7 Ways to Improve Your Senior Living Marketing With Tech

Standing out in the crowded senior living space becomes more difficult each year. As baby boomers start to age into senior living communities, competition will only stiffen. Operators must be ready for the challenges ahead, and that starts with leveraging the right marketing technology and automation tools.

From personalized communication strategies to data-driven insights, today’s marketing technology offers a suite of options to reach your target audience and connect with them on a personal level, which is essential when marketing senior living. And the technology is only getting better. In the last several years, marketing tech has improved at a rapid pace, and it’s on course to advance even more quickly as AI and predictive analytics have already transformed what’s possible.

With increasing competition, senior living operators can’t afford to navigate this space without investing in powerful marketing tech. Let’s take a look at some of the best ways you can use technology to optimize your senior living community’s strategic marketing efforts.

1. Invest in the Right CRM

Implementing a customer relationship management platform, known as a CRM, is your first and most important step to leveraging better marketing tech tools, but not any CRM will do. You want a CRM that integrates every business process into a streamlined, easily accessible system, including sales and marketing, finance, operations, and resident care. 

This holistic approach ensures all departments access consistent, up-to-date information for enhanced coordination and decision-making. For instance, the billing and accounting department can seamlessly prepare deposits and proactively approve rates to ensure any offered discounts are still profitable. The operations team can use the data to stay on top of occupancy rates and look at the sales notes to determine how to improve the community’s offerings to become more competitive. For the resident care team, they can better anticipate the needs of new residents before move-in to help with this delicate, emotional transition.  

Your CRM is at the core of every marketing function, so if you’re using outdated CRM technology, you can’t expect to see the same results when it comes to efficiency and growth potential.

2. Enhance Personalization

Transitioning to senior living is a deeply personal decision, and you need more than boilerplate templates and marketing messages to connect with your prospects and build trust. A good CRM allows you to build a lead profile with your prospect’s unique needs from the first digital touchpoint. From there, you can begin delivering targeted content to your prospects and continually adjust your messaging and strategy as you gather more information throughout the sales and marketing journey. Over time, you’ll have enough data across your different segments to see what worked and adjust your messaging strategy as appropriate.  

Logging a prospect’s preferences also ensures you have one source of truth that’s available across the team. If a sales rep uses a spreadsheet to document their notes on a prospect but resigns in the middle of the sales process, the next sales rep may not have access to earlier conversations. They have to build the relationship from scratch, which can be frustrating for the prospect and make it harder to close.

3. Optimize Performance With Predictive Analytics and AI

Predictive analytics uses data to forecast future outcomes. Depending on the data, you can proactively customize so many different marketing efforts with this technology. 

• Customer segmentation: Identify customer segments with similar characteristics and behaviors. By analyzing historical data, you can predict which customer segments are more likely to respond positively to specific marketing messages and offers. 
• Lead scoring: Automatically score leads using a predictive algorithm based on their likelihood to convert into customers. After monitoring sales activities, such as face-to-face interactions, website interactions, email engagement, and demographic information, predictive models can prioritize leads, helping sales teams focus on those with the highest conversion potential.
• AI chat: Summarize your prospect notes with a large language model, and then use a Chat GTP integration to provide specific, thoughtful ideas for how you can better connect with prospects down the funnel. 
• Cross-selling and upselling: Identify opportunities for cross-selling or upselling by analyzing resident care and engagement history and behaviors with your CRM integration. For instance, a resident who participates in fitness-related activities could be a great target for marketing advanced wellness tracking, nutritional planning, or other specialized health services.
• Campaign response prediction: Forecast how different segments of your prospects will respond to specific marketing campaigns. This allows for better campaign planning. 
• Channel attribution modeling: Attribute conversions to different marketing channels based on performance data. By understanding the contribution of each channel to conversions, you can allocate budgets more effectively to channels that drive the highest ROI. 

4. Leverage a Connected Contact Center

Unresponsiveness is the fastest way to undermine your marketing efforts. Given the emotion behind this transition, many of your prospective residents and their families want to connect with a caring voice from the start with a phone call. A dedicated contact center is the most effective way to ensure you answer every call promptly and then immediately integrate the lead information into your CRM. We’ve seen firsthand some of the impressive results senior living operators can achieve when they implement a contact center. 

These people are ready for serious conversations, and in many cases, time is a major factor. If they’re calling you, they’re calling others, and the community that provides the most complete and comforting information will have a leg up. If you can’t promptly answer your prospects phone calls, it doesn’t inspire much confidence that you’ll be there for them during times of need when they’re a resident. 

5. Provide Live Chat Capabilities

Similar to a connected contact center, live chat capabilities can mean the difference between making a sale and losing a prospect to faster-responding competition.  

Prospective residents and their families want to know you’re available when needed, and offering live chat capabilities both after hours and on weekends shows them the level of attention they need. And as AI technology continues to advance, live chat will increasingly become a service that prospects expect — it won’t just be a nice-to-have communication tool. 

6. Offer Video Tours to Move the Prospect Forward in the Funnel

While the ideal sales scenario is a face-to-face tour of the community, sometimes that’s not a possibility for out-of-town family or prospects with a mobility challenge. This is why the video tour is so important. 

A video tour gives you a chance to show the more human experience of senior living. Not only can your prospective see your beautiful, homey scenery to help them envision their own life at your community, but they also get a personal setting to ask specific questions about their needs. If you can’t schedule an in-person tour, this is still an effective option to move the process forward.

7. Improve Your Efficiency With Marketing Automation

To refine your outreach efforts and improve efficiency, you absolutely need the right marketing automation tools.

• Goal reporting: Set your goals in your CRM and then automatically pull comprehensive, shareable reporting. Since every senior living community is different, look for reporting tools that offer customizable interfaces. With this reporting data, you can make more informed decisions, better optimize strategies, and identify areas for improvement. 
• Automated email campaigns: Use email marketing automation to automate both lead nurturing sequences and personalized follow-ups. Set up triggers based on user behavior for timely and relevant communication. 
• Automated social media campaigns: Schedule and automate social media posts to maintain a consistent online presence. Use tools that allow you to plan and schedule posts across various platforms, saving time and ensuring a steady flow of content. 
• Optimized landing pages: Create optimized landing pages with predesigned templates, so you follow the best practices from the start. Once your landing pages go live, you can implement A/B testing to identify the most effective elements, such as headlines, images, or CTAs, and then fine-tune those pages based on performance data. 
• Workflow implementation: Design automated workflows that guide leads through the customer journey. Workflows can include triggers, actions, and conditions that automate responses and tasks based on user behavior for a personalized and efficient experience.

Invest in the Right Marketing Tools

Embracing the latest marketing technology isn’t just a strategic advantage but a necessity for senior living operators looking to thrive in an increasingly competitive landscape. With the integration of AI, automation, and predictive analytics into your marketing efforts, you can craft more personalized experiences that better resonate with today’s seniors and their families. And, of course, that means increasing their odds of turning from prospects into residents. 

To learn more about how you can put these tools into action, check out our free guide “Improve Your Senior Living Sales Performance With Better Lead Generation.” This guide will walk you through how to put these tools into an actionable strategy that drives results.