SENIOR LIVING EXPERTS. BUILDING CONNECTIONS.
SENIOR LIVING EXPERTS. BUILDING CONNECTIONS.
SENIOR LIVING EXPERTS. 
While senior living marketers have always known that family members play an active role in the decision-making process for a prospect’s senior living choices, it’s only become recently clear just how pivotal the adult child’s role has grown. In an online survey conducted by Care.com that included adult children, relatives, spouses and prospects, 73% of respondents reported that adult children were involved with senior housing decisions regardless of service level. When the adult child helped influence the decision, the move-in rate was 3 times greater than if the decision-maker was only the prospective resident.
Senior living sales and marketing managers are typically focused on providing a data-dump of information to the adult child about their community to include services, amenities, programs, and care through brochures, tours, presentations and community websites. While these marketing channels are important, marketers are falling short on actively targeting and engaging this key influencer.
One of the greatest assets for reaching adult child influencers is through content marketing within the existing community website. This doesn’t have to be multi-layered complex campaign that diverts all of your digital marketing campaign budget away from other important efforts. Rather, some good strategic research and thoughtful writing can help your website become more versatile in how it speaks to a multi-generational audience.
First and foremost make sure the community website provides a resource for the adult child. Create a new ‘Resources for Caregivers’ page that lets searchers learn more about the issues and concerns facing them as they look for senior living options for their parents or family members. Within this page, include a frequently-asked-questions and answers content area to include such questions as:
Remember that these questions are not only answering an important question for your adult child audience, but you will be mirroring the exact same queries entered into search engines which is a critical component of search engine marketing.
Expand upon the online resources your community provides to an adult child researcher by providing a downloadable guide to help them in their search. Include in this guide tips for finding the right community for a parent or family member, considerations when visiting communities, questions to ask the sales and marketing team during a tour and meeting, and a short promotion of your community. Use specific and direct titles such as How to Find the Right Assisted Living Community or Our Guide to Memory Care Communities to capture the adult child’s attention. Promote the guide in both the website and through your existing pay-per-click campaign with a dedicated landing page for visitors to enter their information in exchange for this important information.
Keep your community top-of-mind with the adult child even before a need is identified. Make use of your blog page to write posts that will be relevant and interesting for the adult child audience. Research the adult child audience for your geographic area to determine what would best draw entrances into the blogs through online searches. Suggested blog topics could include:
Research your topics carefully since those that contain the least competitive keywords and phrases have a greater chance of being served up higher in search engine results and lead to greater visibility with searchers. For instance, Baseball Spring Training in Florida will have many hundreds of search engine results that your post will compete against for visibility. However, Spring Training Camps Near Winter Park FL will have less competitiveness and will be more likely to appear closer to the top of search engine results.
Contact us to learn more about our Solutions Advisors’ digital strategies and how we can help your senior living community reach the adult child influencer.