By Amy Brodie, Senior Vice President, Client Experience
Every year, many Life Plan Communities ask Love & Company to review and improve their marketing strategies to be more effective and efficient at driving occupancy and ROI. In almost all cases, these not-for-profit communities are particularly focused on making their budget as efficient as possible.
As senior vice president of client experience, I review all these plans and help my account strategists evaluate and enhance them. Despite working with a wide range of clients, three common themes really stand out in how typical Life Plan Communities can fine-tune their budgets.
I share these common themes to help senior living marketing directors prepare for the annual budgeting process.
Common Life Plan Community Budgeting Opportunities
Adjust your budgeting to think in terms of campaigns, not siloed tactics
The biggest opportunity for improving the typical marketing program is to stop thinking about channels independently. Instead, think in terms of integrated “campaigns” running throughout the year. Doing so forces you to think strategically, which is key to a strong overall ROI.
Here’s what that transition looks like: Let’s say your marketing program uses five different tactics—digital display, a Facebook campaign, print ads, a television commercial and direct mail. If your community doesn’t have a strong brand message embedded in a clear campaign, with a unified design and strategy that ties together all these tactics, your prospects are essentially seeing advertising for five different communities. That’s a waste—your advertising spend isn’t working nearly as hard as it should and could.
By taking a campaign-based approach, your prospects will see the same message, look, campaign integrated across tactics—from digital display to magazine ads to television to social media campaigns. This integration has a wonderful multiplier effect on prospect retention.
What does this mean for budget allocations for the coming year? Instead of simply assigning estimates to each tactic, independently, take time now to think in terms of organizing your tactics around campaigns typically event-based.
Invest in data integrity: In other words, train your team to use its CRM correctly
The reality is, if you want to improve your sales processes or lead generation tactics you need an accurate picture of what is and isn’t working as a foundation for decision making.
I know everyone agrees. “Garbage in, garbage out” is not a new observation. However, if you’re really looking to hone your program’s efficiency, then proper attribution when leads are being entered into the CRM is non-negotiable. It’s the critical path to improved strategies.
In particular, you need to dig deeper into your lead source data and move beyond blanket “leads to appointments” and “leads to move-ins” conversion rates. Real budget efficiency comes when you look at your cost per move-in by lead source and the percentage contribution each source makes to move-ins determines effectiveness. As every salesperson will tell you, all leads are not created equal. Some lead sources are far more likely to close than others.
This brings us back to data integrity. You can only understand your cost per move-in by lead source if you are confident your intake team is capturing and entering lead data accurately. If you have clear and reliable protocols that exist, but simply aren’t being followed, then make it a priority to ensure they are. If your reports themselves aren’t providing you the information you need (even if the team enters data correctly) then I suggest you have a trusted sales consultant review and retrain your team on basic CRM best practices. It won’t magically improve your data overnight, but it will ensure you don’t face this problem again next budget cycle.
Embrace the fact that customers are taking longer to self-educate before they get to you
Simply put, your prospects are in control of their buying journey. Like it or not, most of your leads are going to continuously research, self-educate and reinforce their decisions online. So, those prospects already interacting with you online are every bit as important as new leads.
This means ensuring your content marketing investment is adequate to provide stage-appropriate nurture and retargeting campaigns for leads that have expressed interest in your community. We consistently see lower performing marketing programs fail to digitally court leads once they receive a form fill or an event RSVP. The most cost-effective marketing programs understand that these “sales qualified leads” respond to continued attention, and eventually convert to sales.
Periodically invite fresh eyes to look at your program, even if census is strong
My last bit of advice comes directly from our clients: Every three to five years, invite new to assess your situation. Regardless of your occupancy and wait list.
It’s no coincidence or surprise that our census-turnaround success stories always involve a fresh eyes assessment of our client’s sales and marketing program. Interestingly, though, many of our strongest assessment advocates are clients who are hitting their occupancy goals.
Veteran single-site and multi-site leaders alike recognize that in today’s ever-changing world, doing things as you’ve always done them—even if it’s currently “working”—is a dangerous path. Customer expectations and buying habits are changing, the digital marketplace is changing, the competitive environment for the Life Plan Community product is changing and sometimes staff are growing overly comfortable. Any investment in inviting a trusted third party to review your sales, marketing, branding and product is well allocated; it helps you see how to better budget for the coming year and how to wisely prepare for the years to come.
If you’re entering budget season, I hope these observations help you look at your planning in a new way. If you’d like to discuss these ideas further, please contact us to schedule a time to talk—we’re always willing to be a sounding board or share ideas as you prepare your marketing budget. And if you’d like to discuss a fresh-eyes assessment as part of your budget planning, contact Wayne Langley.
