Nursing home marketing involves a lot more than just plastering your brand on a billboard. Successful senior care campaigns create an online presence, engage with community members, and solidify your nursing home as a trustworthy and caring institution.
If you’re looking to maximize admissions from your latest marketing campaign, this article will have everything you need to know and advice on how to implement key strategies!
Target Audience For Nursing Homes
No matter what the business is, fully understanding your target audience is essential before executing a marketing plan. For nursing homes, the primary target audience is seniors 65 and older, but this isn’t the only important group to reach.
Oftentimes, it’s the children of senior citizens aged, 40 to 60 years old, who are making the caretaking decisions for their parents. As such, your marketing material should contain information that alleviates the concerns of this group and assures them that their parents will be in good hands.
Nursing home marketers can also find great success by appealing to medical professionals like doctors, nurses, and social workers. This secondary audience is often the ones making nursing home recommendations to the families of elderly patients.
Another important secondary audience to reach is in-home caregivers. While these caregivers can be amazing at their jobs, there is always a point at which they can’t provide the level of care needed and will propose nursing home options to their clients.
By creating different advertising material that appeals to each of these groups, you can acquire maximum brand recognition within your community.
Marketing Ideas To Advertise Nursing Homes
Optimize Your Website
Many nursing homes make the mistake of overlooking their out-of-date website in the belief that this isn’t an important factor to consumers weighing senior care options. However, first impressions are everything in marketing, and your online presence matters now more than ever in our increasingly digital world.
As we previously discussed, it’s not just seniors who are researching nursing homes. Whether it’s the children of elderly individuals, healthcare professionals, or caregivers, they frequently use their mobile devices to research local goods and services. As such, it’s key to make your website user-friendly to both desktop and mobile users with clear and easy-to-navigate menus.
Think of your website landing page as an all-in-one package for consumers looking to better understand what your nursing home offers. This means explaining your services, staffing, amenities, and all the unique features of your nursing home. It can also be useful to include an FAQ page to allow website visitors to quickly address any of their concerns.
Drive More Traffic With SEO
Having a visually appealing and informative website is essential for client conversion, but it won’t cause search engines like Google to rank your nursing home higher in their search listings.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a fantastic way to drive organic traffic to your institution’s online presence. To optimize your website, the first step is to conduct keyword research on what individuals are most likely to search for when comparing nursing home options. Relevant keywords and phrases could include things like “Nursing homes in [city name]” and “Best nursing homes [city name]”.
Once you’ve collected a thorough keyword list, add them to your website’s titles, meta descriptions, and content.
Another integral strategy for driving online traffic is to optimize your business for Google Maps. 86% of consumers use Google Maps when looking for local products and services, so don’t overlook this search engine tool!
The first step to optimizing your nursing home on Google Maps is to create a Google My Business account and claim your listing. It’s important to include your operating hours, business number, and address because Google ranks businesses that have up-to-date profiles higher. Additionally, Google Maps favors businesses with the most 4- and 5-star reviews online. While you can certainly drive 5-star reviews through good service, it can be more effective to solicit your existing client base to leave positive reviews.
Use Paid Advertising
There are a variety of paid advertising channels, both digital and non-digital, that are optimal for nursing home marketing efforts. So, let’s explore some of the best ones.
Google Pay-Per-Click Ads
It is possible to rank among the top search results through SEO alone, but it requires a lot of work and can be very difficult. Fortunately, there is a paid workaround. Google pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements will place your nursing home in the top three search listings for keywords and phrases of your choosing.
As the name would suggest, you only have to pay when users click through the sponsored link to your nursing home website. However, bidding for highly sought-after keywords can go up to $80 per click.
Social Media Advertising
Social media companies are constantly collecting data on their users’ ages, backgrounds, interests, and other key factors. Despite many people regarding this as a violation of privacy, this does allow for extremely targeted advertisements.
For example, your nursing home could run Facebook ads that appear in the feeds of adult children in a certain proximity to your facility that recently searched the terms “elderly care” or “nursing homes”.
