In the era of online businesses, Facebook ads have become a very important component of most online businesses’ marketing strategies. When you go on Facebook you will likely find a wide variety of products and services being advertised to you.
The most important thing is growing your Facebook page. You need to have a significant amount of people following your Facebook page in order to increase the success of your ads. Next, you want to offer something on your Facebook page that your competitors don’t.
If you are looking to market senior living with Facebook ads, you should keep reading to find out about how this works, and how you can implement this strategy.
Create a Facebook Page That Stands Out
You might be in charge of marketing a senior living community, and you might already have a significant presence on Facebook. If this is the case, then you need to take advantage of that presence, and set your community apart from all the other ones out there.
This is no coincidence. Facebook ads are specifically sent to a targeted audience set by the advertiser. This is why sometimes the ads that you get on your Facebook page are specific about certain things you might have been looking at recently.
Making your page stand out doesn’t have to include rocket science. It is all in the details. For example, you might choose to post resources that talk about senior health. You might also post resources for families of seniors talking about the benefits of senior living.
You want your Facebook page to be more than just a place where you post pictures of your residents. You want your Facebook page to be a place where people can go to learn more about senior living communities, and why yours is the best option for themselves or their loved ones.
Providing those resources is not only going to grow your following, but is going to make your followers more active. You will begin to see more traffic being directed to your page for those resources.
At the end of the day, the ads you run on Facebook will direct people back to your page, so ensure there is something there for them to look at first! Then you can work to design your Facebook Ad.
Organize Your Facebook Page
If you have looked at senior living pages, you might have noticed that sometimes it can seem like they have a lot going on all at once. This is a common thing across most senior living pages on Facebook. By trying to tackle so many tasks at once, they end up with a cluttered and confusing page.
To fix this what you need to do is organize your page by creating separate location pages underneath your main page. You can think about this as your main page being an umbrella that covers the different types of services and locations you have.
This is especially beneficial to senior living communities that have different locations and offer different services like assisted living, independent living, and nursing homes. Having a designated page for each one of these services or locations can help your page be more organized.
Separating your content between the different “branches” of your page will help your overall page look a lot more organized and inviting. By doing this you don’t have to give up anything that you are already doing.
You can continue to post pictures of your residents under their designated page. This is great for family members of your residents, but it might not be as appealing to people simply looking for resources on senior living. You wouldn’t want to click on an ad that directs you to a page where you have to scroll past activity schedules and pictures of residents, but no information on the community.
You want your page to be as clean and organized as possible. This will allow visitors to navigate your page with ease and find what they are looking for. By having a more organized page you will likely also increase the amount of people that want to be a part of your senior living community.
Humanize Your Brand
You want people to look at your brand and feel like they know your brand. People don’t like to feel like they are dealing with robots or a business. They want to feel like they are interacting with humans. This is especially true about senior living. Family members will want to feel like their seniors will be in good hands.
The only way to give families that reassurance is through humanizing your brand. You can do this by posting pictures of your residents having a good time. You can also achieve this by posting interviews with your staff about what it is like working within your community.
You want to make people feel like they know you, and that they can reach you if they need it. That is why having live videos with sales staff members where they answer questions about what the enrollment process looks like, and other general questions is a great marketing strategy.
What this does is give people looking at your Facebook page more information about your community in a way that makes them feel like there is a human on the other end of the screen. After a while, reading posts and articles can get daunting, and it is not the same as hearing it live from one of your staff members.
This interaction between your potential customers and your staff is what is eventually going to increase the enrollment at your senior community. You need to maximize the tools that Facebook gives you to connect with potential members and current members and their families. It is really important that you assure family members that their family members are in good hands.
Use Facebook Events
As a person in charge of online marketing for your senior community, you need to be fully aware of all of the tools available to you. You need to be able to take advantage of the tools given to you by Facebook.
One way to take advantage of the tools provided to you by Facebook is to make use of their event page. Senior living communities are constantly holding events like: fundraisers, workshops, and employee recruitment fairs. You want to make the most of these events by spreading the word.
Your Facebook page is the perfect place to spread the word about all of your events, especially fundraisers. When the goal is to raise money, you want as many people to see it as you possibly can. A great way to do this is to set up and organize a Facebook events page linked to your main page.
On this page you will be able to post all sorts of updates and information about current and upcoming events going on in your senior living community. It is a great place to advertise events because you can also take advantage of Facebook ads to advertise said event.
The benefit of having an events page setup is that you won’t have to spend as much money on ads because your audience would be people who already follow your page. This ties back to having different branches of your brand within your page. Having everything about your brand organized is going to help your audience navigate your page more efficiently.
This is something that is not very hard to set up, and can have some major benefits on the overall performance of your page and of your brand. By having an events page setup neatly it will be much easier for current and prospective members to attend events like workshops.
This will add to the overall value of your page and your brand as a whole. It really doesn’t take long to create an events page and the benefits are worth it. You should take the time to create an events page in order to improve the performance of your Facebook ads and your overall page.
Experiment With New Things
If you are a brand that has already done everything else that has already been mentioned, it might be time for you to take it a step further and try something new. There are plenty of different things that you can do that will make you stand out from your competitors.
If you have done everything on this list already, you might be ready to try something new out like starting a senior living blog. This might sound silly to some of you, but in the end this is added value to your customer that not every other brand out there is providing.
Trying something out like a senior blog ties into what was discussed earlier about making your brand stand out. It goes along with providing resources for your audience that other brands might not provide.
The main difference is that starting a senior blog will require more time and effort than simply posting links to articles about senior health on your Facebook page. This is an added value to your brand that will make your audience appreciate your brand over other options available.
Check Your Audience
Because you are looking for seniors to join your assisted living community, you likely have the audience for your Facebook ads set to show to people above the age of 60.
Although it can be useful to use the age restriction feature on Facebook ads to market your senior living community, it’s important to note that the senior themselves isn’t always the one shopping for a place to live.
This is especially true if your facility offers a nursing facility, as it will often be the family member of the senior looking for a place for their parent or grandparent to live. In this instance, it’s better to market to people who would be the child of someone in a nursing home, perhaps someone in their 30’s or 40’s.
Even though many seniors are tech savvy, there are some who are not and they may not use Facebook, but chances are their kids do. Changing the target age on your Facebook ads can really help to catch these seniors who may not see your ads otherwise.
Have Good Photos
Of course the ads you take time to painstakingly create will go nowhere if you aren’t using photos that attract potential residents to your community.
It is essential that you take the time to capture proper photos of your community. Don’t just focus on happy residents sitting and smiling, also capture photos of residents in action.
When people are shopping for a senior living community, they don’t want to find a place to sit around! They want to find community, activities, and fun. Try to capture this by running ads featuring photos from those events you’ve been scheduling.
Keep in mind that unless you are a professional photographer, you will likely want to hire someone to take photos. This is because people don’t click on ads that look unprofessional. Even hiring a professional photographer for one event could be worth the cost because of all the people it might bring to your community.
Final Thoughts
It is totally possible to successfully use Facebook ads to increase enrollment at your senior living community. Facebook allows you to be very specific when targeting ads which is a good thing when it comes to drawing in the audience you are marketing to.
At the end of the day, if you run ads on Facebook, but your page lacks organization and value, it will not translate to higher enrollment. You need to work on your page before running ads on Facebook. Then, after your page is organized, spend some time scheduling events, taking nice photos, and creating a look that people will want to click on.
If you do all of these things, chances are you will increase the number of people interested in moving into your senior living community.
Sources:
https://targetpublic.com/11-simple-tips-creating-effective-ad/
