There are many ways you can market an assisted living facility to get more residents at your door. Better yet, most of them are even simple, affordable, and most importantly, effective.
But of course, before you begin, you need to promote your facility in the beginning. Once it has gotten on its feet and has built a good reputation, it will eventually market itself. That said, here are the other ways you can do to further promote it to your target audience:
Table of Contents
1 – Know Your Market
Before getting all out with your marketing campaigns, you must first find the people you would like to target using your materials. You can do this by researching your demographic and learning more about your target market.
Research about the demographics of the people living in the area where your facility is. You will need their information such as their gender and average age. Also, check if there are more families, children, or a sizable population of retirees as well as the percentage of senior citizens in the area.
Lastly, find out if there are existing facilities offering the same services as your business. You have to learn about their services, amenities, and prices to help you develop a competitive rate.
2 – Develop a Marketing Plan
Once you have an idea of your target market, it is time to find out their needs. Do your best to figure out what they like and how your service can be of help to them. It will massively help if you can find local businesses to partner with for your cross-promotional activities.
At this stage, you have to determine what makes your business stand out. There may be other similar facilities in the area, but give people enough reasons to choose you or consider you when the time comes that they require such service.
One of the most important steps at this phase is your budget. You must know how much you can allocate for advertising to devise strategies you can commit to and execute effortlessly.
3 – Create an Advertising Campaign
You must combine both traditional and digital advertising methods to reach more people. Most of your target market are senior citizens who may not use the internet that much, but their younger families surely are.
As such, you want to make your presence felt. You have to make your assisted living facility stand out by branding your community. The first thing you have to focus on is a digital campaign. Here are some ideas to get this done:
- Leverage your social media platforms
This step will generate views and awareness from your target audience. You can create branded social media posts easily and quickly using customizable social media templates. You can also employ the method of retargeting to keep them engaged with your brand.
A good example of retargeting is when 30% or more of your target audience have visited your site but did not communicate with you, initiate communication, or watch the top of the funnel videos on your page. You retarget them by doing content with a more direct call-to-action.
- Utilize a CRM software
CRM software such as Salesforce and HubSpot can help optimize your existing bottom-of-the-funnel acquisition methods. These are the tried and tested methods, such as lead management, telephone marketing, and email marketing.
- Work as a team
If you have different groups of people managing various roles for the community, you have to make them work together to come up with an effective marketing plan. These groups include your website development, communication, marketing, and sales teams.
All of them need to consolidate plans to optimize your online presence. Your core marketing team needs to work on the following tasks:
- Marketing strategies
- Increasing conversion rates
- Streamlining the HR onboarding process
- Training videos
- Identifying your brand’s mission and purpose
4 – Use Traditional Marketing Methods
Many businesses focus most of their marketing efforts online, and you can’t blame them. Even traditional print businesses, such as newspapers or magazines, are shifting mediums in this digital-forward world.
But it doesn’t mean you can’t use traditional forms of advertising. Despite the popularity and efficiency of the digital medium, print is not dead.
Many experts agree that it will help improve the customer experience when you combine your digital marketing efforts with the traditional types. Since you are targeting the elderly, most of whom still prefer holding something printed than looking at a screen, traditional marketing still presents itself as a great option.
Here are some samples of the printed advertising medium you can use in promoting your assisted living facility:
- Billboards
Despite the emergence of digital billboards, the more traditional ones using hand-painted or printed images on canvas still hold prominent spots and are still working. This medium will entice your target audience with more images than texts to raise brand awareness.
You can hire a photographer to capture powerful images of your residents and how they are cared for in the facility. You have to capture emotions to appeal to your target market’s hearts.
- Signage
Signages are like billboards, but they are smaller and placed in moving vehicles to reach a wider audience. They are framed printed photos installed in the vehicle with lights to illuminate the images even in the dark.
Other printed signages are placed at shop-fronts, on a building’s facade, and in other places where people frequent.
- Newspaper insert stories
They are commonly used in printed and digital versions of newspapers these days. The placement depends on the rate. These are the stories provided by the business. They will write something that will look like a credible news or feature story, but the catch is that it is only an ad.
The newspaper outlet publishes such stories with small texts bearing something like they are promotional content from the name of the company or brand. You may want to consider this since your target audience may still prefer holding and reading printed broadsheets to their digital versions.
- Flyers
As long as done right, flyers can reach and get the attention of your target market. To get this done, ensure that they are eye-catching and engaging. Some important factors you must follow in making effective flyers for small businesses include a good and relatable theme, employing the proper hierarchy of elements, and a clear call to action or CTA.
Designing this marketing tool is easy. You can use many online graphic tools as a flyer maker and make other campaign materials. Take, for example, PosterMyWall. You can access the templates found on the website and experiment with the design that will work best for your campaign.
5 – The Technical Aspects of Creating a Flyer
Whatever flyer you end up designing will go to a printer, or you can also print them if you have the resources. Either way, you have to see the technical aspects right from the start.
- Size of canvas
Decide from the beginning what size of a flyer you will be using. Is it going to be one-sided or two-sided, and how many pages? No matter what design tool you’re using, even if it is an online tool like PosterMyWall, you have the option to choose the size and orientation of the printed layout.
- Proper bleeding
Make sure your flyer design has a 3mm bleed on each edge. What’s a bleed? They are the areas that will be trimmed off once printed. You can consider the bleed as safe areas. You are leaving off bleed or the parts where nothing pertinent will be printed to ensure that no important parts of the material will be cut off once printed.
When you do not leave a bleed and cut the material slightly off, your flyer may have a thin and unsightly white line at its edge.
- Color
Set the color mode of your flyer to CMYK. If you have designed a layer in a different color mode, like in RGB, the colors will not look similar once printed. Designing in CMYK will give you the best view of what the printed product will look like.
- Get source files for the printer
Send the printer the source files of the flyers. By getting the source files, you can post the flyers online, on your website, or on social media pages to reach more people.
As long as you have an excellent design, your flyer will work in print and digital platforms.
Final Thoughts
An effective marketing campaign, both in digital and traditional ways, will make it easier for you to capture the attention of your target market. The good thing about having an established online presence is that they are always there. They will keep gathering views and visits even when you are not online or on vacation. You only need to ensure that you constantly create new content and update your information as required.
To make it easier to update your online presence, you can utilize the offline marketing ploys you’ve created and post them online. The two go hand in hand, so you must do your best to consider all aspects of your strategies and marketing medium before giving them out or allowing your target audience to see them.