This was a guest Post I wrote for LifeBio

“I’ve got a story to tell you…”

Those words stop us in our tracks. When a family member or friend tells us they have a story to tell, we perk up. Evolution tells us stories are hardwired in our nature. We see this in drawings on cave walls. In today’s world, we see new stories from around the world, movies entertain us with elaborate stories of fantasy, drama and love. We see stories on our computers, tablets, and in what our friends share on social media.

Stories are everywhere and especially in good marketing. Even in marketing to seniors.

Let’s say you have an aging mother, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to care for her. You’re busy working and leading a professional life, and you worry because she just had a fall, only inches from tumbling down the stairs. You decide it’s time to start looking for a community that can make both your lives easier.

The first thing you do is go to the search engines and start searching for senior living in your area. You see ads and listings that say, “senior living your town”, “24 hour care”, “assisted living.” This is what you’re looking for, but it doesn’t speak to your heart.
Then you see a photo of a resident who your mother knows on the website of a community in town (better yet you read a story about her life experiences too!).  You click on the photo and you’re taken to a video of this woman. She’s telling a story about how she had some health issues and had a fall that broke her hip. She goes on about how she really couldn’t care for herself, and moved in with her daughter. Her daughter was a busy professional and wasn’t home very often. This lead her to becoming depressed and losing a lot of weight because she had no appetite. 

Finally, with the help of her children, they decided to sell her house and move her into xyz community. She was initially very hesitant about moving to xyz community because she didn’t want to leave her home. She had been in the same house for 45 years, and wasn’t ready for the change.

Within 30 days of moving to the community, she said it was the best decision she ever made. She’s with a lot of friends from town, gets to socialize every day, and is getting care her daughter could never provide. This actually has strengthened her relationship with her daughter because her daughter is relieved from the burdens of being a caregiver. She was also putting on weight because she was eating regularly and her depression faded away.

How would you feel after hearing a similar story like this?

The typical advertisements and marketing materials in senior living are dry and boring and fall into the category of “me too” advertising. All you have to do is swap out the community name and they all sound the same. It’s not until you get to the sales coordinators and an actual tour of the community do you hear the stories that changed people’s lives. Stories that can help connect and sell senior living in many more powerful ways than any other form of selling possible could.

Marketing is an extension of sales and connecting with someone on a deep level needs to happen before a sale ever happens.  Asking about someone's past life experiences is one of the best ways to really and truly connect. 
Ask yourself, what are the frustrations and daily struggles your prospects have been through? What was it that finally set the trigger loose? Was it a fall or was it more of a gradual thing?  

If you’re continually talking and asking questions, you'll always understand your prospects. 
In this internet age, there are reviews of communities with gold mines of stories. You can learn what people liked about a community, what they didn't like, and you can reflect that in your marketing materials, too.
We're all emotional creatures, and stories have been part of our existence ever since we've been drawing pictures on the walls of caves. People see stories in our industry and say, “That person is just like me, and they trusted them and they went there? Oh, okay. Well, maybe I can trust them, too.” They identify with similar struggles and challenges. It's stories that drive us to take action, and stories that drive sales and marketing.

Kevin M. Williams is the President of SeniorMarketing.com™.  SeniorMarketing.com™ increases occupancy and income for senior living communities across the country. To schedule a free search engine marketing audit, please call (888) 523-3311 or visit: ww.SeniorMarketing.com.

This is huge and the major search engines have been taking action on this recently.

Mobile searches are even higher. 50% of searches have local intent.

This is important because in senior living and senior care, everything is local. Unless you’re a luxury destination CCRC, your market is mostly local.

Especially when our prospects search for us online.

The typical way someone searches in our market is “your service + your town”.

Why this really matters to us, is search engines are giving away their top advertising spots to local businesses.

In the process they are revolutionizing the way people search for local businesses, and the yellow pages are suffering.

“I want to make a quick point about the yellow pages. There are many people claiming the yellow pages are dead. In some industries and markets maybe that’s true.

