Generating leads in your industry is expensive. According to one study, facilities spend an eye-popping $431 on each lead. Unfortunately, only 30 percent of those high-cost leads turn into contracts.

In this blog series, we’ve unpacked the challenges of growing your resident pool and begun sharing how to leverage best practices in marketing to set yourself apart. Now, we’ll answer one of the most common questions asked by owners and managers of senior living facilities: “How can I improve my conversion of leads to residents?”

Between emails, events, direct mail, digital marketing, and retargeting (lather, rinse, repeat), it’s hard to get a handle on how much – or how many – of these strategies and tactics you should deploy to convert those precious leads.

In our last blog, we discussed the importance of insights – understanding the often long and winding road buyers take when exploring senior living locations and their objections, questions, and concerns at every stage along the prospect journey.

Let’s assume you’ve done the research and gathered the insights. Do you have a clear answer for each question and concern expressed by prospective residents? Can you clearly explain your advantages over your competition? Have you made it easy for prospects to get the answers they’re seeking — online, on the phone, through email, and in person? 

Once you’ve given a tour, has the prospect applied? How have you encouraged them to apply? What is your communication cadence in following up once you have an application in hand? What do you do to keep each lead from going cold?

The recipe for a solid prospect conversion approach has to answer these questions, and should include the following tools and strategies at each step of the game:

Before the Visit 

• Create compelling content – information that is engaging, informative, and relevant to your audience. This content can include blog posts, videos, infographics, and social media posts. To be most effective with your content, you must make sure it is optimized for search engines, and make it easy to share across different platforms.
• Ensure you are providing the detailed information needed to encourage them to keep their appointment – and come prepared with any materials, documents, or questions.
• Create messages for email and phone inquiries that are consistent and transparent.
• Provide relevant inbound follow-up to build trust and credibility with prospects.

After the Visit

• Classify the prospect into the appropriate nurturing segment based on their needs, preferences, decision/move-in timeline, etc. – and tailor your marketing messages accordingly.
• Utilize a customer relationship management system (CRM) to track each lead and automate follow-up communication and reminders.
• Devise a consistent process to track responses to outreach campaigns and follow-up accordingly in order to advance them to the next stage of the decision process.
• Use digital retargeting strategies that show your prospects ads relevant to your senior living facility, whenever they are online.
• Establish a process for your internal teams to collaborate, share information about prospects, and keep leads from falling through the cracks
• Provide a variety of channels for prospects to easily engage with your team (phone, email, SMS, chatbots, etc) to maintain an active dialogue throughout the decision-making process.

In this blog post, we’ve outlined the steps for nurturing prospects throughout the decision process. Now we’ve given you the ingredients to nurture prospects throughout the decision process.  

In this blog series, we’ve outlined an effective approach for acquiring new residents in an increasingly competitive market – helping you understand how to avoid “random acts of marketing,” offering up a marketing playbook to use to grow your business, and giving you the insights needed to dominate your local market. Now, the rest is up to you.

Not sure where to start? Schedule a free 30-minute conversation with one of our senior living CMOs.

In case you missed the first three blogs in the series:

• Are you Ready for the Next Senior Living Crisis?
• Are you Ready for the Next Senior Living Crisis? Part 2
• Are you Ready for the Next Senior Living Crisis? Part 3