Assisted Living Lead Generation
Start Getting Quality Leads for your Assisted Living Facility That Converts Fast | Online Lead Generation for ALF | Everything you want to know about your ALF’s Lead Generation Starts Here
Get ready to Brace yourself ALF owners. You are about to start learning how you can market your Assisted Living Facility and get quality leads who call, schedule a tour to your facility, submit a contact form on your website, and converts faster- All done for you using the power of digital marketing.
Before we begin the article, I want to present in front of you the results, or leads I have driven for an Assisted Living Facility in Chicago.
I will explain in this article step-by-step everything that an ALF owner needs to consider to get a better return on their money spent on Lead Generation.
By the end of this article, you will know how me or my agency can help your assisted living facility with quality lead generation. So, let’s dive into the details!
Things to keep in mind before you start the process of Lead Generation for your Assisted Living Facility
1. It is the age of the Internet and smartphones, and your assisted living facility must have a strong online presence.
A Strong Online presence means that whenever someone takes out their phone and searches for “assisted living home near me” your facility must show on the top.
Your assisted living facility must get the attention and visibility of your potential clients, patients, or their families so they can schedule a tour to your facility, call your facility, or contact you for questions, or inquiries.
Here in this blog, we will cover everything that you or your facility can do to increase the online visibility of your assisted living facility and drive more leads.
2. Follow these lead generation and marketing strategies if you are in the nursing business for a long run, or continue to run the business for a long time.
It is because the results you are going to get out of it will cost you your money and time and you are going to get long-term benefits.
So, if you have started a business, or don’t have funds to spend on advertising and lead generation, I would recommend avoiding these strategies.
3. Online Lead Generation is an ongoing procedure.
It isn’t like you paid for a lead gen service and start getting leads from day one. Because, the results of online advertising improve over time, by making data-driven and strategic marketing decisions.
4. Be ready to invest your time and money for at least 2-6 months.
Again because these are not bulk leads that are being supplied to you by other lead generation agencies. These will rather be fresh leads, that are generated out of online marketing strategies and systems you set in place for your assisted living facility.
Once you understand these concepts, let us now read about your Assisted Living Facility Website
Role of Assisted Living Facility’s Website in Lead Generation
This part of your Assisted living lead generation is all about how your website should look like, what features should you have on your site, and where and how it should be built. Let us get into the details.
Your ALF Website must be built on WordPress, or WIX, or it should be custom-built.
Many people will say what difference is it going to make, after all, it is just a website. Choosing the right platform for your website will make a huge difference in how your website looks, how it functions, and how you want to expand your business website in the future. If you choose website builder platforms other than WordPress, and WIX, and later when you face any problems, you will ultimately have to switch to these website platforms and have to spend money on it again. So my advice would be never to opt for a cheap website service, or other website platforms just to save some money or use shortcuts.
Your Assisted Living Facility website must be responsive
This means it should be able to function across all devices and screen types. If this isn’t done, you could be losing potential patients/clients. Consider your website is only tested for computer screens. And you will have patients, or their families who could be searching for assisted living facilities from their smartphones. You can guess what would happen next right? If not, let me tell-because your website isn’t optimized for all screen types and devices, it might not load properly, or function properly on their smartphones. These potential patients/clients might not get a seamless experience on your website and end up going for another assisted living facility. Quite possible in this age of smartphones, right!!
Use good, attractive content on your website.
Most of the visible content on your assisted living facility website will be in the form of text, images, and videos. Using high-quality relatable images and videos on your website can drive viewers’ interest and excite them to know more about you. There is no harm in getting some inspiration from other websites on the internet or taking a look at your competitor’s website.
Offer Multiple Call to Action Buttons on Your Assisted Living Facility Website for More Leads
Offer call-to-action buttons like a call button, fill a contact form, email, and chat button. Because the end goal for you is that your website visitors contact you. Therefore, give them various ways they can contact you or start a conversation with you and collect leads for your assisted living facility business.
Assisted Living Website should show Client Reviews and Testimonials
Adding client/customer reviews and testimonials will showcase and build trust for first-time site visitors when patients or their family members browse through your assisted living facility website. This will act as a marketing strategy to attract more leads to your ALF business.
Make your Assisted Living Business Website for Your Customers
Many people make mistakes by writing a lot about themselves. However, an Assisted Living website must highlight how it invests in its clients and patients. Consider your website a portal for patients and their families to take a virtual tour of your Assisted Living Facility. Keep things simple, clean, and real.
