The goal of anyone involved in assisted living marketing is the same; find the lowest cost, least time-consuming method(s) to generate multiple sales contacts with prospective residents and family members. However, if you are in charge of assisted living marketing, you know the challenges of promoting your brand and distinguishing your community from your competitors; let’s face it, it is a dog-eat-dog world out there.
For many ALF marketers, however, they miss one of the lowest cost, most productive methods to get in front of potential residents: The web. I know, I know, you are saying but we have a web site. Wonderful. Now, who knows it exists? Can people find your website when they search for an assisted living or senior community in your area?
Let’s start out with just some raw facts:
1) Approximately 72% of all purchases are now begin online, and yes, this includes looking for your facility;
2) Contrary to popular belief, seniors are very active online searching for information and what they are interested in;
3) In almost every community in America, there are THOUSANDS of searches per year for terms like, assisted living in YOUR CITY
So let’s do a simple test.
Turn on your computer and go to Google. Type in these search terms:
Assisted Living + Your Target City
Senior Living + Your Target City
Retirement Community + Your Target City
Does your facility come up on page one for all? If so, how high? If the answer is no, then you are more than likely missing a LOT of potential residents that may not be able to find you.
WHAT DO YOU DO TO GET YOUR WEB SITE SEEN?
If you are like most marketing directors for ALFs, you are already stretched so thin on time that you are now thinking great, something else I need to do. For the novice, getting their website seen on front page of Google and Yahoo can be quite a daunting task.
Usually when people first look into this topic, they start seeing terms like meta tags, hyperlinks, keyword density, anchor text, website trust rank, page rank, argh! Who needs all of that mumbo jumbo: you have beds to fill.
So then next, the facility operator will turn to their web designer to do this for them…. I mean, the web designer’s web site says they do search optimization so this has got to work. Right? Unfortunately, that is usually not the case these days since the tools and techniques necessary to position a website at the top of Google are more specialized that than the average webmaster is able to handle. The typical outcome is that the web designer will “do their magic” and nothing happens: still nobody can find your web site.
It is at this point that most facility operators give up on this “web stuff” as just being too hard and too expensive. Fortunately for their competitors, they have just made a HUGE mistake. What some of their sophisticated competitors know is that there is “gold in them there hills” and more importantly, they have resources to turn to get the job done.
Dr. Chris Anderson is founder of http://www.AssistedLivingMarketingPro.com, a specialist in website marketing. Visit today to learn how your ALF website can dominate Google at absolutely no risk to you.