But in our industry, you can actually see them be more effective because everyone is telling people to pull out, so where there used to be 30 competitors, there’s now 15, and in our industry they’re still being used by adult children and seniors.

When you do advertise in the yellow pages, it is really important to have an ad that differentiates and generates a response. This is where the power of copywriting comes in and where the words you choose can either generate 5 calls per year or 50.”

These local business listings are free on Google. They’re called Google places. Other major search engines offer them too.

I’ve included a screenshot here and you can see how there is a difference between the pages that are claimed and those that are not.

The first two listings on this page are claimed. You can see the companies URL’s under there. The top one has a landing page, which is designed to convert leads versus just driving people to the home page. This is very important. A homepage of a website is not designed to convert leads.

I’ve highlighted in yellow the pages that are not claimed. These go to the business’s Google places page. So this is the free profile that Google sets up for you. You have to claim and verify your profile in order to have it display your own website.

If you claim it, you have much more control over what information is displayed, how you can influence where on the page your listing shows up, and can encourage people to leave reviews on the page.

Claiming these listings won’t take more than 1 hour of your time, and could drive quite a bit of traffic to your website.

It was a beautiful day, so we decided to go on a long bike ride to explore new areas.

After a couple hours and going down many side streets we were a little lost and tired. If you know anything about my sister, she’s terrible with directions. And if you confront her about it, she turns into a fire breathing dragon.

I didn’t want to get her too worked up so, as it wouldn’t help anything, we decided it would be good to grab a bite to eat.

We didn’t know the area, so we did a search on our phones for a good restaurant. On the right is a screenshot of the results I pulled up. 

These are the local search results on Google. The results with the pushpin markers next to them. This listing was about half way down the page. This wasn’t even the top result, but this cafe had 1,870 reviews and the closest competitor had nearly 200.

Can you guess which restaurant I checked out first on my phone?

When we got to the restaurant, I instantly knew what they had so many reviews.

As soon as you walked in there was a big picture with a pushpin marker that said, “we’re on the map! Leave a review.” And underneath that there was a bar code you scan with your phone which takes you to a website to leave a review.

We finally get seated, and have a great lunch. The food was amazing, and I notice how packed the restaurant was.

When the waitress came over to give us our check, she said, “Would you two liked to be entered into our monthly drawing of a free bottle of wine and dinner.” We said, “wow that’s great what do we have to do.”

All we had to do was give her our email addresses so she could send us a link to leave a review of our lunch that day.

Before she came back for me to sign the check, we both received an email and left a review on their Google places page.

This café knew that peer reviews were becoming popular, and people were using them to make decisions before making a purchase. And it worked like crazy because the place was packed.

This is something you need to embrace in your senior living community or home care agency.

Everyone reading this is given a free listing on the search engines, where you can encourage people to leave peer reviews.

Getting reviews of your community, is the most important action you can take with internet marketing if you’re doing it yourself. Embracing this one concept, can mean the difference between being the business that gets clicked on to learn more, or the business that doesn’t attract any clicks.

Have you ever purchased something from Amazon before…?

Now has your purchase decision been by reading reviews beforehand…?

Reviews are extremely powerful. Like testimonials, they let your prospects peer into what life is actually like at your community or your agency. And this is before even seeing your sales messages.

Having a proactive review generation program online can drive new leads and ultimately residents, build credibility, and stand out on the search engines.

They will also increase your rank in the search engines.

88% of consumers ‘sometimes or always’ consult reviews before making a purchase. -Reevoo,2012

Imagine having 20 or more reviews show up on Google search results when you nearest competitor has just one or 2.

Once you get up to 5 reviews on the search results, you get a golden 5 star rating instead of  a blue text link.

That’s powerful stuff!

Who do you think searchers are going to click on?

Where do reviews show up?

Like I just mentioned, reviews will show up in the search results. There’s reviews on the paid ads. Referral sites like a place for mom or caring.com are able to show these reviews. These companies represent many communities and can leverage reviews on paid ads.

