The Importance of Storytelling in Senior Living Marketing
The concept of storytelling in marketing is about building a narrative of what your brand offers and how it solves a problem for your targeted consumer. With senior care, this is a natural fit as there is nothing more personal and compelling than helping seniors and their families find the right solution to their living arrangements.
So how do you incorporate storytelling into your senior marketing? It’s about emotion, relationships, and personality.
Stories Tap into Emotions
It’s a difficult decision. Approaching an aging parent about the possibility it’s time they consider moving into a senior living community is not easy and it’s filled with emotion. As a marketer, you must put yourself into the position of the caregiver and the senior. Understand the story is not going to be about features or cost savings that speak to your audience. It’s about empathy and understanding that a family member and the senior will find a warm, and caring place they can call home. Find the emotion tied to the story for your marketing message to effectively reach its audience.
Stories Build Relationships
Marketing at its heart is about building relationships and you can’t do that with a single interaction. The expectation that a caregiver sees one ad about a senior living facility and decides that is the place for their parent is unrealistic. Consumers are now active players in their own stories and storytelling marketing builds trust. Understanding your senior living audience and reaching out on multiple relevant channels to further the conversation is key to making a connection with your story and building a relationship.
Stories Convey Your Personality
The expression of personality in messaging when it comes to senior living is hugely important. It seems simple enough but you should spend some time considering the tone of your message. Is it welcoming? Is it warm? Does it convey what the family should expect at the senior living facility? Family and caregivers want to see and experience what differentiates you from other senior living facilities. What sets you apart from the noise of the competition?
Marketing Automation Lets You Focus on the Story
A marketing automation platform helps you focus on the story and your audience. It manages the time-consuming technical aspects and puts attention on the needs of the seniors and their families or caregivers.
Marketing automation helps manage:
- Relationship Support: With the support for the child, relative, or other caregiver involved in the choice of selecting a senior living facility, the automation can support more custom personalized messaging that better touches on these relationships.
- Appointment Scheduling: Scheduling appointments for in-person, virtual tours, or consultations and tracking the marketing story that is driving those appointments
- Multi-Community Support: Marketing for multiple locations, community, and multi-tenant support. The best marketing automation platforms like ActiveDEMAND will have time-saving features such as the ability to create new accounts from templates, cloning campaigns and automation between accounts, automatically applying branding at scale, etc.
- Personalized Messaging Across All Channels: Marketing automation can support custom messaging unique to each person who sees it so the caregiver will see a story that is personal to them and different from the personal message to the senior – without having to build separate, individual campaigns.
Conclusion
While storytelling in marketing is important for all industries, it proves to be vital when marketing for senior living. It is evident that the aspects of emotion, relationships, and personality are strongly linked to the senior living story and to reach your audience you must be able to tell your story well. Execution of your story is just as important and with a marketing automation platform, you can save time on the technical tasks and keep your focus on your seniors, their caregivers, and their story.
