Location, Location, Location! How Geotargeting Boosts Leads in Senior Living

Every basic marketing course teaches the importance of the “marketing mix” as designated by the Four Ps: product, place, price and promotion. Simply speaking, marketing is about providing your prospective customers with the right product at the right place at the right price at the right time.

The concept of place (or location) becomes especially critical to creating a media mix that delivers your marketing message to where your prospects are and where they get their information. In senior living marketing today, your prospects – including older Americans, adult children and institutional sources of referral – are looking for information in a wide variety of places, both traditional and online.

With so many older Americans reaching a point where they are now considering their senior living options, the potential for new leads and sales is higher than ever. But so, too, is the level of competition for their business.

Now, SageAge Strategies is using a variety of techniques to take the marketing pillars of place and promotion to an entirely new level with the use of geotargeting. Geotargeting combines geographic and demographic information that enables you to deliver your message to senior living prospects with greater precision and efficiency to stay ahead of your competition.

Geotargeting Tools Deliver Your Message Like Never Before

Says John Vitale, Media Director at SageAge Strategies, “Today, we’re using a variety of geotargeting techniques – both traditional and online – to increase the accuracy, cost-efficiency and effectiveness of senior living and senior care providers across the country. These techniques include geotargeting precise locations via direct mail, print media options that utilize inserts and ‘sticky notes,’ and digital message targeting that displays your messages to specific online information seekers.

“These geotargeting tools are helping our senior living client-partners more cost-effectively penetrate the market with their messages and achieve their lead gen goals. We use geotargeting for both traditional and digital (online) media in senior living marketing as part of a fully integrated strategy.”

Examples of geotargeting tools include:

• Newspaper advertising using customized inserts – Newspaper inserts based on zip code parameters are an effective, affordable tool for getting your message across to senior living prospects. The newspaper continues to be a staple for older Americans and offers senior living providers the opportunity to stand out from the clutter of ads found inside the pages of the newspaper itself.
  
  According to a Consumer Usage Newspaper Advertising Report conducted by the News Media Alliance (NMA), 83 percent of adults said they regularly or occasionally read newspaper inserts, and 70 percent had used them in the past 30 days of the survey. Newspaper inserts are then typically kept around long after the newspaper has gone into the recycle bin.
  
  With the availability of QR Codes and other online links, print and digital media can now be combined to provide seniors and their family members with a more active, engaging and informative online experience.

• Sticky note advertising in publications – Eye-catching sticky notes enable you to stand out and deliver your message in magazines, newspapers and direct-mail materials. Sticky notes come in a variety of sizes, shapes, styles, colors and adhesive options and are ideal for promoting your brand in a highly affordable way for special events, buyer discounts, new services, grand openings, public seminars, open houses and more.
  
  Sticky notes offer a high degree of creative flexibility and can include your logo, a brief message and your contact information. They also offer staying power as they can be easily removed and posted on a refrigerator or cabinet door for later use or reference.

• Digital marketing – SageAge currently uses geotargeting in all of our online AdWords™ campaigns. We can set our targeted market area by mile radius, zipcode targets and even some actual locations. That means when a prospect is within that geotargeted area and doing a Google search, your appropriate ad message will appear.
  
  Digital media can consist of several components. Pay-per-click advertising via Google® AdWords™ is used to capture the prospect who is beginning their senior living research online. Attention-grabbing text ads reinforce the community’s central message while encouraging a call to action that clicks the user through to a landing page where their information can be captured via a form or recorded incoming calls for sales follow-up.

Geotargeting Also Boosts Your Marketing ROI

In her position as Account Manager at SageAge, Aly Howse, MBA, works closely with our senior consulting team and our senior living client-partners to implement proven growth strategies that generate results.

“I work with many clients who are now successfully using our geotargeting strategies to increase their inquiries and quality leads,” says Aly. “Several of them are using a fully integrated approach that combines geotargeted print media inserts and sticky notes, direct mail and geotargeted digital ad messaging. In addition to helping our client-partners implement these precision-based tools, I also support them with lead-generation tracking and analysis, and ROI assessment.

“One of the benefits of geotargeting is that, in addition to showing where our marketing efforts are generating leads, they also highlight lead-gen areas of opportunity that we have not yet focused on.

“My marketing campaign analyses consistently show that geotargeting boosts our client-partners’ lead results and their marketing ROI. As a result, an increasing number of senior living providers are opting for geotargeting strategies for their communities.”

Choose Your Media Wisely and Create an Integrated Plan

The science of geotargeting adds an exciting new dimension to senior living marketing. At the same time, it remains highly important to choose your media options wisely based on your objectives. Today, an appropriate blend of the tried and true traditional media and the new digital options and social media has become the standard.

The senior living target audience is still committed to their traditional news sources – newspaper, radio, TV, church bulletins, niche senior publications and more. These are still effective information sources and should continue to play an important role in your media strategy. However, new media such as blogs, social media channels like Facebook, and digital (online) marketing provide effective ways to engage, educate and influence your target audience.

And while your media channels might be diverse and numerous, it is important to remember that your messages should always be clear and consistent, and always feed your lead generation goals.

Elevating Lead Generation Performance with Proven Strategies and Innovation

The lead generation professionals at SageAge Strategies combine best-practice expertise in digital marketing innovation, integrated growth strategies, market research, social media strategy, media planning and creative design to provide senior living providers nationwide with the resources they need to connect with today’s seniors and their families.

Always on the leading edge of innovation, precision marketing tools such as geotargeting and our new Sage Personas buyer DNA system enable our senior living client-partners to understand, target and cultivate their prospects in the most cost-effective ways possible.