For most senior living communities, their reputation precedes them, be that a good or a bad thing. However, prospective residents may not always have the same image that you’ve worked hard to achieve.
While your own actions and your marketing outreach certainly have a positive impact on the reputation your community enjoys, there are other factors that can work to damage it. When major national media outlets started running stories concerning the bankruptcy of Erickson Retirement Communities, CCRCs across the country began hearing questions about their own financial stability. Recent congressional hearings on consumer protections for CCRC residents have had a similar result.
While these and other situations may have an effect on your community’s reputation, they also present opportunities, if approached the right way. You have a chance to educate prospective consumers, and the media, about your business model, your organizational strength and the benefits living at your community provide residents.
GlynnDevins is hosting a webinar at 11 a.m. to noon CDT on Wednesday, August 11, entitled “Reputation Management: We didn’t do anything wrong!” The presentation, featuring a former TV and former newspaper reporter, will discuss reputation management for senior living communities, as well as current news topics likely to skew impressions, such as tax-exempt status for not-for-profit CCRCs, congressional review of CCRC contracts and disputes with various unions.
Register now for this free webinar from GlynnDevins, the leading senior living marketing agency.
We wanted to share this article, Nielsen: This Isn’t Your Grandfather’s Baby Boomer published in AdAge Magazine about the baby boomer consumer, along with some of our own thoughts. As the article confirms, it’s no secret that the 78 million Baby Boomers, those born between the years of 1946 and 1964, are a large and powerful (and affluent) group of people. The darling of most marketers for decades, Boomers are courted less and less. Brands that were built by the Boomers, like McDonalds, aren’t maintaining that relationship. Think about it: The Boomers still eat hamburgers, but the vast majority of McDonalds’ advertising budget still targets those ages 18 to 49.
Baby Boomers spend money, are more comfortable with technology and more adventurous in their media choices compared to their predecessors. As the average age of all traditional media, such as television and newspaper, is getting older, shouldn’t we see a shift in messaging and advertising that supports this messaging as well?
We expect new marketing channels for seniors to emerge, and we’ll be sure to keep you aware of good opportunities when we see them.
We are excited to announce the launch of our new website (www.glynndevins.com), and would like to give you five reasons to check it out:
1) Photos of more employees! When at conferences or on the road, we often hear clients say they wish they knew what someone looked like or had a chance to meet one of the associates they often work with, so we focused on more photography that shows the daily life and people at GlynnDevins. For example, many of you are greeted daily on the phone by Beki Oberndorfer, so here is your chance to put a face with the name.
2) Awesome creative. We overhauled and updated our portfolio section with the latest and greatest creative projects, ready for you to view.
3) Introduction to Extreme Site Productivity (ESP), which is one of our very successful data-driven digital products that often more than doubles website traffic within only a few months.
4) Quick access to the social media vehicles we use to communicate our GlynnDevins’ insights (blog, LinkedIn, Twitter).
5) And last but not least…some new head shots of our senior staff. It’s about time… I think I was around 21 the last time we took them.
Hope you enjoy the new site. Let us know what you think!
Recently I was consulting with a client on repositioning their community. It is a common situation. The community began decades ago as a nursing home, which at the time brought a needed and innovative service offering to their area. Fast forward five decades and the community is still known as a nursing home, despite having strong independent and assisted living options available, not to mention a culture focused more on wellness than on the care model indicative of 1950s nursing homes.
The topic of how to reposition a community could be a subject for a series of posts. But I will limit this post to a single thought: Repositioning a community is not accomplished through developing new advertising/communications – at least not entirely. To reposition a community in the minds of your consumer audience, that is, to get them to think differently about who you are and what you do, your audience must:
1) Know your complete offering
2) Understand the value
3) Believe it
Think about this list for a moment. Advertising/communications can accomplish some of this, but not all of this. This is why repositioning a community requires the involvement of the entire community team. Here’s a simple graphic that makes this point.
Achieving each successive goal takes increased personal contact. Knowledge can be gained from brochures or ads or even news stories, but understanding and ultimately belief come through interaction with community staff. It comes from building relationships and trust, and it comes from experiencing the reality of the messages first delivered through communications.
As I referenced in the opening, repositioning is a much broader subject and this one point is in itself over-simplified. But it is an important concept, whether your community is repositioning or not. Effective marketing is a team effort that involves more than just communications or even sales. There must be continuity for the consumer at each step, moving them forward from knowledge to understanding to belief.
Writing letters.
Say you get a letter. There’s a pretty stamp, a handwritten address, and the return is someone you know — a friend or relative. Inside, the first of a page or 2 starts with a dear you and includes a “this made me think of you,” a “remember that time when we” or perhaps a “guess what happened!” And there’s a reason: “Just keeping in touch,” “hope to visit soon,” “I wanted you to know.”
Through the information and anecdotes, you get it: authenticity, purpose, a letter from a real person that makes you feel like one, too.
In 1974, Martin Conroy wrote a direct mail letter for The Wall Street Journal that generated 55 percent of new subscriptions over the next 28 years. It’s a letter from a real person, and it comes across with authenticity and purpose. People felt it. They responded.
I think about direct mail letters to seniors that are authentic and purposeful. One-to-one, from a real person, to a real person. They start with “dear” and they mean it.
Saving theatres.
In small towns across the country, old movie theatres are new again — as centers for community life.
Loving colons.
Overlooked and misused, colons have launched a comeback. They’re the latest in punc chic.
Life goes on: So far.
