Like all healthcare marketers, assisted living facilities’ marketing teams face a host of challenges that come from communicating with prospects and clients who are at a transitional period in their lives. However, assisted living facilities also face the unique challenge of addressing the needs and concerns of two distinct audiences — both potential residents and their families — while maintaining consistency and compliance across multiple channels.
It’s a tall order, but with the right marketing strategies and supports in place, assisted living facilities marketers can build meaningful connections with prospects and their families over any number of traditional and digital channels — while keeping their sensitive information completely secure.
In this blog post, we’ll share the five key marketing strategies for assisted living facilities to accomplish all that and more.
Know your audiences.
Understanding your audience is the foundation of any successful marketing campaign. Assisted living facilities face a unique challenge here, in that they have two primary audiences, only one of which are the end users of the services offered:
- Potential Residents are the first audience, and most of these will be senior citizens. Marketing materials must address their needs and concerns, from community activities and social opportunities to quality of care and health services.
- Families often play a crucial role in the decision-making process – and may likely be the decision maker as a POA. So, marketing strategies for assisted living facilities should also take into account the families’ concerns around everything from financials to the safety, well-being, and happiness of their loved ones.
The more deeply you understand both the demographics and the psychographics of your two target audiences, the more effectively you can craft a marketing strategy that will move your assisted living facility to the top of their lists.
Reach your audiences wherever they are, with multichannel marketing strategies.
Now that you know who you’re communicating with, the next question is how will you communicate with them?
In today’s digital age, reaching your audience in a meaningful way requires being present on multiple platforms. This is especially true when your two primary audiences span generations and likely have different research and communication preferences.
A strong multichannel marketing strategy uses a combination of digital and traditional marketing channels. Online channels like social media, email marketing, targeted advertising and localized landing pages can target tech-savvy seniors and younger family members.
Traditional methods, such as direct mail, print ads and local events, can more effectively reach those who are less comfortable with digital platforms. By integrating these channels, you create a cohesive and comprehensive marketing strategy that maximizes your reach.
Ensure consistency across every channel & every location.
One challenge of building a multichannel marketing strategy is ensuring that potential residents and their families are seeing consistent messaging from channel to channel. And this challenge is amplified for assisted living facilities that operate multiple locations, with individual marketers supporting each.
No matter how many channels or how many marketers, however, consistency is key to building trust and credibility with your audience — uniquely critical in healthcare-related fields, where your customers and their families are often vulnerable and scared.
So, how can you ensure your audience has a seamless experience with your brand, whether they encounter it online or offline? This is where a through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) platform becomes invaluable.
A TCMA platform (also known as a distributed marketing platform) is a solution that allows users to maintain brand consistency across all marketing channels and locations. It streamlines the creation, management, and distribution of marketing materials by giving authorized users access to approved marketing collateral and resources twenty-four-seven, whether they’re working on national or local campaigns, whether they’re posting to social media, sending out emails, ordering internal signage, or printing postcards. With the right TCMA in place it’s easy to ensure that every piece of content aligns with your brand guidelines, strengthening your brand identity and ensuring that your marketing messages are consistent and reliable, no matter where you meet your audience.
Enable self-service, minimize 1-off requests.
It can be tough for corporate marketers to field all the constant requests — for creating an asset with just their location, to creating localized social posts to manually reviewing messaging — from both corporate team members and marketing or sales reps distributed across locations. These leaders already have full plates, and the more they’re having to micromanage, the less of their own strategic goals they’re able to accomplish.
A TCMA platform goes a long way in alleviating this challenge. As we mentioned, it serves as a centralized hub for the latest marketing materials and other critical communications (such as training materials or operations updates), but that’s just the beginning. The right TCMA platform leverages modular content to enable approved users to tailor materials to specific audience segments (i.e. updating location information for local audiences, or swapping out a resident-focused text block for one that speaks more to families) — and all without the risk of diluting brand consistency. And, based on the asset, this tech can automate the review of assets that you want to triple check.
With pre-approved collateral templates for every channel — and access to production and distribution partners at their fingertips — assisted living facilities marketers have everything they need to bring every piece of their print and digital marketing strategies to life. Meanwhile, with full transparency into budget, inventory and key success metrics, leadership can rest assured the brand is in good hands.
Prioritize security & HIPAA compliance with a HITRUST certified partner.
Last, but certainly not least, marketing strategies for assisted living facilities mustbe developed with privacy in mind. Not only to maintain customer trust but because any company that deals with protected health information (PHI) is beholden to HIPAA requirements and must follow all the required physical, network, and process security measures to keep that information safe.
Often, the compliance burden gets in the way of effective, personalized, compassion-driven communication, but part of keeping customers in the know is being able to communicate sensitive information in a way that maintains patient privacy and meets HIPAA standards while also building trust, showing empathy, and reflecting a high standard of care.
This can be a real burden on companies who try to handle compliance themselves. But with a partner that specializes in the unique needs of healthcare communication — including regular HIPAA training, end-to-end data security, HITRUST certification, secure FTP storage and 100% match mailing, for starters — maintaining airtight compliance and building successful relationships with current and potential assisted living residents and their families is a breeze.
The number-one marketing strategy for assisted living facilities: Don’t do it alone.
Standout multichannel marketing for assisted living facilities involves a lot of moving pieces. But when it comes to building trust and showing potential residents and their families that you care about them and their healthcare needs, the juice is worth the squeeze.
With the right partner on your side — a partner like OneTouchPoint, whose TCMA platform, U.Connect, was built with healthcare needs in mind, and whose team is obsessed with helping brands connect with audiences through high-impact multichannel marketing strategies — these five key strategies are entirely within reach, and so are your loftiest marketing goals.
Learn more about how OneTouchPoint supports healthcare organizations like assisted living facilities. Then, when you’re ready, request a complimentary demo, and one of our experts will reach out to discuss your business’s needs — and how our team and our U.Connect platform can help.