Despite record growth in construction, senior living occupancy has reached its lowest level in over eight years. As absorption struggles to keep pace with inventory growth, there’s never been a more important time to market your senior living community.
Rather than repurposing volumes of data, metrics and conversion ratios, we’d like to get down to the brass tacks of senior living sales and marketing benchmarks and share three insights that you can act on immediately. That is, what can you do now, quickly, to support your sales team and lift conversion rates.
Here are three insights into senior living CRM benchmarks:
Insight #1
Data Point: 13 inquiries are required to yield one independent living (IL) move-in.*
Insight: That’s a lot of inquiries for one new resident. Unless you’re in the enviable position of having no competition in your market, this points to a critical need for ongoing lead generation. “Ongoing,” as in you always need to be marketing for the primary purpose of generating new, qualified inquiries. Primary inquiry sources in senior living include direct mail, events, advertising, public relations, search engine marketing and referrals. If your marketing does not include implementing each of these regularly throughout the year, you may need to boost activity levels to achieve the 13:1 benchmark.
Action Item: Conduct ongoing, frequent lead generation activities to drive new, qualified leads.
Insight #2
Data Point: It takes 25 touches to yield an independent living (IL) move-in.*
Insight: That’s a lot of touches. This means you need to plan 25 marketing touches for each prospect—phone calls, emails, meetings, lunches, events, direct mailers—before they are ready to pull the trigger and move. Even for the most organized sales counselor, this level of activity requires seriously detailed planning and scheduling of your marketing programs, all of which can be better accomplished using a quarterly or annual marketing plan to guide execution. The best marketing plans include calendars, flowcharts and production schedules along with projected performance outcomes so you are assured of constant outreach, education, nurturing, and ultimately, attainment of your senior living sales goals.
Action Item: Develop a media calendar to help you achieve adequate frequency in marketing.
Insight #3
Data Point: 14% of unpaid referrals result in an IL move-in.*
Insight: Unpaid referrals result in the highest rate of move-ins compared to 5% of digital leads and 9% of advertising and other efforts. And best of all, they are free! Well, sort of. Even the best resident ambassadors need gentle reminding of your resident referral program. At a minimum, your referral program should be packaged and promoted internally using flyers, newsletters, signage and more. Better yet, brand it with a distinctive name for greater recall. Monetary incentives tend to work the best.
Action Item: Invest in marketing, updating and refreshing your resident referral program.
In a nut shell, the most important takeaway from data benchmarks point to planning fully integrated marketing tactics with emphasis on the most-efficient, highest performing initiatives as a means to achieve your occupancy goals.
*Source: Enquire’s Sales and Marketing Benchmark Report