Practical Strategies to Optimize Your Senior Living Website for Lead Generation

In today’s highly competitive senior living market, simply having a beautifully designed website is not enough. To truly stand out and convert prospects, your website must offer an engaging, informative experience that speaks directly to the unique needs and desires of today’s discerning senior living buyers. 

In a recent Senior Housing News Webinar, our Executive Vice President of Sales Jen Lovely, joined Hickey Marketing Group’s Director of Creative Advertising, Daniel Hickey, and Edison Equity Residential’s Executive Vice President of Sales, Allison Singler, to discuss the secret sauce behind top-performing senior living websites. 

To discover what they shared, click the video to watch the full recording or scroll to read a summary of the key takeaways.

How Today’s Buyers Have Evolved

Before diving into practical strategies, the group of senior living experts talked about how today’s buyers have evolved.

Allison, whose team focuses on new developments and marketing active adult communities, mentioned that senior living community “buyers” are no longer in the market just because it’s a need — for some, it’s a want-based move to change their lifestyle. This means that they start their research a lot earlier, making the buying process longer than usual. They go to a community’s website, look for the information that they need, and then decide if they want to connect or not. If your community’s website does not offer the data that these buyers are looking for, they might go elsewhere. Or, they might connect and it ends up as a lead that’s not a fit for your community. This is why Allison’s team has started putting prices on the website.

Allison explains, “Let’s be transparent about what it costs so we can drive the right leads to your community and not have your salespeople waste their time with people who aren’t able to move in due to price.”

Senior living prospects wanting instant gratification aligns with another observation that Jen mentioned in the webinar. She explains that since these prospects are not yet ready to convert when they start researching, it is important that websites have information that’s readily available and easy to find. On top of that, websites must also have different conversion points, such as newsletters, brochures, or in-person events, where prospects can provide information easily when they decide to convert.

The Secrets of Top-Performing Senior Living Websites

Your website should reflect the reality of today’s modern senior living audience. Allison advises getting to know how your target audience perceives themselves and using imagery that reflects the kind of life they want to live through retirement. Allison suggests asking yourself the question, “How do we build a website where our prospects can see themselves in that community?” For example, in the case of active adult, the target audience imagines themselves as younger than they are, and may be more likely to connect with your website if it features imagery of younger-looking seniors.

In addition to the imagery, however, your website should showcase how your community solves a prospect’s pain points. Jen expounds, “You’ve got to solve a pain point. For example…maybe [a prospect is] looking at downsizing and moving into an active adult community. Maybe one of [their] main sticking points is [they are] tired of cooking three meals a day, tired of cleaning the house, tired of doing yardwork. We need to make sure that whatever population we’re addressing and whatever level of care we’re addressing, we’re solving those pain points, and [prospects] need to be able to see that pretty quickly on a website.”

Allison adds, “Especially in this active adult, active living, they are wanting to make a move for a different lifestyle. They want to see something on your website that tells them a story where they can see themselves living there. When we look at our website, we look at how to paint that picture for them, especially when we’re in the pre-lease stage, when we’re not open, and we don’t have a lot of examples of our residents doing things in our community right now. We have had to be creative on that, [showing] the benefit of living in this community because of what you get in the surrounding areas, the culture, and the overall experience.”

Of course, there will be multiple communities addressing the same paint points and offering the same kind of lifestyle. With so many options, prospects will start seeing websites as “cookie-cutter and pretty much the same” so it’s important to stand out from the rest. Jen emphasizes, “Address how you differ from someone else.”

Daniel weighed in on how exactly you can do that. Here are his tips:

1) Break any misconceptions about senior living on your website. Daniel explains that sometimes, there’s a certain amount of guilt that comes with shopping for senior living because of the stigma about “putting parents in a home.” When marketing services like assisted living, let your website show what assisted living really means and how it makes their parents’ lives better. Articulate which activities they can enjoy, what kind of food they will be served, and what type of community they will belong to.

2) Identify your top 5 reasons to convert and include these on your homepage. To help you stand out, Daniel recommends providers identify the top five reasons prospects convert into move-ins. One way to do this is to think about your greatest selling points on tours. What are the five most important and memorable reasons prospects choose your community? Leverage copy, imagery, and video to communicate these selling points on the first page of your site. Showcase an auto-play minute-long video about your community on the homepage. An autoplay video can be a great way to capture attention on your homepage and communicate important details about your community through visual aids and storytelling. This can also positively impact your rankings in search engines. Daniel explains, “When it comes to web rankings, when people stare at your website for a full minute on the homepage because they’re watching a video and they go to a competitor’s website and they [only] spend 20 seconds there, that’s a big indicator to Google that your website is more attractive and more interesting than the other.” 

3) Use a global sidebar with the same call to action on every page. Shoppers everywhere have been so used to e-commerce sites where every product page looks the same, making it easier for them to know where to click to zoom in on an image, add an item to their cart, and pay at checkout. Having a global sidebar mimics that behavior so your website prospects can easily access your top three call-to-actions (he suggests “schedule a tour”, “free needs assessments”, and “subscribe to newsletter”) and convert when they’re ready, regardless of which page they’re on. This also means your other conversion tools and contact information, such as phone number and email address, must be visible on every page of your website.

4) Be SEO friendly to enable your brand to rise on top of search results. Daniel admits that the term SEO brings marketers back to a time when “people were trying to trick Google for money.” But these days, Google has become so much smarter that SEO has become about having content that’s “honest, goes above board, and good for the people we are serving.” As people’s relationship with voice search has evolved, their queries have become more of a full question format, and your website’s individual pages should be able to answer those specific questions. For senior living, this means having one page per service you provide so it’s easier for Google to pull up specific pages that answer the usual questions such as, “What is memory care? What is assisted living? What is independent living?”

This also means creating constant content. Google doesn’t want to rank a site that was set up, gone live, and then left alone. Establish your website as a thought leader in different realms around your industry. One way you can achieve this is to write articles that don’t just talk about your services but also add value for the families and the people searching for senior living communities. Pay attention to what’s going on in your industry and write about it.

Data Analytics for Informed Decision-Making

These days, you shouldn’t be relying on gut feelings or an overall impression of how busy your sales team is to gauge website performance. With so many sophisticated tracking tools out there, senior living marketers have the opportunity to track website success in real time and definitively tie back lead activity to website updates.

Another key element to ensuring you have the data you need to sustain a successful lead generation strategy is to connect your website activity to your CRM system. This connection allows you to answer important questions like, “How many site visits does it take to convert to a tour? How many tours does it take to lead to a move-in?” This then allows you to make decisions about how to encourage prospects and leads to meet that site visit number or how you can easily convince them to book those tours so they eventually convert to a move-in.

Optimize Your Website Now and Maximize Your Senior Living Leads Pipeline

Having a well-designed website is just the beginning for senior living communities. To generate high-quality lead results, we must meet the evolving needs of today’s buyers and optimize senior living websites accordingly. This means offering transparent information, solving pain points, and standing out from the competition. By incorporating strategies like showcasing differentiators, using engaging content, and leveraging data analytics, your website can become a powerful tool for attracting the right leads and ensuring long-term success. 

Ready to generate more leads from your website? Conversion Logix can help you! Schedule a call with us today to learn more about The Conversion Cloud®, our suite of lead-generating website applications. 

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