Today’s senior living marketing leaders are tasked with maintaining occupancy with tight marketing budgets and small teams in an environment where consumer expectations have become even more complex. Since the pandemic, senior living prospects have started to rely more on online research, requiring operators to develop an omnichannel presence so prospects can contact them across a variety of channels and formats. This means marketing and sales teams now have more platforms to monitor and campaigns to develop, making it imperative for senior living communities to start incorporating automation into their strategies.

Below, we outline the specific industry challenges driving the demand for marketing automation and our best practices for implementing automation in your senior living marketing strategies.

The Challenges of Marketing for Senior Living Communities and How Automation Can Address Them

1. Results are difficult to forecast.

With multiple decision-makers, senior living communities’ sales processes can be complicated, making manual tracking very tedious. This also leads to consistency issues in lead generation and nurturing, making it challenging to forecast results.

How automation helps: Plugging in automation in different stages of the sales funnel helps bridge the gap from one sales interaction to another, making tracking conversions easier, quicker, and more consistent. With automation, salespeople in senior living communities can see how many people are in the pipeline and accurately predict results. This also helps in reviewing what’s working and what’s not with the current sales process and improving it to create a better forecasting system.

2. Leads fall through the cracks.

Since 2020, industries were already shifting to an online purchasing economy, since then, this trend has only accelerated. Today’s prospective residents and their families are no longer inclined to wait the same amount of time to get serviced by a sales team and instead expect immediate gratification. However, with senior living prospects coming in through different stages of the decision-making process, it can be very difficult to manually track concerns and provide responses within the time frame that they expect.

How automation helps: Automation lets you create multiple response flows depending on which stage a prospect is entering your sales process, allowing for the quickest turnaround on their inquiries, whether it’s just a simple inquiry on your services or a request to schedule a tour.

3. Prospects go through a long sales cycle.

In the industry, there is a big push to get everyone to the tour stage right away. When prospects get into the door or on the phone, there’s the pressure to get them into the hands of a salesperson as the first next step. However, with the senior living housing journey, some prospects aren’t at that point in the research process.  Many prospects are not the sole decision-makers and are merely “shopping” for information to provide themselves and other decision-makers with the best option possible.

How automation helps: “Soft conversions”, like RSVPs to your events or sign-ups to newsletters, can be just as important as “hard conversions” in that they keep your community top of mind for prospects — and these are only possible with automation in place. By placing automation within the different engagement touchpoints, leads can process information about your community quicker than usual, shortening the span between inquiry to decision.

The Do’s and Don’t of Marketing Automation

It’s not enough, however, to just have a marketing automation strategy — it should be a strategy that works. Here are five do’s and don’ts to creating a winning marketing automation strategy.

It’s true that clients these days want the data, but they don’t necessarily want the computer. While automation allows you to connect with prospects when there are no warm bodies to man the communication lines, it’s still important to offer prospects the option to connect with a real person. Having a live chat option available on your website allows prospects to quickly have more complex questions answered and provides an additional lead capture opportunity.

This can be as simple as putting your prospect’s name within a message that you’re sending. But you can also go deeper with this, especially during any post-initial interactions like follow-ups and re-engagement. Including evidence that you were listening to them the last time you met or acknowledging what you already know about their needs makes your prospect feel connected to you and the community.

The use of AI, like any new technology, can be tricky. One must learn its capabilities and limitations. Leverage the power of AI to help scale repetitive tasks, spark ideas, and make calculations, but make sure to combine AI with an experienced professional when it comes to complex business decision-making. This AI strategy is known as hybrid intelligence and is all about recognizing the unique talents of humans and AI when assigning roles.

Conclusion

Activating automation within your sales and marketing teams will keep you ahead of the competition and enable you to achieve your occupancy goals faster. Teams will save valuable time in their day by letting go of repetitive tasks so they can spend more time engaging with prospects to move them in the customer journey from lead to resident.

Watch the Webinar!

Interested in learning more about this topic? Watch a recording of our latest webinar with Seniors Housing News, “The Do’s and Don’ts of Marketing Automation for Seniors Housing”.

Listen to a lively discussion between Jen Lovey, Executive Vice President of Sales at Conversion Logix, John Greaves, President and Owner of Next Step Sales Management, and Allison L. Singler, EVP of Sales and Marketing at Edison Equity Residential, as they explore the state of marketing automation and AI in senior living and best practices for implementing it in your organization.

The post The Do’s and Don’ts of Marketing Automation for Senior Living Communities appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Unlock the Power of Live Chat With Gen Z Renters

Gen Z is the first truly digital generation. They’ve grown up with technology at their fingertips, giving them instant, convenient, and accessible ways to communicate. They don’t like calling you on the phone and don’t want to wait days to hear back from you in their inbox. So what’s the best way to connect with this new generation as they search for their next apartment? It’s immediate communication and engagement with live chat and virtual assistants. Here are a few reasons why Gen Z prefers online chat conversations and why apartment marketers need to incorporate these communication options in their marketing plans. 

Prioritize Convenience With Live Chat

Chatting online allows Gen Z to communicate with businesses at their own pace and convenience without having to wait on hold or be available during specific business hours. Like the Millennials before them, this generation is not used to phone calls and prefers to talk to people and businesses on their terms and online. Having spent most of their lives using text messaging and instant messaging through social media to communicate with friends and family, they find it more comfortable and natural to message a business versus picking up a phone. 

