Uplifting Occupancy and Staffing in a Midwest Assisted Living Community
Background
Our client, a 64-bed assisted living community in the midwest United States, is deeply committed to providing compassionate care in a small-town setting. Specializing in long-term care, hospice care, skilled nursing, and memory care services, they uphold the highest standards of well-being for their residents and their families, backed by the dedicated service of their professional staff.
This predicament led them to seek the expertise of Senior Care Growth by Whittington Consulting, aiming to revitalize their online presence and marketing strategies.
The Challenge: Raise Occupancy and Hire Skilled Nurses
Faced with the dual goals of increasing their patient census and attracting more job applicants, the client sought a tailored digital marketing solution. Their occupancy rate had declined to 80% and because of their rural location, it was difficult to recruit skilled nursing candidates.
The initial assessment revealed a significant challenge: the absence of effective digital marketing. The community was using the traditional means of advertising their services, but had yet to try online marketing to recruit residents and nurses. Operating within a constrained budget, it was critical for us to devise a strategy that maximized reach and efficiently targeted potential residents and qualified job candidates.
Our Solution: Expanding Reach with Strategic Digital Advertising
Embracing the client's goals, we set out to enhance their staff recruitment efforts and boost patient admissions through a carefully planned Google advertising campaign. We set up a Google Ads account for the community, and then thoughtfully created their campaigns. This initial phase involved:
- Designing and implementing landing pages to increase the relevance of their message to each audience they hoped to reach.
- Establishing a comprehensive analytics framework to track conversions through HubSpot.
- Curating a targeted keyword list to optimize the campaign’s reach and effectiveness.
- Writing engaging ads tailored to attract both potential residents and job applicants. Multiple ads were written for both target audiences so they could be performance-tested.
- Implementing geotargeting to focus on audiences within a 50-mile radius of their location.
We launched two advertising campaigns – one aimed at prospective patients and and one at skilled nursing job candidates. This involved developing multiple persona-specific landing pages catering to various audience segments such as potential hires, future residents, and those seeking end-of-life care, hospice care, skilled nursing, and memory care services.
Following the campaign setup, our focus shifted to optimization, enhancing keywords, ad copy, landing pages, and bidding strategies to ensure the most efficient use of the advertising budget. By narrowing focus with “negative keywords,” we minimized wasteful ad spend and refined our ad targeting to match specific search queries, improving ad relevance and effectiveness.
The Results: Significant Improvements in Online Engagement and Lead Generation
Our work yielded significant improvements in various metrics and key performance indicators. Moving their educational resource library to HubSpot substantially increased website performance scores, making the client's resources more likely to appear in search engine results. The most notable wins include:
- Web traffic growth: Overall website visits improved by 137% and unique visitors increased 134%, helping our client build their audience by having better search engine visibility.
- Increased lead generation: Lead generation optimizations resulted in a 149.5% increase in potential patients for their home health line of business and an average of 115 new sales opportunities monthly for the personal care line of business.
- Enhanced user experience: The newly designed homepage saw an 88% increase in user sessions.
- Improved website performance: Website performance scores overall improved 32.7%. Website performance scores for their educational content improved 61.8%, dramatically increasing the likelihood of appearing in Google search results.
This comprehensive approach to digital marketing not only addressed the immediate challenges faced by the senior care provider but also laid the groundwork for sustained growth and improved patient acquisition.
Services Used
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