Case Study

Uplifting Occupancy and Staffing in a Midwest Assisted Living Community

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The Challenge

Raise Occupancy and Hire Skilled Nurses

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.

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.
Senior Care Community

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 Result

Boosting Occupancy and Recruiting

Our client saw significant improvements in both patient census and staff recruitment. Regular optimizations and targeted advertising strategies resulted in a more efficient allocation of their budget, directly contributing to the achievement of the client’s objectives.

We met monthly to review key performance indicators, providing the client with transparent insights into the campaign’s success and facilitating ongoing discussions to refine and adjust the campaign as needed.

Notable Results

New Nursing Hires: The client was able to hire 7 new skilled nursing employees as a direct result of our digital advertising efforts.

Occupancy Pipeline: The digital advertising campaign also added 81 new resident prospects to their sales pipeline with an average 5.03% conversion rate.