If you’re still relying on a legacy system, you’re likely among the 40% of companies still using spreadsheets and email to transfer documents, send out alerts, and keep track of referral sources.
Not only does that drastically slow down your sales processes, but the lack of innovation also makes it increasingly hard to compete with the 68% of senior housing facilities already implementing marketing automation.
To remain competitive in today’s senior living industry, you have to innovate and adapt to the ever-changing healthcare technology landscape.
But if that isn’t quite convincing enough of the benefits of marketing automation (or over-arching platforms like a healthcare CRM), read on. We’re breaking down the benefits of marketing automation for senior living, and helping you calculate potential ROI for your community.
Benefits of Automation for Senior Living Communities
The senior living industry has been a very late adopter of a lot of healthcare technologies but specifically marketing automation.
This is understandable, since older residents tended not to understand or prefer text notifications, digital newsletters, and social media, and neither did their family members.
But as Baby Boomers slide into retirement and senior living and assisted living communities, with family members of younger generations, the reliance on continued updates through regular messages increases.
While the preferences of your residents and their family members are rapidly changing, marketing automation doesn’t just service them. It’s just as vital, if not more so, for healthcare marketers and sales professionals struggling with patient engagement and senior lead generation.
Marketing automation can help with:
- Personalizing content sent out to hundreds or even thousands of people at a time
- Scale your marketing, without scaling your team
- Reduce data entry and staff workload
- Gain greater visibility into social and referral channel performance
- Improve efficiency of your sales and marketing team
Personalizing marketing and sales content
In the past, personalized content meant individually created content. It took a lot of time, and slowed down sales lifecycles.
Today, it’s possible to send hundreds of emails and newsletters personalized to the individual with marketing automation.
With automated lead generation, you can tailor your messages to specific audiences, levels of care, interests, and their stage along the buyer journey.
For leads already on the fence and near sign up, this can help accelerate their jump to becoming a resident. For those that aren’t quite ready, are just looking, or have just heard about your community, these tailored messages helps your team nurture leads with far more human and needs-centric.
Scale your marketing, without scaling your team
Your sales reps don’t have time to send individual thank you messages, follow-ups for every download or interaction on social media, and respond to referrals from multiple channels in a timely manner. At least not on their own.
Marketing automation software allows you to schedule social media posts across multiple platforms, build triggers and email sequences for specific interactions, and build entire campaigns for multiple locations in one place.
Reduce data entry and staff workload
Rather than manually importing information from contact forms and other interactions, marketing automation does the work for you, autopopulating forms for intake, admissions, insurance, and more.
With less time spent filling out forms, initiating intake, communicating with residents, family members, and updating medical records, staff are freed up to focus on patient engagement and care.
Gain greater visibility into social and referral channel performance
One of the greatest advantages of CRM software and marketing automation platforms their analytics capabilities.
You’ll see which referral channels bring in the most amount of qualified leads in any given time, the frequency, point of contact, and historical data as well.
Increase marketing efficiency and productivity
Since senior living marketing teams are typically small and working on a tight budget, seeing every what efforts are working and what aren’t can not only improve lead generation, but efficiency as well.
Not only that, but automation, well, automates the most repetitive tasks and utilizes templates to short cut the most time-consuming work.
The ROI of Marketing Automation
Our 2019|2020 Benchmark Report– which assess CRM data from thousands of senior living facilities across the United States and Canada- shows that marketing automation is truly worth it.
Cloud-based CRM software led to:
- For independent living facilities, the number of web leads increased by 37% (overall web engagement with these facilities also increased)
- While inquiries to tour rates declined due to the pandemic, tour to move in conversions increased
- Independent living facilities received an average of 16 web forms per month, which was a 20% increase over 2019
- Assisted living facilities saw an average web form submission 10x each month in 2020, which was an increase by 26% over 2019
- Web forms made up 44% of all inquiries for assisted living and memory care facilities in 2020
- 27% of inquiries into assisted living facilities came from social media, online paid ads, and organic search results.
These results are pretty significant, considering the challenges that senior facilities (and healthcare in general) faced throughout 2020 and continue to face today.
Throughout the report, we see again and again that web forms intake increased dramatically from the year prior. This jump is, of course, impacted by COVID-19, but it’s unlikely that we’ll see a return to prior numbers in the years to come.
So, is Marketing Automation for Senior Living Worth It?
These facilities, with smaller teams and tighter budgets, were able to ramp up their digital marketing efforts to bring in far more web leads than they’d previously handled.
With our CRM, they were able to funnel those web leads into a singular channel, respond to them quickly and efficiently, and even increase tour to conversion rates.
The senior care industry has long faced the challenge of adapting to new technologies, but in order to compete today, you must consider all resources available to you.
Marketing automation is the resource that will simplify and streamline your sales processes, scale your marketing, and eliminate repetitive and time consuming tasks.
Want to learn more about marketing automation for senior living? Check it out, here.