Deliver Instant Gratification With Lightning-Fast Response Times

We’ve all heard the rumors that Gen Z has the lowest attention span, willing to wait only seconds before they scroll onto the next video or jump off a website. eMarketer recently reported that Gen Z’s TikTok attention span is eight seconds, so think about how that translates into other aspects of their online lives. Gen Z values quick and real-time communication, and online chat allows for immediate responses, reducing the likelihood that they move on to a competitor and end a conversation with your community before it begins.

Account for Multi-Tasking 

Gen Z is highly adept at multi-tasking. Virtual assistants and live chat agents allow them to communicate with businesses while also engaging in other activities, such as browsing the web, working remotely, or watching videos on social media. 

Give a Safe Space to Ask Questions

Chatting online offers a more personal and less formal communication style than a phone call, which can be particularly appealing for Gen Z. They may feel more comfortable asking questions about topics like roommates, pricing, income qualification, and pet policies anonymously. The low-stakes nature of chat allows these renters to get the information they need to make a leasing decision without the social pressure of a face-to-face conversation.

Connecting With Gen Z

Incorporating live chat functionality on your website can go a long way in increasing engagement with Gen Z renters and setting your apartment community up for long-term success. However, improving communication with onsite teams isn’t the only way apartment marketers can need to level up their marketing efforts to appeal to Gen Z. This new crop of renters is spending more time on short-form video platforms like TikTok than any other generation.

To help you get up to speed on the advantages of TikTok, we have a quick 24-minute LinkedIn Live recording that answers marketers’ most popular TikTok questions. You can also explore the 5 advantages of TikTok advertising for more tips on reaching the next generation of apartment renters.

The post How to Get Gen Z Renters to Talk to You appeared first on Conversion Logix.

At Conversion Logix, we understand that a continuous marketing approach brings benefits to everyone. Driving traffic to your site, generating conversions, and analyzing where that traffic comes from lets you make immediate changes to your campaign for a better customer experience. Today, we introduce two new features to deliver successful campaigns.

Continuous Marketing Approach: 

These new solutions enhance the capabilities of our three-step approach to digital marketing, “Capture, Connect, and Convert.” The 3Cs represent the process of driving traffic, generating leads, and nurturing prospects until they convert. 

Analyzing attribution in the last conversion step shows us the customer journey and enables insights that we leverage for performance-enhancing optimizations.

Reach Your Target
Market On TikTok

TikTok rose to social media juggernaut status during the beginning of the pandemic when video consumption and social media usage were on the rise. It’s now a preeminent social network with over one billion monthly users worldwide (TikTok).

With the addition of TikTok advertising, we expand your reach across social media channels, delivering another powerful “capture strategy” for our clients. 

We’ve tested the effectiveness of TikTok advertising among a sample of student housing and multi-family housing clients and found promising results.

Our Findings:

• Expanded reach. TikTok ads delivered high volumes of impressions and quality traffic.
• Increased brand recall. We identified a lift in organic search traffic, paid search, and direct traffic for clients running TikTok advertising, indicating the effectiveness of our ads in building brand awareness.
• Higher ad engagement. TikTok ads received high volumes of clicks, video views, and video completion rates. 
• Lead generation. In our study, TikTok ads drove traffic that completed lead-generating actions in our Conversion Cloud software platform. These actions included: scheduling a tour, claiming an offer, or contacting the community.

Expand Your Marketing Mix With TikTok

Reach out to your Conversion Logix account manager to include TikTok in your campaign strategy.  If you’re new to Conversion Logix, schedule a call today, and we’ll help get you started!

Our New Virtual Assistant, Say Hello To Claire

To enhance the customer experience, engage prospects with immediate information, and reduce stress on your staff, we are introducing a new virtual assistant, Claire. Claire is a complementary addition to The Conversion Cloud and can answer frequently asked questions anytime, day or night. Pairing Claire with Live Chat further enhances the customer experience allowing a live team to answer those tough or detailed questions.  

This will be a game-changer for clients that haven’t yet made the leap to adding live chat services to their site. This chat product will enable our clients to respond to inquiries instantly during times when onsite teams may not be available to answer a call or respond to a web inquiry.

Claire can:

• Prompt engagement. The vast majority of queries are related to pricing and availability. Claire can prompt customers with frequently asked questions, increasing the likelihood of engagement. 
• Deliver instant responses. The automated nature of a virtual assistant provides immediate information to website visitors. This ensures your website visitors have instant access to support 24/7.  Many common questions, including pricing and availability, arise outside of business hours and can be immediately addressed.
• Increase lead conversions. Claire encourages prospects to schedule a tour or claim an offer after their initial chat conversation, increasing lead generation from your site.
• Gain customer insights. Identify the topics most frequently asked by your target market with real-time reporting in The Conversion Cloud.
• Fully integrate with Live Chat. Seamlessly incorporate Live Chat with your virtual assistant experience to deliver personalized responses from highly trained chat professionals.

Bring Claire to Your Website

Reach out to your Conversion Logix account manager to enable Claire as a part of your Conversion Cloud subscription. If you’re new to Conversion Logix, schedule a call today and we’ll help get you started!

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