visual aids in senior living marketing

Tips On Using Facebook For Senior Living Social Media Marketing

Senior living social media marketing, is one of the most effective ways to spread awareness about your senior living community. In doing so, you provide your audience with insight into your facility. This is because decision-makers will often look through social media pages; to not only find the information they’re looking for, but also to get a sense of what other people think about your facility as well as how you engage with decision-makers. As for what social channels you should focus on, Facebook is arguably the best way to reach your audience. This is because Facebook not only has over two billion users, but because 75 percent of American adults between the ages of 18 and 49 use Facebook, which means you’re more likely to reach the family members who are in charge of finding a senior living facility for their loved ones.

Keeping this in mind, the following are a few senior living social media marketing tips to help strengthen your efforts to reach your audience and to engage with them via Facebook:

1. Showcase Your Personality

Besides delivering information about your community, you’ll also want to showcase the personality of your community. This is done through the tone you use and the type of content you post. Showcasing your personality is important because it makes your community more engaging for potential prospects.

2. Use Real Pictures Of Your Property And Your Residents

People tend to be attracted to visual content. Pictures of your community can convey much more about what it’s like to live there than words can. Facebook is a great place to share pictures of your property and residents that will have a real impact on your audience. Additionally, people will be more likely to share visual content, thereby helping to drive awareness of your community. Just make sure to use actual pictures of your property and residents and not stock pictures. As this will feel inauthentic and will hurt your trust.

3. Give Your Residents A Voice

Instead of constantly trying to convey the message that residents are happy and active in your community, let your residents deliver the message themselves. Post testimonials from actual residents in your community. Even something as simple as a quote from a resident and their picture can impact a person’s impression of your organization. Your audience is much more likely to believe what actual residents have to say about your community over what you have to say about it, after all.

4. Promote Events And Activitiessenior living social media marketing 2

Keep your followers up to date with all community-related events and activities. Posting updates that include the dates and times help keep your audience informed about what’s going on in your community. It also gives decision-makers the opportunity to see what kinds of events and activities you typically hold.

5. Be Helpful To Your Audience

Facebook is a social channel, which means it’s not just about delivering information to your audience. It’s also about engaging with them in a two-way conversation. As such, make sure to address any questions, concerns, or feedback that’s left on your page; in a polite, friendly, and helpful manner. The more helpful you are, the better it will reflect on your senior living community.

6. Post Content That Is Informative And Relevant

Facebook is a great way to nurture leads through the buyer’s journey by posting links to content. This content can be from your blog or even from other relevant blogs on other high-quality, non-competing websites. Since the buyer’s journey isn’t linear, make sure that you post content that addresses all three stages of the buyer’s journey:

  • Awareness – At the awareness stage, people are still identifying what their pain points are. Content that addresses common challenges to finding the right senior living community (such as budget, help with activities of daily living, location, staying active, and more) help address the awareness stage.
  • Consideration – Once they are familiar with their pain points, they will begin looking for specific solutions. Post content that highlights potential solutions to those challenges and how your community is able to provide such solutions.
  • Decision – At this point, people will know exactly what they’re looking for and will be deciding on the community that best suits their loved one’s needs. Content that helps convince your prospects that your community is the best option can include testimonials, virtual tours, ebooks, and more.

Similar Article: 4 Tips for Marketing Senior Living Communities

7. Use Relevant Hashtags

When posting content or comments to Facebook, adding relevant hashtags helps to categorize what you’ve posted. Doing so can make it easier for interested people to find your content more easily. In doing so, helping to drive awareness of your community on various social media platforms. This includes not just Facebook but also Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus, and Pinterest.

8. Listen To Social Conversations About Your Brand

There are plenty of social media tools available that allow you to track mentions of your community. This allows you to get an overall idea of what people think about you since you can monitor reviews on Facebook as well as general comments about your community. Not only can you get a sense of your reputation this way and find areas that need to be addressed (in the event that there are similar complaints about specific things), but it gives you a chance to find opportunities to engage with the people who are talking about your brand.

9. Drive Conversions Using CTAs

Although your audience can do its own research using the content you post on Facebook, they still need to be encouraged to take action. Use CTAs (calls-to-action) to encourage potential prospects to take specific actions, such as opting in to your email newsletter or calling your community to set up an appointment.

Facebook can be an incredibly effective way to inform your audience about your senior living community and to drive conversions if you know how to leverage it properly. These are nine senior living social media marketing tips that will help you do just that.

