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Inside Advice on Marketing Senior Housing

By Phyllis M. Thornton

This article is the first in a series of articles derived from Thornton’s new Textbook & CD: Inside Advice on Marketing Senior Housing—The 15 Components of Success.

Click here to view Part II
Click here to view Part III

Long gone are the days when hosting a cheerful open house and producing a pretty brochure passed for a marketing program. Today, maintaining and protecting your market amid fierce competition and rapid-fire industry change requires solving complex issues. It’s a time where no one’s future is assured. If marketing planning falters, an occupancy goal that looked like a sure thing can suddenly become a pipe dream. If marketing execution is incorrect, full occupancy can turn into vacancies before you know it.

While senior housing has never been a simple business, today it’s more complicated than ever before. In fact, you might be tempted to call it something stronger—chaos.

Marketing has suddenly become crucial. To succeed in the face of this daunting reality requires advanced marketing systems and a formula for achieving full occupancy.

One key to successful marketing planning is directing resources to those areas that have the greatest influence on occupancy development and maintenance. However, tracking occupancy as a benchmark for success is misleading in that census is a trailing indicator of a marketing program’s overall effectiveness.

A successful marketing program should focus less on overall occupancy and more on offsetting attrition with new move-ins. The program goal is to generate enough sales and move-ins to offset attrition and meet budgeted occupancy. To do this effectively, a community first needs to data map inquiry, sales, and attrition trends. Inquiry activity, for instance, is a useful barometer of market interest. If inquiry activity is declining, or if a community is capturing fewer inquiries, it will negatively affect move-in rates and aggregate occupancy. If this is what the data show, the causes need to be identified and corrective actions need to be outlined in the marketing plan.

For example, new competition generally results in declining inquiry activity. This scenario could indicate the need to step up external advertising programs. If sales are declining, possibly due to fewer inquiries, rather than reflexively spending more money on advertising, a community should first determine if sales are down for other reasons. A decline in sales could be attributed to not having enough sales staff, a lack of effective sales training, and/or a community’s offerings are not as attractive as they once were to today’s savvy consumer. Depending on the underlying cause, a community may need to reconfigure and fine tune the skills of the sales team or reposition the facility to meet new consumer expectations.

Throughout the marketing program, it is imperative that the community map out what is happening; not by occupancy alone, but by what is influencing occupancy. Without comprehensive inquiry, sales and attrition data, it is impossible to identify what the real problems are and what must be done to solve them.

Marketing can seem like a complex maze, but you can eliminate its mystery with the use of some simple math that is founded on one guiding principle: Leads generate sales. Sales translate into move-ins. Your move-ins, less resident attrition, determines ending occupancy. Marketing functions as the “flow control”. Your program, if properly planned and executed, creates the flow of leads—the lead objective—that will be converted into move-ins—the sales objective.

In the next issue of News from New Lifestyles, Thornton will reveal the formula for full occupancy. You’ll learn how to calculate your community’s lead and sales objectives.

Phyllis M. Thornton is author of Inside Advice on Marketing Senior Housing—The 15 Critical Components of Success. It is the industry’s first marketing textbook and planning tool that details every aspect of planning and implementing a strategic and tactical marketing plan. It also includes an innovative planning prototype, the Marketing Plan Template. Furnished on a companion CD, the Template is a multi-faceted tool that provides instructions, worksheets, and planners to draft a marketing plan that you can put to work right away, and to create a plan that you can use time and again.

Visit www.signuminc.com to learn more about this groundbreaking marketing resource.

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