Wellness Boards
Wellness boards are physical displays that are often placed at supermarket and retail storefronts as well as pharmacy wait areas. These wellness boards dispense sanitizing wipes from below a prominently featured advertisement.
This out-of-home (OOH) advertising medium drives impressive levels of engagement as it encourages shoppers to stop for a moment, take a wipe, and view the sponsored company.
Terraboost is a leader in this advertising medium and independent studies have shown that 88% of shoppers take a wipe from their in-store kiosks and that 50% would take a coupon or brochure to learn more about the featured business.
Nursing homes can use this advertising medium to great effect by featuring their brand at local grocery stores, retail shops, and pharmacies that seniors and their children are bound to visit.
Create Branded And Informative Content
We’ve discussed how to drive organic traffic to your nursing home’s online presence quite a bit, but there are additional avenues for growth we haven’t mentioned.
One of the most important search engine criteria is Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T). To establish your institution as a trusted educator in your field, consider writing blog posts and articles on topics relevant to senior care. These topics could have titles like “How to Choose a Nursing Home” or “Ways to Pay for Elderly Care”. When publishing these articles, make sure to include those keywords and phrases from your SEO research throughout the content to maximize your online traffic boost.
These articles can also increase your authoritativeness in the eyes of search engines if credible websites provide backlinks to them in their content. Google ranks businesses higher that have been backlinked across numerous websites. One of the easiest ways to do this is to use content formats proven to generate links, such as publishing “ultimate guides”.
Network With Your Community
Many modern marketing strategies focus on digital advertising, but grassroots campaigns that engage with community members can be a game changer for businesses based on personal connections– like nursing homes.
Here are some great community networking ideas to get you started
- Partnerships with local organizations: Institutions like senior centers, community centers, hospitals, and clinics are more than happy to partner with nursing homes as this relationship can drive mutual referrals.
- Community events and workshops: Hosting or participating in workshops related to senior care, health, and wellness can position your nursing home as a caring educator in your local community and solidify your brand image.
- Health fairs: Operating a booth at a local health fair is an easy way to connect with potential customers face-to-face.
- Open house events: Creating open house events, like “lunch and learn” sessions are a great way to bring community members into your establishment and educate them on your senior care options and unique offerings.
Engage and Connect On Social Media
Paid social media advertising is a good asset to utilize, but so is actively posting on your nursing home’s various social media accounts. By connecting with potential residents and their families, you can put a friendly face on your organization.
Your posts can include pictures of daily activities, senior testimonials, or informational posts about elderly care.
Having active social media accounts is essential when conducting paid social media advertising because interested users are likely to search for your institution on the platform to learn more.
Boost Your Credibility With Reviews And Testimonials
We’ve discussed acquiring online reviews to drive organic traffic to your nursing home, however, reviews and testimonials can also be used to foster trust with potential clients.
One of the best ways to fully utilize online reviews is to feature notable ones on your company’s landing page so it’s one of the first things potential customers see when they view your website.
Social media posts aren’t a good format to post customer reviews, but it is a fantastic format for senior resident and family testimonials. By having seniors and family members vouch for your nursing home in a video format, you can create engaging and convincing content that inspires potential customers to place trust in your institution.
Create a Patient Referral Program
Today, marketers have a wide range of advertising mediums at their disposal and often mistakenly overlook the power of word-of-mouth marketing.
Patient referral programs work by incentivizing your current client base to refer other families to your practice. You can use incentives like discounted services or even simple gift card giveaways to recruit your patients and their family members into your referral program.
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Conducting a successful nursing home marketing campaign can be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. We at Terraboost have worked with countless care centers and can provide you with key industry insights as well as a free personalized quote.
Our 120,000+ wellness boards are featured in pharmacies like CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid and supermarkets like Harris Teeter, Acme, and Stop & Shop.
If you’re interested in having your nursing home appear on an advertising network that delivers up to 8.8 billion monthly engagements, get in touch with us today!
