Happy Monday! Last week thousands of leaders and providers within the senior living industry headed to New Orleans for the 2017 LeadingAge Annual Meeting & Expo. Our CR team returned home inspired, excited and even more invested in partnering with organizations dedicated to serving and helping seniors thrive. While at the conference we shared some insights in real-time through our social media channels. This week’s blog post recaps some of those insights and inspirations that people shared and liked throughout the week.
Did you attend LeadingAge 2017? We’d love to hear your favorite take-aways via the comment section below.
Content Marketing
During a session entitled Tying Inbound and Outbound Marketing Together, Dan Hutson of HumanGood shared the following insight regarding the secret to effective content marketing:
“Content Marketing is the overlap between what you think and what your customers actually want to know about your brand”
What I love about this statement is that Dan speaks to the trap that so many fall into when trying to create content – they speak at their customers, not to them. Truly effective content marketing highlights what matters most to your prospects based on two components: the channel you are using and where they are in their purchase journey. If you’re not sharing content they deem relevant, prospects will tune you out.
Whether you are just starting to develop a content marketing strategy or looking at where you will go in 2018, now is the time to look inward and determine what messages and insights are most valued by your prospects. Need a place to start to ID what matters most? Use your analytic tools to gauge what content and messaging speaks to people. You can even draw inspiration from successful education events to determine themes that people want to learn more about.
Senior Living Perceptions
A Town Hall discussion of the challenges and rewards of working within the Senior Living industry drew significant interest. Not because of the topic itself, but because of the participants…students and members of Leading Age.
A discussion we have regularly with our senior living partners is the critical need to attract younger generations to fill workforce vacancies. It’s important not just to continue to ensure we can effectively serve our resident populations, but to ensure we can bring new views and approaches to HOW we serve them. During the town hall those within the industry spoke to common perceptions about the senior living industry, coupled with real life examples of what makes it so rewarding.
Here’s to hoping that a spark was ignited among some of the student participants and we’ll soon see some of them within the walls of our communities!
The Importance of Nurturing
A session regarding the power of online leads confirmed what we at Creating Results have seen play out over and over again…you can shorten a sales cycle significantly when you turn anonymous web visitors into digital leads and nurture them into prospects (and hopefully happy residents).
Each time our agency conducts Social, Silver Surfers, our national survey to gauge the digital preferences and pet peeves of boomers and seniors one key metric continues to stand out, that your prospects will visit your website up to 6 times before they ever walk through the front door. These are informed leads who want to know more about you. But what if you could leverage engaging content (see first point above on the importance) to capture their information and nurture them before walk-in? As they say, there’s gold in them hills. Because these digital leads are more informed and qualified their gestation period could be reduced by up to a third, making them your most viable and ready to act leads.
Trading Places
Creating Results had the opportunity to lead a panel during the conference entitled Trading Places: Insider Insights From Marketing Experts. The panel brought together experts from both the agency and client sides of the senior living fence to share thoughts on how to improve marketing effectiveness and achieve goals. It was so well received that we’ll be launching a webinar series February 7th next year where we’ll continue the conversation.
Visit our website to learn more about the panel and email Patrick McShane at patrick@creatingresults.com if you’d like to register for our webinar.
For Those Seeking Inspiration (or Re-Inspiration)
During a morning session Jennifer McCrae shared the following with attendees that I think sums up why so many of us work with seniors, be it directly or indirectly:
“Making the world a better place is not in the future. It’s today, and should be a verb not a noun.”