Now, that you have a thorough understanding of how your ALF website should look and feel, let’s move on to the Marketing part, i.e. how should you market your assisted living facility to drive more leads.
Assisted Living Facility Lead Generation
Marketing your ALFs for consistent Leads
There are 2 ways anyone can market their assisted living facility to produce high-quality leads:
- Organic Lead Generation
- Paid Marketing and Lead Generation
Organic Lead Generation for an Assisted Living Facility
Organic Lead Generation is a process of generating leads where you don’t pay for leads. Let us read in this section how you can generate organic/free leads for your assisted living facility.
Create a Google My Business (GMB) Profile/Google Maps
The registration for a Google My Business Profile is completely free unless you want to opt-in to run paid promotions on Google Maps, or for your local searches.
You must be very familiar with these listings on Google (See the image next). Local businesses and service providers register themselves on Google My Business to drive customers, inquiries, and leads to their business.
Once you register your ALF on Google My Business, you prepare yourself to show it in front of local clients, patients, and their families on Google, in local searches.
If you already have a Google Business profile registered for your ALF, your next job is to keep it up-to-date and make regular updates on your account. Updates such as locations, services, additional information about your business, working hours, photos and videos, customer reviews, etc. will keep the ball rolling and can showcase your ALF listing above your local competitors in Google Maps.
When people search for senior living homes or assisted living homes in your area, your business shows up first, increases visibility, and drives more clicks on your business profile and website, thereby generating more leads for you.
Lead Generation with Content Marketing for your Assisted Living Facility
The entire Internet and Social Media is filled with a variety of content materials that are triggered when a search is made on a search engine like Google or Social Media.
There can be different types of content you can create and write for your assisted living facility in the form of website articles and blogs (like the one you are reading now), graphic and video content in the form of posts, reels, videos for Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube.
Keep in mind, while writing and creating content for your Assisted Living Facility that they must be unique, relevant and add value to your audience.
- For social media platforms like Facebook, and Instagram, you must make video reels. These platforms allow to share and upload video reels of up to 90 seconds.
- Use a variety of content such as images, graphics, and videos. Your content can include client’s images or videos, services, your facility itself, beds, staff, environment, and testimonials.
- The goal is to keep your content fun, engaging, and consistent.
- Also, I have seen many social media accounts that simply post for a few days or weeks and then disappear. Don’t do this if you want to make your content marketing game strong and drive organic leads for your ALF.
- Video content is being consumed a lot these days so I am insisting again and again not to miss it. If you or your creative team is lacking ideas then you can seek inspiration from tools like ChatGPT and other content creators.
- You can also hire a freelancer or a full-time photographer whose job will be to capture moments, photos, and videos of your facility. This is a great idea as per the latest trends in content creation- or just say I have shared a million-dollar idea with you. You can’t even imagine how your content will explode in 6-9 months without having to pay a single dollar on paid leads at all. (Before you do this, make sure you are hiring the right person for this role and who knows how they can drive leads using content marketing)
Assisted Living SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for Lead Generation
SEO will play a major role in generating online leads for your Assisted Living Facility because SEO’s entire purpose is to make your content like website pages, blogs, and articles search engine friendly and rank above your competitors.
This topic brings me back to where I discussed about choosing a website platform for your assisted living facility, and why people should WordPress.
The reason why WordPress website builder must be used in developing a website for your ALF is that it offers inbuilt SEO plugins and guidelines that can be used to improve your website ranking.
It is to be kept in mind that SEO is an ongoing process and it can take a while. However once your website content is optimized for search engines, you will start getting plenty of organic leads without having to spend a penny on paid advertising.
Companies spend time and hundreds and thousands of Dollars on SEO because they know it is going to give them long-term and consistent results in the form of quality website traffic and visitors that convert into leads and paying clients.
Lead Generation for Assisted Living Facilities using Paid Marketing Strategies
Few things to keep in mind before opting for paid marketing services for Lead Generation for your Assisted Living Facilities
- Do not run ads by yourself, or start a paid marketing campaign without learning how to do it effectively.
- Don’t do it because you will end up losing and wasting money on sponsored/paid advertisements and later will blame that paid advertising doesn’t work. Trust me I have seen many business owners making these mistakes and losing thousands of dollars on paid advertising.
- If you want to run ads on your own- Learn first!