17 SEO Myths
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Figuring Out Your Bounce Rate Benchmark

When it comes to your website, it’s important to monitor how it’s performing. Tracking performance allows you to adjust different tactics. Thereby ensuring that you have the best chance of attracting high-quality leads and converting them while they’re exploring your site. One metric that you should be sure to monitor is the bounce rate. However, the bounce rate benchmark isn’t as easy to read as you might think.

What Is The Bounce Rate?

A “bounce” occurs whenever someone who has visited your webpage leaves the page without engaging further. This is generally seen as a bad thing since visitors who leave without engaging may not be interested in your content, may have a poor first impression of your website, or did no0t find what they were looking for. A bounce can be triggered when a visitor returns to their original search results, closes their browser, stays inactive on your page and the session times out, clicks on an outbound link, or enters a new URL into the address bar.

While a high bounce rate might indicate that there’s something wrong with your page (for example, it’s not loading fast enough, resulting in visitors returning to their search results in frustration), it’s not always a bad thing. In some cases, certain pages simply have naturally high bounce rates. For example, contact pages often have high bounce rates. This is not because the visitor is leaving as a result of a negative experience — instead, they may simply be using the contact information they’ve found to reach you. With that in mind, you’ll want to set a different bounce rate benchmark for different types of pages.

Setting Your Bounce Rate Benchmarkbounce rate benchmark2

Setting a bounce rate benchmark is important. When you monitor your bounce rate of certain pages, you’ll want to be able to identify if the bounce rate is too high or not. A bounce rate under 40 percent is considered normal, while a bounce rate between 20 and 30 percent is excellent. However, there are other factors to consider as well. Sometimes a 50 percent bounce rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. With that in mind, the following are some of the factors you’ll need to consider when setting your bounce rate benchmark for different pages on your site.

Similar Article: Improving User Experience With Good Website Navigation Design

The type of page

As previously mentioned, some pages are going to have higher bounce rates than other pages because of the type of page that they are. Content-based pages, such as blog pages, tend to have higher bounce rates. A visitor might spend some time reading a long-form blog post and then leave after finishing. Unfortunately, this can trigger a bounce if all they did was read the post. But this isn’t necessarily a negative thing — if they stayed on the page and finished reading the entire post, then there’s always a chance they’ll come back to your site in the future.

Additionally, content pages are often visited via links posted on social media. This means that someone who came to your site, via a link to your blog that you posted on Facebook may go back to your Facebook page after they’re done. Just because they didn’t engage further on your website, doesn’t mean that they’re not engaging on your social pages afterwards. In addition to content-based pages, reference pages tend to have high bounce rates as well. For example, FAQ pages, form submission pages, and sales confirmation pages.

The device used

The device the user is on affects the bounce rate as well. People using a desktop are more likely to engage with a webpage that they are visiting because they have more time. Mobile users tend to be in more of a hurry and are more likely to bounce as a result.

The origin of the traffic

Knowing what channels your traffic is coming from is helpful since the origin of the traffic can affect the bounce rate. Visitors coming to your site from social media pages tend to go back to the social channel they came from. It’s why social media bounce rates are usually two to three times higher than bounce rates from other channels. The highest bounce rates come from display ad traffic. As far as the lowest bounce rates go, they tend to come from referral and email traffic. This is because visitors coming to your site from a referral or email link, are more likely to have an existing interest in your brand and are more likely to continue engaging on your site.

Although bounce rates are an excellent metric to track in order to monitor your website’s performance, it’s important to understand the factors that contribute to your bounce rate. Understanding why the bounce rate is what it is will make it easier to judge the performance of your pages.

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Internet Marketing 1

Evaluating Your Internet Marketing Strategy

It’s not only the beginning of a new year, it’s the beginning of a new decade. So what better time to update your internet marketing strategy than now? If it’s been a while since you’ve evaluated your marketing strategy, then it’s time to do so. Even if your marketing efforts have been effective, there’s no reason why they can’t be improved on. The following are five ways that you can update your internet marketing strategy in 2020:

1. Update Your Web Design

Your website design will always be one of the most important aspects of your internet marketing strategy. It’s the foundation from which all of your marketing efforts depend on, after all. If visitors come to your website and it’s difficult to navigate or not aesthetically pleasing, it will leave a poor first impression of your company. Consider the last time that you updated your web design. If it’s been longer than a year, then you may want to consider re-evaluating your website in the event that it could use an update.

