Does Your Senior Care Facility Pass the Ultimate Marketing and Admissions Test?
Are You Doing Enough to Attract and Retain Residents in Your Senior Living Community? Here is a free Sales and Marketing Annual Checkup
The New Year is a great time to evaluate your sales and marketing efforts to ensure that your community is doing everything it can to maximize qualified leads, move-ins and occupancy. Think of this just like you would your annual physical with your PCP, you want to assess all of your sales and marketing systems and make sure everything is running smoothly. Here we’re going to outline all the things the Fannon Group does to fully analyze the ‘health’ of a community’s marketing efforts to generate qualified leads and the ways it engages prospective residents and their families as they are making the senior living buying decision.
Metrics
Sales and marketing is all about the generation and conversion of leads into move-ins. We won’t trivialize the process of taking care of people as a numbers game, but we can start the assessment of the effectiveness (or health) of a community’s sales and marketing by analyzing key metrics and their trends. Here’s 5 metrics and their trends I encourage you to analyze:
Leads
Move-Ins
Tours
Tour to Lead Conversion Rate
MI to Tour Conversion Rate
If you would like an easy to use tool to analyze your metrics, go to our website www.thefannongroup.com/resources to download our free metrics calculator. For example we recently completed an analysis of these metrics for a client and found that in 2024 leads, tours and move-ins were down and move outs were up in comparison to 2023. It’s no wonder their census was declining. The best way to evaluate metrics is to look at quarterly averages, which our metrics calculator will help you with.
Digital Marketing Strategies
1. Check your digital assets and make sure that information presented is accurate, including:
Website
Social Media Platforms
Google Business Listing
These are easy fixes and can have an impact. One of my senior living clients' google business listing identified them as a nursing home, no wonder they received a large number of leads that were very sick. Once we fixed it the quality of leads they received increased.
2. Check Your Social Media Posts!
If you haven’t posted in a while (or have never posted) it’s a problem. Post 1-2 times a week is ideal, just take pictures of your residents having fun and post them.
3. Prospect Engagement
When the Fannon Group evaluates how a community and its sales team engages prospects we look at the entire prospect experience from how the phone is answered, how responsive the community is to website requests for information, and the skills used by the team as the prospect moves through the process including discovery, giving tours, gaining commitment (closing), handling objections and follow-up.
If you are an executive director or owner who doesn’t have sales experience some of these things may be tough to evaluate (like tours and discovery). However, you (or someone you designate) can make a phone call and evaluate how the phone is answered and what happens if you leave a message. Ditto with filling out a website request for information or a tour.
I encourage every Executive Director or owner I work with to participate in phone calls and tours to evaluate if the information shared with prospects and families is accurate! You can also see if your sales team asks for a commitment, like scheduling an important next step (for example does your sales team invite prospects to tour at the end of their first phone call with them?)
4. Marketing Plan
Do you have a written plan to generate qualified leads? If you don’t then start by getting your team together and write down a plan for the next month. Some tips: keep it simple, two pages max and write down actions your team will complete to attract new leads. If you need help with writing a plan, attend our program on March 18, 2025 where we will give you a primer on business development basics.
