With so many marketing channels available these days — we’re looking at you, social media — you may wonder if your community still needs a website. The answer is an emphatic “yes!”
Your website acts as home base for your brand, and it’s critical for educating prospects about your community and collecting valuable data. But the site that served your needs five years ago likely isn’t sufficient today for anchoring a robust senior living marketing program. To maximize your website investment, pay attention to these important features.
1. Responsive Design
The number-one critical functionality your website needs in 2016 is responsive design. A few years ago, “mobile” site design became a priority in web design. Today, you can assume that a significant percentage of your site visitors will arrive via mobile devices. In 2014, the number of web users on mobile devices exceeded the number using desktop machines. The question now is, what types of mobile devices will your visitors use?
With consumers viewing your site on so many screen sizes, it has become virtually impossible to design “mobile” sites to meet every need. Enter responsive design, which automatically adjusts your site’s pages to look good on any screen size, whether on a tablet, phone or desktop. Responsive design take a lot of the guesswork out of design so you can be assured your site looks good on all viewing devices.
2. Enticing Images and Video
Social media has raised expectations among consumers for information to be delivered in easy to consume, bite-sized nuggets. Compelling photos and videos deliver messaging about your community much more quickly than text can, and they draw in your visitors and hold their interest.
By including professionally produced, short videos on your site, you appeal to visitors who have no desire to read large blocks of text. Images in general — and especially video — provide a powerful window into your community. Images and video also can stand in as a virtual tour of your campus, piquing prospects’ interest and increasing the chances that they’ll want to visit in person.
3. Vital Information About Your Community
Two decades ago, business leaders began realizing en masse that a web presence was no longer optional. So it’s amazing that so many companies still fail to include key information on their websites or make it incredibly difficult to find.
At a minimum, information on your site should include:
- Contact information, including your physical address, phone number and marketing department email address and direct phone numbers.
- Names and brief biographies of key officers, including your CEO, COO, medical director and marketing director.
- Levels of care offered.
- Your mission statement.
- Requirements for residency.
- Brief history and information about sponsorship.
- Affiliations with medical care providers, universities, religious groups and other organizations.
Consider including your resident handbook, sample menus, sample activities calendars, a listing of resident groups and clubs, and information on your wellness program. This is especially important if your food, activities and wellness program are key selling points of your community. The more you can convey about lifestyle benefits on your site, the more likely prospects will be to email or call you to schedule a visit.
4. Ease of Use
In 2014, research found that 55 percent of website visitors stay on a page for less than 15 seconds. If your site is confusing, lacks intuitive navigation, looks dated, loads slowly or is simply difficult to use, you can bet that time on site metric will be reduced.
Contrary to a trend that surfaced a few years ago, your page titles should be clear, simple and generally in line with convention. Users who want to know the name of your CEO will look for an “About Us” or “About” link. Those who want to contact you will want to see a link with “Contact,” “Contact Us” or a similarly clear label. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel here or make users scratch their heads unnecessarily.
And remember that many prospective residents may find your site through a search engine and, therefore, may not visit your home page first. Every page needs a clearly labeled, standard navigational structure and menu.
5. Valuable Data
Does your site incorporate Google Analytics or another analytics package to log and track user activity? If not, installing one of these useful tools will immediately make your website more valuable to your marketing efforts.
With the proper code installed on each page of your site, you can track:
- Number and location of visitors.
- Demographic information, including gender and age.
- The page on which users entered your site.
- Keywords by which users found your site.
- Devices used for browsing your site.
- Content and pages viewed during visits.
- Time spent browsing your site.
- Video views and file downloads.
- Conversions such as number of inquiry forms generated.
Traffic, engagement and conversion metrics should be reviewed regularly to determine the behavior of your site visitors and identify areas that are most popular or areas that may benefit from modifications. Set up your most desirable website actions as conversions in Google Analytics Goals and watch as your marketing efforts lift conversions. The more goal conversions you can report, the more bragging rights you’ll have when marketing and advertising dividends pay off.
6. Fresh Content
Content that’s frequently updated and relevant to your overall brand will help boost your search rankings. It also will get visitors coming back to your site more often.
The best content, of course, entices and persuades your visitors to take action, whether that’s calling you or requesting more information. By creating a blog that’s updated on a regular basis with useful and interesting content, you increase the opportunities for engagement with your visitors and establish your community as an authority in the senior living industry.
Let’s face it. Creating content takes time. To get the most out of your time investment, publish/repost your blog content on your social media profiles and get the added exposure and visibility from cross channel content promotion.
Keeping Your Website Sharp
Maintaining an up-to-date, engaging website remains critical to an effective senior living marketing program. By adding responsive design, enticing imagery, video, blog content and other important features, you’ll ensure your position in search rankings and keep your prospective residents coming back.
The post Make the Most of Your Senior Living Website appeared first on Walker Marketing | Best Marketing Agency.