There are an estimated 30,000 plus senior living communities in the United States and, according to Statista, “by 2050, it is estimated that over a fifth of the population in the United States will be 65 years or older, compared to only 15.6 percent today.”
There’s no doubting the power and potential of senior living franchises. The market value for 2021 was approximately $87.4 billion in the United States alone. Clearly there is a lot of opportunity for you and your organization to grow!
Let’s see how HubSpot can help.
The senior living industry is one that touches many families, and one that is both healthcare and hospitality, with the latter taking precedence in recent years. From traditional facilities and care, including home care, memory care, assisted living, and skilled nursing, to luxury retirement facilities offering spas, salons, and 5-star dining, each presents their own unique set of challenges.
The industry and consumers you serve are more technologically savvy than ever before. They are navigating themselves through the buyer’s journey. In 2021, 67% of that journey took place online which was a significant jump from 2019 when just 23% of the buyer’s journey was digitized.
Senior Living Growth Challenges
Senior living companies are faced with a number of other challenges including building enough awareness around their brand in a sea of online competitors. Many companies also struggle in the area of alignment with sales, marketing, and operations on different pages. And, more often than not, the processes and automation tools used by senior living companies and facilities are lacking the automation tools needed to close sales as well as improve customer experience.
Awareness Challenges
Today, families are looking for as much information as possible online before deciding to tour a facility. Therefore, it is key that your company stays on top of content delivery, including pricing which is often hidden. Because the market is oversaturated, your website needs to be top of the line; there has to be consistency of brand to encourage trust, and you must make sure you are being seen where people are looking.
Alignment Challenges
Alignment is also a big challenge in the senior living industry. Because many companies struggle to keep sales, marketing, and operations on the same page, many leads slip through the cracks. The Director of Sales has to be able to share information readily as well as have real time knowledge of unit availability. Another alignment challenge is that operations and support staff have to have the ability to access care recommendations, dietary changes, room maintenance requests and any of the other needs of its senior residents.
Automation Challenges
Automation is essential for handling the challenges of awareness and alignment as well as providing the best customer experience before move-in and after. With 67% of the buyer’s journey taking place online, tools for automation are essential. Chatbots, intuitive online appointment setters, and ease of resources and usage on websites will improve user experience and lower costs to close. Automation also improves the care of individuals after purchase by automating service and levels of care inside the facility.
Reporting Challenges
A lack of timely data is another challenge facing the industry. If automation is streamlined, often the natural progression is access to essential data. But without effective reporting, you can’t measure awareness, track leads, or gauge return, among many other criteria. Likewise, essential reporting tools help you to gather and disseminate essential feedback you need to create sales and marketing strategies for the future.
Digital Impact on Senior Living
Here is some additional food for thought as you consider your company’s next step: The search rate in this industry is high with over 6000 searches per hour. Are your senior care facilities being found during these searches? Also, how much does it cost you to generate a lead? The industry standard is $431 per lead. Ouch. Another pain point is that a customer, on average, makes 25 digital touchpoints before making a decision, which means that many senior living companies have a lot of work to do. How about your company?
5 Key Family Expectations
Senior living companies must provide an easy-to-navigate website if they are to be effective in capturing leads. Buyers are looking at facilities that are open and transparent about their pricing and what it includes. Those individuals seeking out senior living solutions also desire personalized communications. They need to be assured that you will be providing their loved one with personalized care, and the first step is giving them the same service in your marketing.
Let’s Look at a Few Senior Living Facilities Using HubSpot
Vista Springs has 12 different facilities located throughout Ohio and Michigan. Like many senior living operations, they were experiencing extremely high costs per lead. They had also just built three new properties and needed to fill them as well as standardize their operating procedures across all communities. With HubSpot’s Growth Suite, they were able to not just do that but get their cost-per-lead down to $66.
Vista Springs also needed to build awareness around the brand quickly as well as convert customers. With HubSpot, they personalized their landing pages and automated workflows and were able to generate key data insights to enhance the buyer’s journey. Vista Springs got some impressive results, a 96% increase in leads, a 26% increase in scheduled leads, and a 58% move-in rate.
In Dallas, Texas, 12 Oaks Senior Living provides third-party management and operation services for senior living communities. With multiple communities, the company was struggling with brand identity and consistency as well as lead management. After integrating with HubSpot tools, 12 Oaks Senior Living saw website sessions increase by 78%.
12 Oaks Senior Living utilized HubSpot’s Marketing Hub Enterprise, HubSpot Sales Hub Pro, HubSpot CRM Hub Pro to automate a number of marketing processes which improved their brand consistency and helped them provide digital marketing to delight and convert leads four times the rate they had prior to HubSpot. They were also able to score and segment those leads and nurture them with automated workflows.
