Curating a strong online presence is absolutely vital in the modern age of assisted living marketing. In 2022, it’s not just family caregivers searching for assisted living options online; seniors themselves are becoming more internet savvy by the day. And with many senior living facilities enlisting the help of marketing consulting services to streamline their online presence, it’s vital to know how to stand out amongst a growing sea of competition.
Drawing upon our experience as a senior living marketing consulting company, here are 5 important things your senior living website design must do to successfully convert prospects into residents.
1. Highlight Benefits Over Features
Wording is a powerful but often overlooked tool in assisted living marketing. Though it’s important to tell prospects what features you have on offer, try to word them in a way that allows seniors and family caregivers to better envision what this means for them. For example, instead of stating that you offer “24 hour around the clock care,” tell families about how they will “get peace of mind” knowing their loved one is “cared for around the clock.”
This way, prospective residents and family caregivers can easily picture how each feature will impact them – their health, their lifestyle and their happiness. When copywriting for your website, simply change the stance of your sentences from “we will…” and “we can…” to “you get…” or “you will.” This will help you clearly illustrate the positive impact each feature will have on both seniors and families.
2. Provide Useful information
Your website should answer all the questions seniors and their loved ones have about assisted living and retirement – even the ones they didn’t know to ask! Because if your website doesn’t answer their question, someone else’s will. As a senior living provider, you know better than most what people are looking for in a senior living community. Adult children want peace of mind that their loved one will receive high quality care from compassionate and respectful professional caregivers, and seniors want to know how their needs will continue to be met as they age.
When developing or updating your website, take some time to write down all the questions seniors and their loved ones may need answering, and make sure your website addresses them clearly. If you’re unsure, think about the questions you get asked most on tours or in inquiries, or speak to your current residents and find out what they wanted to know before making their decision.
3. Gain the Trust of Prospects
Building trust with prospective customers is important in any industry, but as a senior living provider, it’s absolutely vital. After all, future residents are going to be trusting you with their health and wellbeing. Having some great reviews on third-party platforms like Trustpilot, Google or Facebook is an effective way to back up the claims made on your website, assuring prospective clients that you really are as caring and diligent as you claim. Ask current satisfied residents and families to leave a review of your senior living community. If your website and reviews both instill trust in prospective residents, they’re far more likely to arrange a visit.
4. Offer a Responsive Senior Living Website Design
When it comes to assisted living marketing in the modern day, every second counts. Your prospective residents have a world of information at their fingertips, and if your website can’t grab their attention in a matter of seconds, they will go elsewhere. Therefore, ensuring your site loads quickly and is well optimized for use on a range of device sizes is one of the simplest yet most effective ways to prevent the loss of prospects at the first hurdle.
This should be a top priority, because even if your content is excellent, answers all the right questions and is beautifully trust-building, it’s all for nothing if prospects are immediately driven away by slowly loading pages or poor senior living website design choices. Bear in mind, too, that many seniors aren’t especially internet savvy – so keep your website clean, simple and easy to navigate, ensuring that all the key pieces of information like rates, lifestyle options and floor plans are easy to locate.
5. Portray Quality and Professionalism
Part of your assisted living marketing strategy should be connecting with a reputable marketing consulting company who can effectively address each of the areas we have covered and more. Your senior living website design should include professional snapshots of your facilities, and a sleek layout that clearly highlights the key features and benefits your senior living facility can offer. It should also include regular calls to action, encouraging prospects to arrange a visit or call.
Treat your website with the same consideration as any of your traditional assisted living marketing materials. If you were creating a brochure, would you settle for Polaroid instant film shots, or would you invest in professional SLR photography? Would you settle for cut-and-pasted, generic text, or would you want a seamless, professional layout that highlights your community’s unique strengths and leads readers through the pages and panels easily? In 2022, your senior living website is at the forefront of your assisted living marketing, so it’s worth the investment.
What is the Next Step?
The points we have covered highlight the basics of website development for assisted living marketing. Focusing on these 5 core elements is a strong starting point, but enlisting the help of a marketing consulting company is an excellent investment to skyrocket patient census even further.
With specialist marketing consulting services, you can also address vital technical aspects of website performance, like developing an effective senior living facility SEO strategy. To find out more about our marketing consulting services including both senior living website design and senior living facility SEO, arrange a consultation today.