Choosing the right Marketing Automation platform for Senior Care

Our population is aging and we are living longer. Senior care facilities are now becoming more personal, even offering customized lifestyle option packages to offer better-matched levels of care. Marketing to reach out to attract new seniors as well as to keep connected with families is crucial. The same personalized options that some facilities now offer has to be mirrored in a marketing strategy that’s equally as personal and people-focused for the residents.

What to Avoid

When looking for a marketing automation platform for driving occupancy (potentially across multiple communities), it is important to use what you learned when you purchased a CRM for your operations. When you chose a CRM for your sales operations, you most likely learned quickly that deploying a CRM that was designed for B2B sales would be a significant mistake. Most B2B CRMS are designed for project managing a long sale cycle sale to one company, a primary contact, and potentially a few supporting decision makers. Making a life change for a senior is clearly a different engagement entirely. There are many great CRMs that are designed specifically for the seniors care industry (Enquire, Sherpa CRM, Welcome Home, Eldermark CRM to name a few).

AVOID

Avoid trying to use a B2B CRM for your sales operations. CRMs like Salesforce and Pipedrive are designed for B2B, not Senior Living. You will have much better success if you are using CRMs by industry leaders like Sherpa CRM, Enquire, Eldermark, or Welcome Home.

The two features that set a senior living specific CRM from a B2B crm are:

• Contact relationships: there are many important contact relationships that need to be represented. Mother-daughter, daughter – power of attorney, husband-wife, etc. Most B2B CRMs do a very poor job of capturing these relationships
• Community management: The fundamental business unit in seniors care is a community. Most B2B CRMs do not intrinsically support the concept of a community based sales organization

The exact two elements above are critical when deploying marketing automation. If you deploy a marketing automation system that was designed from the ground for B2B, you will spend a lot of time and money (and generate a lot of frustration) trying to pound a round peg into a square hole.

AVOID

Avoid trying to use a B2B marketing automation platform for your Seniors Care marketing. Marketing Automation platforms like Hubspot and Act-on are designed for B2B, not Senior Living

5 key senior living features

If you are looking for a marketing automation platform for driving occupancy, there are a set of features that are MUST HAVEs to succeed. Deploying a B2B marketing automation platform is a critical mistake that you want to avoid at all costs. From a high level, there are several feature categories that offer large differences between senior living marketing automation platforms. Five are:

• Relationship support. For many prospects, their child, relative or other trusted person may be involved in the choice of senior living facility. With support for these contact relationships, the automation is able to support more custom messaging that better touches on these relationships.
• Multi-community support. For providers that use a centralized marketing team to market for multiple locations, community and multi-tenant support are crucial. The best marketing automation platforms will have time-saving features such as the ability to create new accounts from templates, cloning campaigns and automation between accounts, which automatically applies branding at scale. If your marketing automation platform does not natively support this type of model, you will be spending a lot of time trying to ensure the right prospects are getting the right message. In seniors care marketing the location is everything. All messages, all communications, all posts to social platforms are community specific. Without native support for multiple brand/address/facility offering, your messaging will not be on target, the ability to deploy automations will be greatly reduced.
• Call tracking. Because many prospects and their influencers will call to book their appointments, some marketing automation platforms offer built-in call tracking, recording and transcribing. Those features make it easier to score leads, quality check sales calls and determine what steps to take next. Calls, recordings and transcriptions should ideally integrate directly with the CRM as well, to save time for the sales team.
• Appointment scheduling. For senior living prospects, the first major action in the sales process is usually booking an appointment for an in-person tour, virtual tour or consultation. If the marketing automation platform can schedule appointments in the platform, operators have an easier path to tracking which marketing efforts are driving those appointments. They can then automate reminders and other activities for the appointment. Operators should ensure the platform natively integrates with the calendaring software, such as Google Workspace or Microsoft Office 365
• CRM Integration. If you want your sales strategy to align with your marketing strategy, it starts with the tools. It is essential that your marketing automation system integrates natively with your senior living focused CRM platform.

The Basics: Move-in and Occupancy Attribution

ActiveDEMAND’s full attribution tracking helps senior living communities track their prospect’s digital behavior via email campaigns, social posts, the visitor behavior on the community’s website, and engagement such as downloading brochures, appointments, or clicking through content about the community. This tracked attribution data shows the buyer’s journey for a potential lead, which supports the sales team to better engage a prospect’s care needs or interests. Knowing which marketing efforts are driving your move-ins and helping to increase occupancy is key to tuning marketing efforts for high performance. Full attribution also helps with identifying new occupants who may have come in from marketing rather than referrals from an affiliate network. Marketing Automation for Senior Care Tips

• Track phone calls and find what marketing drove those calls using Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI)
• Track form fills
• Allow prospects to schedule a visit themselves
• Use filtering

Email/Social Media Communications at Scale

Managing multiple senior care communities from a single marketing group comes with some efficiencies and some challenges. Marketers sure get their copy/paste practice in when they’re sending out the same Christmas emails to 15 different locations, then putting the same message out 15 times on Facebook, Twitter, and sometimes on a website blog. Nobody got into marketing so that they could copy and paste their life away, yet that’s what many digital marketing specialists are stuck doing these days. ActiveDEMAND has both multi-channel campaigns as well as cross-account campaign cloning. So you can build 1 omnichannel campaign that includes a WordPress blog post, Facebook post, email, and Tweet, and then clone that campaign to multiple accounts, applying appropriate branding for each account. Now marketers can spend more time on the strategy, concepts, and creative of the campaign, and less time copying and pasting between accounts.

Integrating Systems: CRM

One activity that unlocks marketing capabilities is integrating a CRM with marketing automation. Most senior housing and post-acute care facilities use a Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, platform. Rather than use a general purpose B2B CRM, senior facilities have purpose-built CRM platforms that are customized a strong contact relationship model, intrinsic support for communities, industry specific terminology and sales processes. Sales and marketing alignment is important for any business’ growth so finding the right marketing automation platform to complement your CRM is a must. With an integrated CRM and Marketing Automation platform, senior living providers can effectively market across multiple online channels – email, social media, ads, and more.

 

Consultants will try to convince you that the CRM integration is not important. If your MAP does not seamlessly integrate with your CRM, your sales will suffer!

CRM data is used to trigger automated marketing messages, making move-ins and other common activities more consistent. The integration also ensures all relevant email activity is synchronized between both systems. Additionally, the call tracking features and full-featured appointment scheduling system provide valuable data to the senior care CRM system. Having all the sales and marketing data in the CRM system allows the sales team to manage all leads, contacts, referral sources, and residents in one place. Sales counselors can use the combined data in the CRM to increase occupancy and simplify the revenue cycle. A well-integrated system works together to demonstrate a better way for companies to achieve high contact and conversion rates, as well as gain insight into the performance of their communities through customized reporting and business intelligence tools. ActiveDEMAND integrates with many of the popular senior care CRM’s so you can keep customer details synchronized and better connect marketing and sales. Want to level up your marketing automation for senior care? Contact ActiveDEMAND for a trial today!

ActiveDEMAND provides a lot of the digital tools for modern marketing. I love having everything in one place and pulling all the different report options to show ROI. -Katie from Senior Star

Written by Eric Murphy

Eric Murphy is the Digital Marketing Manager at ActiveDEMAND. He is responsible for driving the marketing strategy for the ActiveDEMAND integrated marketing platform. He has a strong background in online marketing, communications and working closely with sales teams. For many years Eric was an evangelist and marketer for the industrial communications community through guest articles, maintaining industry blogs and speaking at conferences and other events.