Content marketing is one of the cornerstones of a solid digital marketing strategy, but producing and publishing content that doesn’t appeal to, educate or entertain your target audience is potentially a waste of time and money. This statement is especially true of producing content that is in service of generating interest in your retirement home or community. Furthermore, if the content you’re creating doesn’t stand out from your local competitors, it’s not likely to drive as much organic search engine traffic as it could.
Define Your Target Audiences
Broadly speaking, when thinking about the target audiences for your retirement home marketing efforts, you can count on the following categories:
- Adults approaching retirement age
- Adults living in a different retirement home looking to move
- Retirees friends
- Retirees adult children (Daughters tend to be more involved in helping mom or dad with retirement home decisions thus having an outsized influence)
- Physicians (family doctors)
While these are some broad target audience categories, it’s still a good idea to flesh out these demographic categories further. In a previous article, targeted at Orthodontists, I laid out how you can develop a demographic and psychographic profile for all of your potential customer personas. You can apply the same formula to the groups mentioned above.
What Makes Your Retirement Home Special?
When planning out your content, consider what’s both better and different about your retirement facility? What makes it stand out? What philosophy of care and lifestyle does it espouse that’s somehow different than your competitors? Is there something about your location, community or area that is advantageous. Just off the back of answering some of these questions, you can probably plan out some exciting pieces of content.
Develop Content for the Various States of the Decision and Buyer Journey
Not everyone that comes across your content will be at the bottom of the decision/purchasing funnel. When they find your content, they may be at the top of the funnel, just starting their research process into discovering a great retirement home for themselves, their parent(s), or someone they know. It’s essential that the content you develop, is both targeted to the various customer personas mentioned above, but also aimed to appeal to the multiple points along the sales funnel, top, middle and bottom. Consider how each of your targeted demographics makes their decision about choosing a retirement home.
Content Marketing Ideas for Retirement Homes
Here are a few content categories and ideas to get you started in planning out a comprehensive content marketing strategy for your retirement home property.
Local Content
- Produce content that is not only designed for your targeted customer personas but also include local content that will appeal to those persons living in the local area.
- Not only produce local content but consider crafting content for people considering a move to your area.
- What makes your neighbourhood unique?
Content That Answers Your Most Commonly Asked Questions
Content that answers the most common questions about your facility is a must. Don’t skimp on this. Make your content in-depth and personable. Answer the question as if though the person asking it were standing right in front of you.
- Showcasing and answering common questions, not just with textual content but also with rich media content will help to promote trust in your home.
- Look at competing facilities FAQ pages and how incredibly bland, boring and lacking comprehensiveness most of them are, and then realize how much of an opportunity this is for your organization to help stand out.
Create Content for The Most Common Reasons People Move into a Retirement Community
Consider the various life events and reasons for someone wanting to or needing to move into a retirement home and content ideas will immediately come to mind:
- Loss of a spouse
- Unwilling or unable to do house chores
- Reducing housing costs
- To have freedom and independence
- Be closer to relatives or friends
- Need for continuous health care
- Access to personal care services
- To have more social contact & engage in more activities
Plan Content that Caters to the Reasons Why People Choose a Retirement Community
- Location near a shopping centre
- Distance from friends and family
- Access to planned social activities
- Location near hospital or doctor
- Advice or relatives/friends
- Access to other medical services
- Quality and access to home-care services
- Home or personal security
- Access to public transportation
Create Content For Questions About Day-to-Day Life
A frequent apprehension that retirees have about moving into a retirement home is not knowing what to expect from day-to-day life in a community like yours. Sure there are always the pertinent questions around health-care, competency of care, costs and various other practical matters, but what is it like to live there? Consider these questions your potential customers may have:
- What are the people like?
- Will I be happy there?
- Will I fit in with the type of people that live there?
- Can I make new friends?
- Can I afford this?
- Can I live here for the rest of my life?
Video Content
Don’t be afraid to showcase what your community looks and sounds like. If you’ve fostered a culture of liveliness through events, community gatherings and more, make sure you capture that through video. If you have residents that are willing to give you a testimonial, schedule them for a quick video shoot and don’t be afraid to ask them their story and why they chose your community.
Calls to Action
One of the most often forgotten elements of good content is a clear call to action. After all, why take the time to develop a strategy, write the content, drive organic search traffic and not have any of that traffic convert to qualified leads? Make sure that your content has strategically placed calls-to-action that mirror the searcher’s most likely intent for the reason they landed on your article in the first place.
Need a hand in creating a compelling and comprehensive content marketing strategy for your retirement home? Get in touch with our team of content marketing experts today.