Pay attention to how easy it is to navigate. You should make sure that there are clearly marked links to the most important pages of your site on your homepage. Add a search feature to make it easier for visitors to find what they are looking for. Check to see if all of your links are working. Make sure every page loads quickly. These are all important to a successful web design. You should look at competing websites as well to get an idea of what’s working and what isn’t. When it comes to the aesthetic of your site, remember that what may have been popular a few years ago may be significantly outdated tomorrow. These days, clean, elegant, and minimal web designs are preferred.

2. Expand Your Content Strategy

A successful content strategy is one that produces a variety of different types of content. You may be running a successful blog on which you post new articles several times a week, but there are other content creation tactics that you should consider employing in order to improve results. For example, writing guest blogs for companies within your industry that you’re not competing with directly can help to build your audience as well as increase brand authority. If you’re not creating video content yet, then you should begin doing so. Video content is more easily consumed by people, especially those on mobile devices, making it an important component of any modern content marketing strategy.

Learn More: 5 Ways to Update Your Internet Market Strategy in 2020

3. Improve The Effectiveness Of Your Email Marketing StrategyInternet Marketing 2

Because of how old email marketing is, some people may think that it’s an outdated strategy in itself. This is a mistake — email marketing can still be very effective if you do it right. You just need to make sure that your email content can’t be mistaken for spam. The best way to ensure that your email marketing efforts are effective is to use the data you have on your subscribers to segment your email list. This will allow you to send out more relevant content, thereby allowing you to nurture both leads and customers more effectively. You should also begin performing A/B tests on your emails. This will help you pinpoint certain elements (for example, the types of CTAs or titles that you’re using) that result in the best open and conversion rates.

4. Find More Ways To Improve Your Conversion Rate

Be sure to monitor your conversion rates over time. You can identify ways to improve your conversion rate as well by testing different elements. For example, use conversion rate optimization to test images, webpage layouts, CTA buttons, and more to identify what visitors prefer. For example, you might find that a blue CTA button converts more visitors than a red CTA button despite the page layout and content being the same.

5. Continue Leveraging Social Media

Social media is an incredibly cost-effective way to engage directly with your audience. As such, it’s the perfect tool for building relationships, promoting content, and even managing PR. If you’re only using social media to promote content, consider leveraging social media to engage your audience in other ways. For example, begin contributing to discussions that your followers are having. Hold contests on social media to encourage followers to engage with each other. Use social media to collect valuable feedback from your customers. You may also want to re-evaluate your social media strategy to determine if your audience is using any other channels other than the ones you’re on. You want to have a presence wherever your audience is, after all.

As effective as your internet marketing strategy may currently be, you should always be on the lookout for ways that you can improve it. These are five areas that you should focus on when evaluating and improving your internet marketing strategy for the new year.

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10 Best Digital Marketing Podcasts in 2020

Marketing strategies constantly change and evolve every year. Therefore, it’s important that you stay up to date on all of the best digital marketing podcasts, and latest marketing trends. Doing so can give you good ideas on how to improve your marketing strategy. So that it doesn’t grow stale. While keeping up with the latest marketing trends may seem like a challenge, it can be easier if you know where to look — or listen. Podcasts are becoming an incredible resource for all kinds of information, especially when it comes to online marketing. The following are ten of the best digital marketing podcasts that you should be sure to check out: 

1. Duct Tape Marketing

Duct Tape Marketing is a podcast that has been around for the better part of a decade. The podcast covers a number of digital marketing topics. From organic SEO to word-of-mouth marketing and more. Likewise, host John Jantsch, brings well-known guests onto his podcast. Including the likes of John Lee Dumas and Neil Patel. As a result, these conversations contain helpful advice for interested listeners. Moreover, Duct Tape Marketing is particularly useful for beginner and medium level marketers.  

2. Marketing School 

The Marketing School podcast is unique in that it’s a daily podcast that’s only ten minutes long. Easy to consume and a great way of obtaining helpful advice. Considering that the hosts are well known for their marketing acumen (it’s hosted by Neil Patel and Eric Siu), Marketing School is well worth tuning into eveBest Digital Marketing Podcast 1ry day. 

3. The #AskGaryVee Show 

Gary Vee is a New York Times bestselling author, motivational speaker, and entrepreneur who gained popularity with his YouTube series. Consequently, his podcast, the #AskGaryVee Show, is a spin-off of that series. Going over lots of marketing tips as well as diving into emerging marketing trends. Gary Vee also answers questions that his listeners submit. As a result of using the #AskGaryVee hashtag on every podcast. 

