Challenge/Goal

Challenge

Senior Lifestyle (SLC) manages 180+ senior living communities across the nation, however, communities operate as unique properties and have varying degrees of investor involvement and ownership. This means all communities have to be treated as individual entities with their own budgets, level of care, apartment vacancies, geographic location, targeting, and marketing strategies.

We needed to determine targeting and strategies for filling both the pipeline (top of funnel) and move-ins (bottom of funnel), while also ensuring that all leads are attributed with a specific community using campaign UTM parameters with specific community codes. Without having an attributed community upon lead submission, leads are unable to be entered into the client’s CRM.

The challenge involved finding a balance between top- and bottom-of-funnel leads to fill a marketing funnel without reducing the current number of move-ins.

Goal

The goal was to decrease the client’s reliance on third party lead aggregators while reducing the cost per lead and cost per move-in. With third party aggregators taking credit for leads in which they have the first attributed touchpoint, and retaining that credit for two years thereafter, we worked to increase the number of leads in which we had the first touchpoint. We worked to make the first introduction to prospect audiences and attribute first contact to our marketing efforts. By reducing the client’s reliance on these third-party lead aggregators, we worked to ensure financial success to the campaign by increasing the prospects with whom we had the first touchpoint. Finally, SLC wants to build their marketing funnel to allow a steady flow of leads to support the business in the future even during slow periods.

Solution

MULTI-CHANNEL APPROACH

Multi-Channel Approach: Top of Funnel

Paid

We used a combination of Google Search and Display Ads, Bing Ads, and Programmatic ads to promote educational materials, specifically an e-book, “The Complete Guide to Senior Housing.” These contacts were then directed to a landing page to download the e-book which used utm_campaign parameters to dynamically pull in community-specific information.

Social

We utilized Facebook Lead Ads with an e-book, “The Complete Guide to Senior Housing,” as a lead magnet. The ads created an in-platform experience that auto-filled some fields with the users’ information without taking them away from the Facebook news feed. The ad language focused on providing educational resources around senior housing from Senior Lifestyle as a brand and was not community-specific. Each of these ads was geo-targeted around a community and used hidden fields to attribute the lead to a community, even though the ad was community-agnostic. The lead is then “introduced” to the community during the lead nurture process. All leads were synced into HubSpot using the native Facebook lead ad integration.

Organic

Multiple top of funnel e-books are available to capture contacts before these individuals are ready to search for specific communities. These contacts are then nurtured through email and encouraged to look for a specific community before they are moved down the funnel.

Multi-Channel Approach: Bottom of Funnel

Paid

With a mixture of Google Search, Display and Lead Ads along with Bing and Yelp, we targeted contacts looking for a specific community and level of care near them. Each of these contacts are then directed to a single landing page which is populated with community information based on the UTM parameters associated with them. These contacts are then entered into a bottom-of-funnel lead nurture workflow.

Organic

In addition to the SEO updates our team implemented to improve the community visibility within search engine rankings, we have also implemented updates to the Google My Business pages which encourages calls and form fills for lead capture. These form fills are on each individual community page and then use hidden fields to populate with the correct community information within HubSpot.

WEBSITE

SLC launched a new site in October 2019. We served as project manager for the external web development agency. SLC and the agency took our recommendations in development.

LEAD NURTURING

Once a contact is in HubSpot they then enter a lead nurture workflow depending on the community, their spot in the funnel, and source type. Every campaign uses dynamic personalization branching logic to funnel into nearly 300 workflows with thousands of property assignments to provide a specific timeline and CTA that is catered to the individual’s specific needs. Overall, there are thousands of different variations of messaging a contact could receive depending on community, engagement, and original source.

Workflows include

• Top of funnel from Social
• Top of funnel from Search/Display
• Bottom of funnel from Social
• Bottom of funnel from Search/Display
• Top of funnel (community agnostic)
• Bottom of funnel from Organic
• Re-engagement

SALES ENABLEMENT

Lead scoring

In order to provide only sales-ready leads to the sales teams at each community, leads are passed in two different statuses: “web” or “deactivated”. The community sales team only work leads in the “web” status. In order to achieve web status, contacts are scored within HubSpot off a number of engagement metrics, information provided, and original source. Once the lead hits a lead score that qualifies it as “sales-ready”, the lead is moved from “deactivated” to “web” within Microsoft Dynamics.

Quizzes

While the initial information gathered from leads is limited, additional information is gathered through the use of quizzes throughout the lead nurture process. The quizzes, hosted on Typeform, directly integrate back into HubSpot. Not only are these quizzes able to be used as part of the lead scoring process to better qualify leads, it is also a non-intrusive way to gather additional information that the sales teams can use to better help leads when they are ready for a sales conversation.

Results

Lead volume is up

• May 2019 Leads – 1,307
  • May 2020 Leads (coronavirus) - 2,224
    • 70% increase in lead volume
• Cost per lead is down
  • May 2019 cost per lead - $242.02
  • May 2020 cost per lead - $160.25
    • 33.8% decrease in cost per lead
• Lead to tour % up
  • March 2019 – 16.99% (This is when all tactics were on and running together)
  • May 2020 – 17.91%
• Contacts are engaging with multiple channels before interacting sales, providing a more educated consumer
  • Assisted channels in hubspot
    • In 2020 41% of contacts actively engaged with SLC through multiple channels during their journey
    • In 2020 13% of contacts actively engaged with SLC through three or more channels during their journey

Impact

With lead volume up and cost per lead down, Senior Lifestyle is more independent and self-reliant in terms of reaching and engaging with new audiences. With cost per lead substantially down and the fact that they themselves own the contacts, Senior Lifestyle can generate and keep leads in the funnel rather than outsourcing the contacts. In addition to owning the contacts, the contacts are also more educated and further down the funnel, due to the multi-channel approach.

The workflows continue to generate leads, which are passed to sales. With the changes that COVID-19 brought, engaged contacts are added to the wait list and engaged contacts remain in the sales funnel. Tours and move-ins are not allowed at this time.