From building trust with your prospects to increasing awareness of your brand, you’ll find several benefits of having a strong senior living content marketing strategy in place. Content marketing provides ways for you to ditch the heavy sales pitch, get creative and focus on educating your prospects through various media. As you create your strategy, here are five types of content you can leverage to help kickstart your next content marketing push.
Weighing Options with Comparisons, Checklists and Scoresheets
It’s one thing to have prospects read your senior living content marketing materials. It’s another thing to have them interact with them. We often create content for our clients that gives prospects comparisons of their community’s costs and services side-by-side with their competitors and at-home services. If you’re community’s costs stack up favorably against your competitors or alternative services, a comparison piece is a great way of showing that.
Checklists and scoresheets provide other ways for prospects to engage with your content and your community. Here’s an idea for a checklist: outline everything the prospect should be looking out for when touring a community so that they can check off which communities have these items and which ones don’t.
This checklist we created for our client gives their prospects an opportunity to narrow their search for a community by checking off their requirements.
And to make the prospect’s evaluation process even easier, you can add a scoresheet —whether separately or as part of the checklist — where they can rate different aspects of all the communities they visit, rather than having to compare them from memory. Be sure to include spaces where prospects can, in their own words, write down what they’re looking for in a community, state their “must-haves” and “nice-to-haves” and write down any thoughts they have about the community.
Videos That Provide Prospects With the Information They Want
Eighty percent of Baby Boomers go online daily, and they’re consuming more digital content than any other generation. This includes video content. Twenty-four percent of YouTube visitors are Baby Boomers, with 68% of the cohort saying they use the platform for some purpose, be it entertainment or educational.
While Boomers are very receptive to written content, they also appreciate how much time they can save by watching videos. And while it requires a different level of effort compared to written content, you’d be missing out on an opportunity to meet your prospects where they are by taking a pass on video.
You can repurpose much of your written content for video, but you can also create content unique to the medium as well. From video tours of the community and resident interviews, to “day-in-the-life” vlogs and event highlights, short of taking a tour, videos offer some of the best opportunities for your prospects to learn about what their lives might be like in your community.
Testimonials: Stories From Your Residents and Their Families
Don’t be afraid to ask your residents and their families for testimonials that tell stories of their experiences at your community. They can share what they’ve enjoyed about living in the community, how they’ve benefited from the lifestyle and the services offered, how a staff member went above and beyond to provide exceptional service and countless other stories that help to highlight your community’s unique selling points.
When asking for testimonials, the goal is to collect multiple quotes that tell the story of your community through the eyes of the person giving the testimonial, rather than just short, one-sentence compliment. These resident stories provide a stage for your product’s user — the more they have to say, the more material you’ll have for your senior living content marketing.
The Philadelphia Protestant Home used their homepage to showcase some of their resident testimonials.
You can choose several ways to showcase testimonials. Trying spacing them out throughout your website’s and/or having them on a “testimonials” page on your site. You can also add one or two particularly complimentary ones to your printed collateral, post testimonials as quotes on your social media accounts and even have residents and their families deliver them in video form.
These stories can be leveraged across all your marketing channels. Don’t be afraid to get creative with how you show off all the great things your customers are saying about you.
Make Your Senior Living Content Marketing Interactive With Virtual Tours
A virtual tour is a great way to keep your prospects engaged with your website and give them a walkthrough of your community from the comfort of their own homes. Think of it as the tour before the tour.
With a virtual tour, the prospect can navigate the grounds, swing by the indoor pool, peruse the dining room and even step inside that new model home you’ve been telling them about. Virtual tours may instill the prospect with a sense of familiarity with your community. When they do decide to go in for a tour, they’re bound to come across a few aspects of the community they recognize from their virtual sojourn, and they may even be able to locate a few of the amenities on their own!
Mulberry’s long-term care virtual tour allows prospects to navigate through one of the community’s apartments from the comfort of their home
A virtual tour isn’t something that you want to go halfway on. When people hear virtual tour, they’re looking for an experience — one in which they can click, navigate and feel as if they’re actually at your community. Take a look at the Mulberry Health website if you’re looking for an example of a good senior living virtual tour experience.
Blogs That Keep Your Prospect Wanting More
Raise your hand if you think your community is using its blog to its fullest potential. If we were sitting in a room full of senior living providers, chances are, not many hands would be raised. In our observations, we’ve seen that blogs often fall by the wayside for senior living communities.
But maintaining an active blog is among the best ways to gain prospect’s attention from search engine results pages and keep them coming back to your website. A blog provides a way to add fresh content to your website on a regular basis. When optimized for search, blogging is one of the best ways to get your website to appear sooner in search engines.
Use your blog to give repeat visitors useful, helpful information senior living, aging and any other topics they’re interested in. Remember to keep content focused on them — not you. You’ll position yourself as a reliable source for prospects by writing about information they’re looking for.
Although blogging is a commitment, it’s one that can be both fun and pay dividends, especially once you’ve gotten into the rhythm of developing a content marketing calendar and publishing posts on a regular basis. In just six steps, you can get a leg up on your competitors and take your blogging game (and your senior living content marketing as a whole) to the next level!