You can’t necessarily do this on an individual community basis, but if you’re part of a corporation that has multiple communities, and you’re advertising one corporate URL for all of them, this is something to definitely check into.

Reviews also show up when you click into the local listings on search engines. This is important, and I want to stress again that after 5 reviews you will get a 5 star rating on your listing which stands out prominently.

Other places where reviews get displayed.

Other local listings on other major search engines, and also senior specific sites like SeniorAdvisor.com.

These site are showing up in the search results, and also get traffic on their own. It’s a good idea to diversify your efforts, In another post, I’ll explain a great and easy way to find places to get reviews.

I've been writing rather lengthy responses and got the idea to turn it into an advice column. So every week I'll be adding a new question and answer section on our blog.

This week a subscriber asks, "What is the best way to market for a non-medical home care company? What approach is the most effective with the referral sources we are looking to work with?"

This is a rather large question and it comes down to a couple things.

One, you didn't list the referral sources that you are looking to work with, so I will talk about them in general.

And two, it comes down to the marketing budget you have to work with. If you have less money and more time, then you can involve yourself in more community outreach programs and grassroots efforts. If you have more of a budget, you can get quicker results because you can afford things like direct mail and internet marketing.

As far as marketing to referral sources, there's a couple things you can do to engage them. It's important to note, however, it depends on how the client is paying.

If the client Medicare/Medicaid then you're restricted to how you can connect with doctors and hospital dischargers by anti kickback laws and stark laws. (being non-medical I don't think you have to worry about this.)

However, If the client is paying Medicaid/Medicare you essentially have to form a strong relationship with referral sources. This is where old school networking and relationship building comes into play. You can do things like invite them to lunch, bring lunch to them, or something else to get face time in front of them. (This is all labor intensive and takes time.)

Another way to stand out, especially with dischargers is to bring a CEU gift card for one CEU hour every time you make a visit. This is a sure way to stand out as many dischargers have to cover their own CEU credits these days. You can get some at http://easyceu.com/

How To Attract Private Pay Home Care Clients

If the client is private pay, (usually the case with non-medical) then you have more flexibility and depending on your state, you should forming alliances with other professionals that service seniors in your area. Since you both have a cost to acquire a new customer, this is a way for them to earn back some of that cost, and you to build a consistent flow of trusting and qualified leads.

You can create co-branded materials and introduce the alliance concept to the business owner serving seniors in your area. If you introduce this concept the right way, you can form a few of these relationships around town and really get a great source of consistent leads coming in after a little bit of upfront work. The idea is that when someone in your town needs home care, your company is the name that comes to people's minds. We feel it's a shame that when someone needs home care in your town, and they don't use you because they weren't aware of you.

If you have more of a budget to work with, this is where you can move into strategies that include internet marketing and direct mail for your home care business.

With internet marketing the most effective approach is search engine marketing including Google local profiles, Pay per click advertising, and Search engine optimization. You get your message in front of a home care prospect, the moment they need your services. Powerful stuff!

The quickest and most effective way to get on the search engines quickly is with the local business profiles and pay per click advertising. You can actually be setup on these two areas in the next few days and start attracting leads quickly.

There's some caveats though. It depends on your market and how much search volume for home care services is there, and also how much budget you have to work with.

And always…always…always… measure by the cost to acquire a new customer.

Many internet marketing companies tell people that they should measure by cost per lead. I don't know about you, but a lead has never paid me money. I have to get a customer to do that. If they're measuring only by leads, then they have an incentive to only send you leads, not customers. The quality of these leads may suffer if they have an incentive to produce just leads.

Another very effective strategy to market home care (if you have a budget) is direct mail. There's lists you can purchase of adult children who have live-in parents, adult children who purchase medical equipment, ailments, medications, etc… Most of these lists you can drill down through demographics, household income, etc…

When we do research for a new client (that has the budget for direct mail) we often times learn more about the market then many of our clients new, because of what we can find.

Obviously, there are many more strategies to market to your customers. I've given some affordable grassroots strategies, and also some effective home care marketing strategies if your company has the budget.

Leave a comment, what have you found to be effective?