Think it’s too early to prepare your senior living marketing strategy for next year? Think again! January 2023 will be here before you know it, and it’s the perfect time to set your goals for helping seniors find their new homes in the new year.
But how do you market your senior living community for 2023? Is it much different from last year or the year before?
Craft & Communicate has some tips to share to align yourself strategically amidst the senior living digital marketing landscape. Below are a few overlooked, but powerful tools to use when marketing your community.
Virtual Tours of Senior Apartments
Virtual tours on community websites are a great way for prospective seniors and/or families to get a glimpse at your floor plans. In addition to photos, a virtual tour where a prospect can click through an apartment, studio, or home can help them come to a decision faster about your community.
Below are other benefits to adding virtual tours to your website:
- Quick Decisions: Help prospects who are out of state, but looking at your town, decide quickly if your community is the right fit for them by allowing them to virtually tour your floor plans.
- More People: On another note from the tip above, reach more people! Virtual tours are a great way for many people all over to get a glimpse of your community.
- Saving Money and Time: Save money and time for all involved – seniors or families can view the apartments right from their computer, tablet, or phone while your sales teams assist even more people on-site.
- Easy to Add: Easy embedding is the name of the game for adding media to your website. Virtual tours should be easy to add to your website in theory, however, not everyone is a web developer guru. Luckily, if you have a senior living marketing agency like Craft & Communicate, you do not have to worry about this technicality – we will do it for you.
- Available 24/7: The virtual tour is available on your website any day at any time. Seniors and families could be growing interest in your community without you having to move a finger.
If you do not have virtual tours on your websites, now may be the time to look into this powerful tool. Virtual tours are used by many hotels, apartments, and senior living communities, including competitors.
Keeping up with COVID-19
No one wants to recreate 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic started. It sounds convenient and ideal to go back to pre-2020, and how we marketed our communities back then. However, as a senior living community, we must think of the extreme impact that COVID-19 has had on our industry.
Moving forward with new ideas and keeping up to date with the times is crucial, as seniors and families are looking for reassurance that they, or their loved ones, will feel secure in your community.
Remember to keep up-to-date on your COVID-19 guidelines page on your website and reassure leads that your team continues to keep up with your sanitation and cleanliness protocols.
If keeping up with your web page is a hassle, C&C manages all things web and digital for our clients. We also send reminders of when to keep updating the page so content does not grow stale, as well as how to navigate a COVID-19 crisis. Contact us if you would like to learn more!
Speaking of crisis management, having a plan in place for any kind of situation is important as well, especially in this day and age.
Crisis Management Strategy
What happens when a crisis hits your town, or community? The crisis is more manageable with a strategic marketing team with reputation management and crisis PR experience.
Here are a few tools to create if you do not have a senior living marketing agency doing this for you already:
- Create a statement keeping families and residents up to date on crucial developments
- Create a press statement if needed for the media
- Develop talking points for any press inquiries
- Ensure all teams from Legal to Operations are on the same page as the Sales and Marketing teams
- Maintain continuous monitoring of your social media channels and review listing sites
In this day and age, it is important to have a crisis management plan in place for your community. It is better to be proactive than reactive to a situation and ensure everyone is prepared.
Clean Design and Accessibility
The old adage “less is more” can apply to your web design, too. We know you have a lot to say, but be sure you’re not saying too much, including with imagery, all at once. Otherwise, your message will just be noise to the reader.
Instead, our team can work with you to clearly and concisely define your message, helping your users digest your content more effectively.
You certainly know that accessibility standards are crucial to maintain for your senior living community, but did you know that also extends to your website?
According to W3C, it’s important to design your website in such a way that users with differing abilities can process the information.
Your content can’t rely on information that is only presented via sound, or those in the deaf and hard of hearing community would not have the same access to your message. Also, your text should contain large enough fonts, along with a way for the user to manipulate the text size, background, and contrast settings, in order to better visualize your website. Not following these standards for your website can put you at risk for a fine or even a lawsuit.
Fortunately, our team is skilled in this digital territory. We can design a site for you that is clean, clear, and accessible for seniors and their families.
When you are ready to market your senior living community for 2023, better than before, let us know if we can help! Craft & Communicate is a full-service digital marketing and public relations agency. Our goal is to help you make your life easier.
We will make sure you are ready for 2023 and beyond.
Contact Craft & Communicate today to learn more about us and how we can help you.
