The Holy Trinity of Digital Marketing for Assisted Living Homes

I love Cajun food. If you are a fan of it like I am, you might know about the holy trinity of Cajun cooking. These are three ingredients that serve as the basis, or foundation, of most Cajun dishes. They are onion, celery, and bell pepper. My favorite, crawfish etouffee, is based on these ingredients in a rue. Yum!

Digital marketing, like a good Cajun dish, should start with a solid foundation. What I like to call the holy trinity of assisted living home digital marketing. Let’s explore these three key ingredients.

Your Website

Your website is the nucleus of all things digital. Google assumes that this is where the most comprehensive information will be for your business. The content, structure and optimization of your website is where all things digital begin.

You can deploy other digital marketing strategies without one, but you are placing yourself at a significant disadvantage. You MUST have a website.

Now that does not mean it needs to be complex or expensive. Simplicity is often best when it come to an assisted living home website. A good assisted living home website can be a few pages or even a single page. What’s important is that has the key elements for visitor engagement and Google SEO, or search engine optimization.

I’m not going to get too “in the weeds” on this. You just need to have a professional, aesthetically pleasing, informational site that contains the following.

Content

Take the time to give visitors insight into why you do what you do. Tell them about your care philosophy, about your experience, and what makes your home different than your competitors. Google is still primarily a text-based search engine. Search engines look at this content to determine relevance regarding user’s search terms.

Your First Keyword

Those that delve in deeply to SEO quickly understand that keywords along with their volume and competition are what, to a large degree, determine the effort needed to generate traffic from search engine results. Some businesses must target multiple, high volume, competitive keywords. Others may find themselves in a less competitive search environment. We find both scenarios in the assisted living industry.

Keep in mind that you must target at least one keyword. This is your brand or business name. Trust me if you don’t, an internet referral company will and end up getting traffic looking for your business. Be sure your brand name is plentiful in text on your website at the appropriate density for search engines to understand the business name that the website represents.

Here is an example of an assisted living home that has brand awareness and likely good word of mouth marketing, but when people search for this assisted living home, there is no digital marketing to take advantage of it. This business is being searched about a 110 times per month and could yield about 80 website visitors or actions (see the next ingredient, GMB) per month.

Name Address Phone or NAP

This is important because you want search engines to easily be able to link your other digital marketing efforts to your website. One way Google does this is by linking digital marketing that has the same name, address, and phone number information.

Photos

Display a gallery with beautiful images of your care home. For assisted living, this is extremely important. A nice website with a gallery can often be the difference in a family member contacting you for a tour or not.

Call to Action or CTA

Give your visitors an easy way to get in contact with you. This may include-

• A prominent contact form.
• Click to Call Phone number
• Messaging box such as Facebook messenger

Google My Business or GMB Listing

The next ingredient in our holy trinity is Google My Business. This is an area of search that focuses on physical location of business. Think of this as a directory, or our 21^st century Yellow Pages on steroids.

Its no secret that people now use these little devices we all constantly have in our hands to find businesses that are nearby. Google has made this super convenient with the integration of Google My Business and Google Maps.

The power of Google My Business is how it usually increases the performance of your business in organic search results which, in turn, drives visitors to your website.

A website and GMB listing individually are wonderful things. But when leveraged together they become very powerful to easily raise your business to the top of SERP (search engine results page) results. There is a clear synergy in deploying these first two ingredients together.

The following is actual engagement data for our GMB listing for our assisted living home.

Google Reviews

The last element in my digital marketing holy trinity is positive reviews on your Google My Business listing. This provides two advantages for your digital marketing strategy.

The first is that Google must rank Google My Business listings. One way it determines rankings is to consider the number of reviews and the quality ratings represented by the reviews. All other things being equal business listing with more positive reviews will rank higher. There are a number of elements considered in this calculation, but reviews are a major one.

The second reason is likely the more important than the first. Positive reviews drive conversions and engagement. Someone viewing similar listings will much more likely engage a business that has several authentic, positive reviews. You should do all you can to facilitate satisfied clients and vendors leaving a positive review.

So, there you have it. Follow this simple recipe to launch an effective digital marketing presence for your assisted living home. This foundation will serve as a solid basis as you engage in additional digital marketing methods to generate tours and reduce placement fee expenses.