In Massachusetts, LCB Senior Living is one of the fast-growing developers and operators of facilities across New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. They were experiencing so many leads that they often just sat untouched in their CRM.
LCB Senior Living utilized HubSpot’s various platforms and tools to develop systems for sorting and parsing 4,485 leads. The system helped them identify and nurture leads as well as identify unengaged contacts, and they created a “Stay in Touch” campaign to meet prospects where they were in the buyer’s journey.
Why HubSpot?
HubSpot’s CRM platform has all the tools and integrations you need to solve for the many challenges we mentioned above. HubSpot was created so that never again do you have multiple databases that you are trying to force to work together, instead everyone is operating from one single source of truth. Likewise, each one is intuitive and easy to use for the ultimate customer experience. Each product in the platform is powerful alone, but the real magic happens when you use them together.
Hubspot’s CRM will help you to create a connected customer experience for individuals and companies seeking your services. It also allows you to automate and unify your sales, marketing, and service teams so everyone is on the same page. Likewise, you can create workflows that make communication more efficient while at the same time tracking them to ensure all leads are followed-through and buyer’s needs are met.
Sales Hub
HubSpot’s Sales Hub is a time-saving tool that provides you with an in-depth 360 degree view of your prospects while minimizing your busy work and giving you time to close deals. The Sales Hub will also help you leverage documents, track bids and proposals, ensuring the right follow-up communications occur. The Sales Hub also helps you track revenue by deal stage across various pipelines as well. You can also create email onboarding sequences to automate deal stage communications and reduce manual follow-up for recurring communications. And, that is just the tip of the iceberg.
As we mentioned above, HubSpot deals provides a single location for sales cycle details which can help your teams’ performance numbers and revenue goals. Likewise, the document library will help you manage content, make it self-serve, and aggregate data about its usage so you can gauge content effectiveness.
Marketing Hub
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is a CRM-powered marketing platform that allows you to create, manage, and track your campaigns. It provides you with everything you need to get found, engage new people, and nurture them. It also provides you with informative data to steer future marketing efforts and track your PPC ad campaigns all in one platform. You can also use the Marketing Hub to develop lead nurturing workflows to educate consumers and manage and automate your social messaging.
With HubSpot, you can create dynamic personalized emails at various stages of the buying process to connect with customers at all stages of the buyer’s journey. Triggers for various behaviors and different stages will help your customer get the right email at the right time, while you get notified when they are ready to commit.Also, with HubSpot’s workflow tool, you can publish and schedule to publish content to your social accounts at the recommended time for your target audience.
Service Hub
The Service Hub is another well-crafted HubSpot tool that allows you to provide superior customer service. You can create custom properties to track leads and customer’s preferences to enable a highly tailored and connected experience. The Service Hub also allows you to leverage tickets and a customer portal to track, manage, and resolve customer issues. You can also develop knowledge-based content that allows customers to self-solve. With Service Hub, you are able to monitor how quickly a customer’s questions are answered and problems are resolved as well as create surveys to measure customer satisfaction and your companies net promoter scores.
With a shared inbox, you can connect you teams. Email, live chat, Facebook Messenger, and more to one universal inbox to make everything visible to your teams and make it easy to manage. Video messaging is available right inside HubSpot as well. You can create and use them to build stronger relationships during your onboarding process or for customer relationships.
CMS Hub
In your industry, where a majority of your customers are searching for you, it’s essential that they are greeted with a high quality website with all the information they might need to make a decision. With CMS Hub, you can create a secure, mobile-optimized website that is responsive, easy to understand, and optimized for quick, mobile, on-the-road inquiries. Also, you can compile a resource center to leverage forms and essential information consumers want and need while you gather information about potential buyers. The Hub will also help you to create a modern and attractive website with a chat option where customers can ask the questions that are on their minds in real time, 24/7. Likewise, HubSpot’s CMS Hub has the tools to manage your on-page SEO as well as monitor traffic sources.
HubSpot’s SEO tools make it easy to optimize your website for search engines and searches and even provides recommendations to improve your SEO performance. Likewise, with website tracking, you can track every visitor to your site in one place and use your CRM data to create personalized digital experiences.
Operations Hub
The Operations Hub seamlessly integrates with all the other tools and allows you to connect data and automate processes for a friction-free experience between your teams. You are essentially aligning large amounts of data around a secure, single source of truth and presenting it in a clean, consistent, and easily accessible manner. Likewise, the Operations Hub helps you streamline processes that allow you to reduce manual work while at the same time personalizing your messaging and improving customer experience.
Once you decide that HubSpot is right for you, Lovable Marketing makes it easy for you to integrate, get up to speed, use it, and experience success quickly. With dedicated onboarding and one-to-one training, your teams will be up and running swiftly. You can also rely on HubSpot day or night with 24/7 phone support.
