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As we head into the last quarter of the year, sales and marketing teams are feeling the pressure to accomplish multiple initiatives before the calendar flips. From developing marketing plans and budgets for 2019, to scheduling those last events in 2018, to making a final push for depositors and move-ins, there’s often little time to focus on functionalities such as your digital marketing efforts.

Knowing how stretched sales and marketing teams are this time of year, we’ve put together a list of five quick-hit tips that take little time, effort and cost to implement but can have big (positive) impacts on your digital marketing efforts.

1. Take Advantage of Google Posts. Released in June 2017, Google Posts allow for additional content postings within the Google My Business profile. It’s a free feature for businesses to promote incentives, events and advertisements. If your community is actively publishing blogs and news articles, this is a great way to further promote that content. Events will stay live up until the event date and all other content (blogs, articles, news, etc.) have a 7-day lifespan on Google Posts.
2. Scoop Out the Competition. A new feature Facebook introduced in June 2018 to make Pages and ads more transparent was the Info and Ads section. Go to any of your competitor’s Facebook pages and locate ‘Info and Ads’ in the left sidebar. If they’re running paid advertising campaigns, you’ll see the exact sponsored content. Keep tabs on the competition to know what incentives and content (videos, downloadable white papers, cost calculators, etc.) they may be promoting. You won’t have access to their targeted audience or performance metrics, but at least you’ll know what you’re competing against in the paid Facebook advertising market. Think this feels seedy? Don’t worry…this information is public and they’re looking at your ads too.
3. Respond to Reviews. The senior living industry has done a great job of telling its participants how important it is to respond to negative reviews on third-party review sites. This cannot be stated enough. But equally important is responding to positive reviews. A simple ‘thank you’ to a compliment or positive message tells the review reader that your community finds input from others to be important and improves the community’s opportunity at creating a dialogue with the review reader.
4. Add Calls-To-Action to Your Content Posts. Regular postings of blogs and news articles are an excellent way to drive visitors to your website. At the end of your blog or news article, don’t leave readers hanging without a next step. Adding a call-to-action function such as ‘download a white paper,’ ‘watch a video’ or ‘sign up for an enewsletter’ puts the reader just one click away from a deeper dive to answer their questions and provides new pieces of information.
5. Add Directional Buttons to Your Blog Posts. A user-experience best-practice is to add a small toolbar or buttons at the bottom of each blog post or news article to allow the reader to go to the <Previous> or <Next> blog or news post. This is particularly effective if you categorize your posts by subject such as Healthy Living, Retirement Planning, Caregiving, etc., since the directional buttons will take the reader to other articles common to their interest. Combined with tip #4 above (adding calls-to-action to content posts), this practice engages the reader and improves the chance for a conversion.

Performance improvements to your digital marketing campaigns don’t always require time-intensive and costly investments. Often just a few tweaks to an existing campaign is all it takes to make a good campaign great. For more information about the 5 tips noted above, contact Jeff Felton, Vice President of Interactive Innovation, at jfelton@solutionsadvisorsgroup.com.