Craft & Communicate and Talk Further offer tips to grow your business.
If you’re a senior living operator and are looking for ways to enhance your business processes, Craft & Communicate is here for you. We’re a comprehensive marketing and public relations agency that specializes in senior living communities. We’ve teamed up with Talk Further, a leading company in the Virtual Sales Assistant (VSA) arena that also specializes in senior living to offer some insight on how to prevent blind spots in designing and growing your senior living community.
Potential blind spots we wish senior living operators knew as they acquire new communities.
As senior living marketing and engagement experts, here’s what we’ve learned over the years that will make operators’ lives easier when acquiring new communities:
- When naming your community, follow these guidelines:
- Don’t be too generic. You’ll want your name to be easily recognizable but not easily confused with others.
- Make sure the name is easily pronounceable.
- Make sure there aren’t other businesses or areas of town with the same name.
- Think about how your community stacks up against the competition.
- Are you priced based on the current occupancy, climate, and look of the community?
- It’s important not to only evaluate a community by what you see physically; this can skew your judgment, impacting investments for improvements. You should also consider how the community lives online. How do they attract prospective residents? What is the pre-move-in experience like? Invest where the prospect journey begins.
- Optimize data:
- So many groups are lost when it comes to their own data. They want to harness it and deploy some ability to gain business intelligence insights out of their numbers but too often result to manual spreadsheets which are time-consuming and do not scale easily.
- As you scale operations, consider solutions that automatically consolidate what’s most important to you. This will help you optimize operations across your portfolio.
- For more on recognizing data trends in how people are searching for senior living and how to analyze lead activity, check out our collaborative research with Talk Further, “Understanding 2021 Move In Trends (Part 1) “.
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- Think outside the box
- Too often operators get focused on what’s happening inside the walls of their communities, including how they think about technology.
- Think outside of the community and focus on the experience of a resident, from their first interaction as a potential resident. Set the tone of their experience through your digital touchpoints and provide them with exceptional service, information, and easy navigation as they make the important decisions about their future home.
- Invest in new solutions to impress and delight future residents through well-designed, easy-to-use digital offerings/website
- What are your current Google reviews like?
- If the number of reviews is low or if they are poor, put a game plan into place sooner than later.
- Have you budgeted for Google Ads and print advertising, if needed?
- Look at what your competition is spending and put together a plan for advertising before coming up with the advertising budget.
- Think about branding and colors. Are they senior-friendly and aesthetically pleasing?
Consider these tips as a guide to preventing common mistakes or pitfalls in the senior living industry. It’s vital to the success of your community to plan appropriately, ensuring you’re easy to find and your branding meets senior accessibility standards. You’ll also want to budget adequately for marketing expenses and digital engagement in order to execute a well-developed strategy.
Are you ready to unleash the potential of your senior living community?
If you’re looking for ways to automate, innovate and advertise your business, let us be your resource. Connect with Craft & Communicate and Talk Further today. For more expert tips and advice, check out our blog.