4. Marketing Scoop by SEMrush 

SEMrush is known for their knowledge of digital marketing. As a result, they launched their podcast to help share this knowledge in an easy-to-digest way. The first season focuses mostly on SEO and PPC. Their second season covers news, trends, and discussions with industry leaders. All of which focusing on content marketing, SEO, and more. Some of the guests in the past have included Jim Banks, Barry Schwartz, and Larry Kim. 

5. Everyone Hates Marketers 

Everyone Hates Marketers was launched by Louis Grenier, the Content Lead at Hotjar, back in 2017. His goal was creating a podcast, that would help inform listeners on how to market the right way. Similarly, encouraging them to avoid manipulative tactics. Which included, interviewing successful marketers who avoid using “buzzwords” and focus on telling the truth.  

Similar Article: Types of Digital Marketing Strategies Your Business Should Use

6. The Mad Marketing Podcast 

The Mad Marketing podcast is hosted by Marcus Sheridan, one of the partners of HubSpot, and the founder of River Pools and Spas. The podcast focuses mostly on SEO and content marketing and is a great resource on those topics. It’s an easy listen as Sheridan is a entertaining host. Incorporating personal stories from his career into his podcasts. 

7. Marketing Over Coffee 

Marketing Over Coffee, hosted by Christopher S. Penn and John Wall, focuses on the latest digital marketing tactics and techniques. As a result, this weekly podcast is an excellent way to stay up to date. Conversations ranging from social media marketing and email marketing to copywriting and SEO marketing.  

8. Seeking Wisdom  

Seeking Wisdom is a podcast created by Drift. Featuring conversations, between David Cancel, the CEO of Drift, and Dave Gerhardt, the host. Each podcast spending about 20 minutes on a conversation between the two men over coffee. Leadership principles and the process of building Drift, are among some of the discussed topics of the podcast.  

9. Growth Marketing Toolbox 

The Growth Marketing Toolbox is a podcast hosted by Nicholas Scalice from Earnworthy.  Focusing on exploring the newest marketing tools and technology being used within the marketing industry. Similarly, Scalice himself is an expert in landing page design, conversion optimization, and A/B testing. In short, this a podcast is worth listening to.

10. The Marketing Companion 

The Marketing Companion is hosted by Mark Schaefer and Tom Webster, combining over 50 years of shared marketing experience and expertise. It’s an on-demand podcast that is incredibly entertaining. Having seven years worth of podcasts currently available, there’ll be plenty to listen to. 

In conclusion, these are some of the best digital marketing podcasts available. Retaining insightful and invaluable information when it comes to finding ways to improve your own marketing strategy. 

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Cornerstone Content & Why You Need It

As you likely know at this point, the success of your inbound marketing strategy depends significantly on your content strategy. Your content strategy, however, probably consists of several different facets. As you plan your content, it’s important to understand that not all content provides the same value to your strategy. Some content is much more valuable to your marketing strategy than other types of content. The most important of this content is known as cornerstone content. It’s useful to understand what cornerstone content is and that you implement it on your website.

Cornerstone ContentWhat is Cornerstone Content?

Cornerstone content is the best and most important content found on your website. Out of all the content you create, this is the content that you want to rank highest in search engines. It provides new visitors with an overview on important topics that are relevant to your business. For example, cornerstone content for a roofing contractor might include an article, about the different types of materials that can be used in a roof installation. Or how to tell when your roof needs to be replaced. It can also include an in-depth breakdown of services offered by your company and when they might be needed.

As such, cornerstone content can take the form of a blog post or a webpage. Cornerstone content is generally found at the top of your funnel. Since it provides visitors with a thorough introduction to a topic, it doesn’t need to be gated.

The Benefits

The following are some of the benefits of creating and implementing cornerstone content onto your website:

  • Increase your brand awareness – Your content is more likely to be found by new visitors, who are looking to educate themselves about certain topics. Because your content provides visitors with an introduction to certain information, it should help to drive awareness of your brand as a result.
  • Create a positive first impression on visitors – People who first arrive at your site are more likely to do so via your cornerstone content. If the information is helpful and insightful, then you will leave a good first impression. This will encourage them to continue exploring your site and to read other content.
  • Earn natural links – Cornerstone content is more likely to earn links from other respectable sources. As a result of being a good source of information for people who are new to the topic. As such, cornerstone content is more likely to earn traffic as a result of external links.
  • Drive relevant web traffic – Create what is relevant to your brand, then the people who search for the topics you’ve focused on are more likely to be part of your target audience.
  • Build brand authority and trust – If what you create is of high quality, it will help to build brand authority, making it easier to earn trust from new visitors.
  • Repurpose into other types of content – Because cornerstone content is a long-form introduction or overview of a topic, you can repurpose it into other types of content, such as smaller blog posts.

