Today’s Savvy Senior Living Shopper

Senior living sales and marketing teams truly deserve a pat on the back for all that they do.

Day in and day out, sales and marketing teams work to keep occupancy high, waitlists in order and prospective residents’ expectations in line. To guarantee their efforts will be successful, sales and marketing teams need to know who exactly their marketing initiatives should target — and they need a way to effectively nurture relationships with all of the prospective residents that inquire about their communities.

All of this, unfortunately, is made more difficult by the nature of today’s senior living shoppers.

Statistically, seniors aren’t likely to make senior housing decisions in a vacuum. In fact, it may prove a waste of time to market senior housing communities to prospective residents alone. Instead, senior living sales and marketing teams should focus their efforts on the real senior living shoppers — prospective residents’ adult children.

These real senior living shoppers often come to the table prepared, and they conduct their senior housing research almost entirely online, Senior Housing News reported in 2013. Sales and marketing teams must be equally prepared to work with these well-researched adult children.

Tech-savvy and well-researched
Seniors’ adult children participate in about 73% of senior housing decisions, according to 2014 American Senior Housing Association (ASHA) data reported by Caring.com.

Still, about one in four seniors do search for senior living by themselves, according to senior living referral service A Place for Mom. Seniors looking without the help of family or friends end up searching for twice as long, though, and only 7% of seniors who end up moving into senior living researched their options alone.

Additionally, 93% of seniors who end up moving into senior housing received help from a caregiver or a family member, A Place for Mom found.

It seems as though the best way to reach prospective residents is to win the attention of their adult children. After all, the move-in rate ends up being 2.5 times higher when adult children inquire into a particular assisted living community than when a senior looks into senior living for her or himself, according to Caring.com.

But these adult children tend to be pretty inquisitive. Senior living sales and marketing teams need to be prepared to answer any and all questions they have, while simultaneously making sure their parents will actually be a good fit for their organization.

That’s a complex task, but there are solutions that make it easier.

Tech for happy, healthy residents
It’s extremely helpful for senior living sales and marketing teams to have an electronic Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution at their disposal. PointClickCare’s CRM, for instance, enables sales and marketing teams to track and engage with prospective residents from the pre-admission process through the day they move in. The CRM also helps guarantee that all residents move into a building that corresponds to the level of care they require and their own personal preferences — leading to happy, healthy new residents whose needs are met from the start.

Additionally, PointClickCare offers a Customer Engagement solution that helps guarantee senior living providers ask the right questions of prospective residents and their family members prior to move-in. Asking the right questions is key, because it enables providers to design action plans that will ultimately improve residents’ health outcomes after they move in. When residents receive the right amount of care from the start, they’ll be healthier throughout their stay — and hopefully remain in senior living longer.

In many ways, sales and marketing teams are the lifeblood of senior living organizations. Providing them with tools to make their jobs easier will ultimately benefit organizations’ overall occupancy and, ultimately, care quality.

Read More: Senior Living Staffing for Success