If you want to produce a consistent brand experience for your senior living business, integrated marketing should be something that you implement. To do this, you need to select the right channels to work with, as some may not be suitable for your audience. Having a good balance of offline and online channels will increase your reach and get your community in front of the people you hope to attract to it.

First off, let’s make sure that we understand the term integrated marketing. After that, we will cover what you need to know about identifying the right marketing channels for your business. Getting this right will help you to build relationships with your audience. 

What Exactly Is Integrated Marketing?

In essence, integrated marketing involves coordinating your marketing efforts across various channels. These different channels work in harmony to promote your services as a senior living provider. 

Coordinating your efforts into a strategic campaign across your various channels ensures that you produce a consistent message that ties into your community ethos on the different platforms.

Working Out A Strategy

1. Set Goals

It’s important to understand the goal of your integrated marketing campaign. Think about what you’re trying to achieve. If you run a senior community, are there new units that have become available, and are you trying to promote those? Consider coming up with a tagline that you can continuously use in your marketing for the new units.

Your goals also need to be measurable. This way, you can understand whether your marketing efforts are being pushed through suitable channels or whether you need to adjust your strategy.

To do this, keep track of key performance indicators such as traffic, engagement, sentiment, lead generation, or sales. These need to be clearly linked to the end result (in this case, the end result may be how many units are sold). Map out how you would like your marketing efforts to impact the bottom line.

2. Choose Your Channels

Setting the goals for your integrated marketing campaign will help you find the right direction when it comes to choosing which platforms to use. Some will be more effective than others and depending on your message, not all will be suitable.

As an example, a well-placed roadside billboard could bring in more inquiries than publishing a post on your Facebook business account. But Facebook might be the ideal place to share a resident success story. A radio announcement might work better to announce new wellness initiatives in your community, but not to promote the new look of your available senior living residences.

To tie these all into one another, you should ensure that your branding is consistent, your voice is consistent, and the language you use is consistent.

As you can see, there are many marketing channels to choose from. Print advertising, direct marketing, PR, email marketing, social media, and events are just a few. Integrating your channels helps you to reach a wider audience in a place where they are open to receiving your message.

3. Manage and Measure

Obviously, the marketing team is in charge of all integrated marketing efforts, but it’s not to say that everyone on the team is an expert across various channels. It is therefore important to identify who exactly will be in charge of the various aspects of your entire campaign. Ideally, each person is an expert on their assigned channel and knows how to tailor the right message to reach your audience.

We spoke about the importance of measuring your marketing efforts earlier. It is not enough to know that general sales are picking up. You need to pinpoint exactly which channel is generating the conversions. This will help you to focus your efforts on what is working and not waste time on those that aren’t as effective.

The Question Of Online or Offline

Because we live in an increasingly digital era, the first reaction can often be to focus mainly on online marketing, and this does mostly make sense.

However, keep in mind that the seniors you are trying to attract may not be online that often themselves, though their family probably is. If you hope to reach seniors directly, then offline channels such as a magazine article or radio ad can be more effective.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, ensuring that your community is delivering a consistent message on the right marketing channels can help prospects to connect with the community and get a feel for the services you offer.