- Be prepared to spend a minimum daily marketing budget of $50-$100 on your ads. If you have less marketing budget, you won’t get enough leads out of it. (The average cost per click in assisted living is $4 to $10 and when you run ads with a budget of $10 a day, you will hardly get any clicks and leads)
- So, go for paid advertising only if you can spend a minimum of $1000 to $3000 per month for up to 3-6 months at least to see long-term benefits. (This amount is for advertising on Google, also called Google Ads. For Facebook ads you can test your ads with less budget)
Now you know if you should invest in paid advertising for your Assisted Living Facility, there are 3 major types of digital ads you can run-
- Google Ads- Ads run advertising on Google
- Facebook Ads- Ads run on Facebook and Instagram
- Local Ads- Ads run on Google My Business, Google Maps
How to Target Your Audience on Digital Platforms like Google and Facebook and Prepare for Paid Advertising
Let’s Discuss Lead Generation using Google Ads first
- Type of Ads you can run on Google- Search Ads and Call Ads. (Any other ads may or may not perform as they come with very less control options)
- It is required to write good ad copies, or else the conversion count will be less.
- Keep the targeting impactful by using relevant keywords, location targeting options, and other audience targeting options so your ad campaigns can produce better quality and more leads for your assisted living facility.
Things to remember if you plan to run Facebook Ads for Lead Generation.
- Use image ads or video ads
- Proper audience targeting and other relevant audience targeting
- Because you don’t know who will see your ads on Facebook, run ads for a broad audience to find what is working.
- Facebook ads don’t give you the leverage to target your customers based on keywords, so you will have to test and figure out what audience is working for your assisted living facility
Set up Google Analytics and Conversion Tracking for the Assisted Living Facility Website to Measure your Leads
Google Analytics is a free and very important tool to be installed on any website as it helps to measure online traffic, clicks to your website, and customer actions such as phone calls and submitting a contact form.
And for lead generation campaigns it is a must to install them on your website so you can measure the number of leads.
To track your conversions/leads through Google Ads use Google Ads Conversion Tracking, and to track conversion/leads through Facebook ads use Facebook Pixel.
Missing on setting up conversion tracking in your Paid Lead Generation Campaigns for your Assisted Living Facility will not allow you to measure the lead count.
And therefore you will be able to make data-driven marketing decisions to analyze what is working and what is not. You will not know which ad, which keyword, or which campaigns are driving more leads, and it can be a huge mistake that one must avoid.
Common FAQs Related to Assisted Living Facility Lead Generation
Should you run Facebook Ads, or Google Ads for your Assisted Living Facility Lead Generation”
This is a long ongoing debate about comparing which advertising channel should someone choose for their Assisted Living Facility, should one use Google Ads, or should one use Facebook Ads? Will Google Ads produce more leads, or will Facebook Ads generate more leads?
My answer to this is- Whichever gives you better results go for it, and explore possibilities from other channels.
There is no right or wrong answer to this question. For some Facebook advertising could be more fruitful, and for some Advertising on Google can be more fruitful.
However, in my opinion, and based on years of running ads on Google, go for Google Ads for your Assisted Living Facility Lead Generation. Because it allows you to target your online users based on the Keywords. Google Ads will immediately place your assisted living facility ads in front of the users who search for terms or phrases you set as keywords like- assisted living facility near me, good assisted living facility in my area, etc. Refer to the screenshot next to see how keyword targeting works in Google Ads.
How much budget should you spend across Facebook Ads and Google Ads in Lead Generation Campaigns?
If you are unsure how much should you spend on these platforms and if you are planning to use them both for lead generation, go for a 60-40 split of your marketing budget. 60% of your marketing budget on Google Ads and 40% on Facebook Ads, and based on the outcome you see you, make your decisions based on the data.
Final takeaway- Don’t run paid ads if you do not know how to do it, Use proper targeting options to control how and where your ads appear, and make a 60-40 split of your marketing budget for Google and Facebook Advertising.
So this now brings us to the end of the Complete Lead Generation Strategy for Assisted Living Facilities.
I hope that you have read everything in this article and have a better understanding of how you can generate Quality leads and more leads for your ALF.
If you want to work with me or my marketing agency, you can click on this link and submit the contact form, or email me at contact@leadschief.co
The quickest way to schedule a call with me or my agency is to call or WhatsApp me at +1 407-794-1333.
To learn more about me and Leadschief Digital Marketing Agency, click here to see the About page on our website.
Thank you for reading and wish you a Productive 2024!!
