a long and tedious process. And to me, it is so much fun.
I’m a big believer in goal planning, vision board creating, and visualizing the future we want. I would not be in the place I am in today if I did not put these practices into place for so many years.
But how do we use proactive marketing for senior living exactly? What are its benefits?
How We Use Proactive Marketing for Senior Living
First, we look at trends from the year before and then apply these principles to what we’re doing now.
- Which resident stories had the biggest impact?
- Which email blasts had the greatest open rate and click rate?
- What did our leads tell us about what they are looking for? What kinds of questions did they have?
- In the testimonial videos we made based on our communities’ residents and family members, what did they say over and over and over again? What did they say that resonated?
- Which landing pages got the most forms filled out?
- Which referral sources did we get the most move-ins from, and why?
All of this and so much more is what we dive through. It is imperative to do so in order to tell the story of who our communities are and where they are going. When our clients tell us their year-end goal is 96% occupancy, we can use our data to answer a couple questions: how did we go from 78 to 88% last year, and how do we apply those principles to get them to 96%?
It is a process. And it is essential.
Reactive Versus Proactive Marketing
Reactive marketing will never go away in senior living. I have worked in this industry for nearly 13 years. I know fully well that we must change our plans when a lot of residents move out, when we get bad reviews, when our competitors remove their move-in fees, or when one of our residents elopes. We have to say yes to changing plans, and at the same time, we have to have a solid plan in place before the changes can be made.
If you’ve taken the time to proactively plan out your year in marketing, these types of situations will not cause you to derail. You’ll learn to add in the new needs, while also staying within the course of your overall goal.
We do this for each and every one of our clients, and we’d love to do it for you, too. Reach out to us if you’re looking for solid ways to market your unique communities, and how to use your residents and your associates in order to help.
