Optimizing Lead Nurturing for Senior Living Communities

Lead nurturing is an incredibly important part of your inbound marketing strategy. This is especially true when it comes to marketing senior living communities.

Inbound marketing can have powerful results for senior living communities. In order to achieve those results, you need to implement a robust strategy that generates leads and nurtures them into residents.

What is the best way to nurture leads into future residents? Let’s take a look.

What Do You Currently Have?

The first step to take when it comes to optimizing your lead nurture strategy is to take into account what content you already have.

Map your content to your Buyer’s Journey and make sure that your lead nurture strategy makes sense and is aligned with said journey. Once you are sure that your strategy makes sense for your buyer personas and their individual Buyer’s Journeys, take a look at your sequencing.

Typically, the decision to move to a senior living community is a big step and is a decision that takes a long time to make. Are your lead nurture workflows set up with this in mind? Dementia care lead nurturing should only have a few days between each email, whereas independent living lead nurturing emails should be multiple weeks apart.

Analyze any current workflows you have set up. Are contacts reaching the goal? Are some performing better than others? Why? Spend some time with your workflows and understand what is giving you sales qualified leads (SQLs) and what isn’t.

Lastly, make sure your emails are coming from a real person. Don’t send emails from your company; send them from a person at your company. Make these emails as personal as you can (without getting creepy). The decision to move to senior living is a difficult one for most people. Position the person the emails are sent from as a resource and a confidant.

Where Are Your Communities Located?

Senior living is all about location.

A strong content strategy is going to bring in leads, but they could be leads from anywhere. Do you want to spend your time on all of those leads or do you want to spend time specifically nurturing the ones who already live near your community?

Recently, I have been trying to hyper-focus my efforts on the geographic areas of the communities I support. I started doing this with Facebook ads that were targeted within a radius of a community. They brought in significantly more SQLs than bottom of the funnel ads did. This switched on a light bulb in my head. Why not do this with everything?

I have begun creating more localized blog content, premium content, and lead nurturing campaigns because of this, and I am already seeing success.

If you have communities all over the country, ignore this step, but if you are only in specific regions, look into your database and see how many leads you currently have in each region. You may have enough to start a new lead nurturing campaign.

Is Your CRM Integrated? Things to Consider

The last thing I highly recommend considering when it comes to lead nurturing for senior living is your CRM and whether it is integrated into your marketing software.

In senior living, calls and walk-ins play a much bigger role in the sales process than web forms and emails alone. Because of this, you want to make sure your CRM is talking to your marketing software, especially when it comes to lead nurturing. The last thing you want to do is invite a prospect in for a tour when you gave them the tour yesterday. A mistake like that can damage trust, and with such an important decision, you want to make sure your marketing efforts are establishing trust, not tearing it down.

In a perfect world, you would use a CRM that doubles as marketing software—then you wouldn’t have to worry about any wires getting crossed. However, there are many CRMs out there specific to senior living that do not provide marketing automation. This is okay, but when you are deciding on a CRM or a marketing software, make sure they have the ability to talk to each other. It will make your lead nurturing more effective and also much easier to manage.

Hopefully, this blog has given you some ideas to hit the ground running with a lead nurture strategy specific to your senior living communities’ needs. If not, or if you have more questions, tweet me at @marycatespires or @smartbugmedia. I am always happy to chat through ideas! Optimizing Lead Nurturing for Senior Living Communities