How to Create What You Need

As important as cornerstone content is, creating it is a simple process. The following are some of the basic steps you can take in order to create what’s needed for your website:

  • Identify main keywords – Do keyword research to determine what the main keywords you want your website to rank for. Use these keywords to form the topic ideas for your content.
  • Write long-form content – Cornerstone content should be more in-depth pieces of content that provides readers with highly-informative material. Content that is impressive in both quality and scope is more likely to be linked to. Make sure that when you begin crafting that it’s well-developed and comprehensive.
  • Connect related content – Link your cornerstone content to other pages and other content on your website that’s relevant. Keeping it interconnected will help boost your SEO as well as make it easier to keep visitors on your website.
  • Optimize – Make sure you also use proper keywords in your headers, meta tags, titles, and URLs.
  • Make your content accessible – It should be easy to find your cornerstone content. Even if new visitors don’t find it via a search, they should be able to find it when on your website. It’s why you should link to it from your homepage.

When it comes to your content strategy, the importance of having this information on your website is essential. It is the foundation that will help to drive the success of your content marketing strategy in general.

market research strategies

7 Market Research Strategies You Should Implement

When it comes to market research strategies, the more you know about your target audience, the more effective they will be. The biggest mistake you can make is assuming you know who your audience is and that you understand what their needs are without doing the proper market research. Not only could you be mistaken, but audiences evolve over time. This means that even if you do have a firm grasp of who your audience is at the moment, this can change in the future. It’s why you need to continuously do market research so that you can keep up with who your audience is. With that in mind, the following are seven market research strategies that you should use to better understand your audience and what their needs are:

1. Send Out Customer Surveys

One of the easiest ways to collect information about your target audience is to send out surveys to your customers. Basic NPS surveys can give you a good idea of what they think about your products and services and give you more detail about what they liked and didn’t like. This will give you a better understanding of whether you’re meeting the needs of your audience or not.

Of course, NPS surveys aren’t the only type of surveys you can use. They are certainly helpful and easy to complete, but you might want to consider sending out surveys through the mail, asking website visitors to do more in-depth surveys on your website, or even performing telephone surveys.

2. Perform Customer Interviews

Contact customers and request personal interviews. These can be in person or over the phone. When performing a personal interview, make sure that your questions are unstructured and open-ended questions. When you first contact a customer, do so with the intention of scheduling an interview in the future and not performing one on the spot as they are more unlikely to do this. Incentivizing a customer to take the time to do an interview may be a good idea as well, just make sure that by doing so, you’re not affecting how they answer your questions.

3. Hold A Focus Group

A focus group can be an excellent way to find out what customers think about your brand. During a focus group, a moderator will ask a series of scripted questions to a group of customers at a neutral location. The conversations that take place are videotaped so that you can review them and learn about what your customers think.

4. Observe Your Customers

It’s worth noting that customers may give answers in focus groups, interviews, and surveys that conflict with their actual behavior. It’s why you should consider observing customers in action. You can do this by recording customers in your store to see how they behave. Also, try inviting customers to try out products or services and record them (with their permission of course) so that you can see how they interact with your product in person.

Similar Article: Simple Ways that Small Businesses Can Use Data to Build Better Customer Relationships

5. Monitor Your Competition

You can learn a lot about your audience by reviewing what your direct competitors are doing. Routinely check out the content they’re posting on their website, their press kits, their advertisements, and their social media activity. Doing so can provide you insight into how they are positioning themselves and what kind of audience they are targeting and engaging with. This should also provide you with some useful information in the form of what their weaknesses and strengths are that you can apply to your own marketing efforts.

6. Monitor Discussions About Your Brand

Customers will often talk about your brand without you even realizing it. You can use a variety of tools to track mentions across social media channels. This allows you to identify when people are talking about your brand and what they’re saying about it. You could even join in on conversations to ask people follow-up questions to their comments.

7. Join A Trade Association

Joining a trade association can be quite useful. It provides you with access to information about your industry, making it easy to keep up with the latest trends and market shifts. Not to mention that you’ll have access to networking events and conferences. There, you can glean all kinds of information about both your industry and your audience.

By better understanding your audience, you will be able to keep up with their needs and improve your products and services to meet those needs. Use these seven market research strategies to stay up to date with who your audience is and how their needs are evolving.

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