Summary
Five Star Senior Living was not reaching the full potential of prospective residents online, but with the help of Boston Interactive, we developed a holistic digital strategy that positioned Five Star at ideal points in their buyer’s journey to capture leads. As a result, Five Star has increased their site visitors by 139% and increased their weekly leads by 23%.
About
As a national healthcare and senior living provider headquartered in Massachusetts, Five Star Senior Living offers the highest quality service and care that comes with the warmth and hospitality of home. They have an extensive network of independent living, healthcare, continuing care, and assisted living facilities. However, during the early stages of a prospect’s path to purchase, Five Star’s messaging and marketing did not exist; therefore, they were not reaching the full potential of prospective residents — and their families — online.
The Problem
Five Star had primarily focused on leads in the latter portion of the buyer’s journey. These leads had already expressed interest in senior living, and Five Star’s marketing strategy was only reacting to inquiries. This gap allowed competitors ample opportunity to steer early-stage prospects away from Five Star, so they needed to engage prospects as quickly as possible.
Five Star realized that they required Boston Interactive’s skills to create a holistic marketing program. In order to capture the attention of Five Star’s target audience, educate them on the superior qualities and amenities of Five Star’s communities, and ultimately convert them to residents, they needed a strategy from Boston Interactive that took into account their entire ecosystem — something more encompassing than their existing methods.
Boston Interactive and Five Star’s relationship first began with a website redesign. However, after the launch there was a lot of drop off occurring with site visitors who would leave the site before converting. They needed Boston Interactive to take a look at their digital strategy and determine how the company was capturing and nurturing leads to the decision making stage.
Five Star was doing a great job of engaging individuals who were at the consideration and decision phase of their buying journey, but failing at engaging leads who were at the top of the funnel — basically residents and their families who weren’t ready to visit the property or move in.
The Solution
In order to place Five Star Senior Living at the forefront of their industry, Boston Interactive leveraged the nature of Five Star’s personas and the unique journey each persona takes as they determine which is the best senior living residence for their needs. The discovery process resulted in several fully realized personas, including the Adult Daughter, the Senior Prospect, the Friend, and the Referring Physician. By understanding the needs of each persona, we took advantage of this opportunity to create valuable, trustworthy content. During the decision making process, each persona requires a variety of research, guides, and other self-help materials to help them make an educated decision. Because of how personal this process is, the material Boston Interactive created reflected the compassion and respect that Five Star Senior Living is already known for. When their target user downloaded the content, Boston Interactive put them into a lead nurture program and provided them with content until they were ready to visit a property. We were able to keep the conversation moving, helping Five Star stay at the top of their prospects’ minds.
Boston Interactive built a dedicated Resource Center on the main corporate site. The Resource Center would act as a hub for relevant, engaging content that addressed the needs of each of the personas. From early-stage prospects, content around the warning signs for Alzheimer’s and tips for exercising the brain as people age can be found in the Resource Center. Additionally, as prospects move further down the funnel, and they begin searching for content about making the decision to move to Five Star, they can find articles on affording senior living as well as video testimonials from current residents. The Resource Center provides Five Star Senior Living a strong inbound strategy as it attracts potential visitors through tactics like social media promotion, search engine optimization (SEO), and paid search.
As valuable as it was, the Resource Center alone could not capture the leads we needed at this early stage in the buyer’s journey. Therefore, we recommended a content marketing strategy that included the creation of high-value content that could be used to capture lead information as well as an email drip campaign to nurture leads to conversion.
We wrote and designed several e-books aimed to our Adult Daughter persona on top-of-funnel topics such as warning signs and dementia. We created blog articles, landing pages, social media posts, social media advertising, and retargeting ads to promote the ebooks.
Once we captured leads, we dropped them into a nurture email track using HubSpot. We wrote, designed, and developed several email touchpoints that we then implemented into a nurture workflow. Using our marketing automation platform, we can manage the leads by implementing lead scoring, setting up lead life-cycle stages, aggregating data on the user, and dictating the cadence between email touches. For the client satisfaction survey campaign, the open rate was 57%, and the overall open rate for our entire database was 44%. For blogs, the open rate was 24%, and these numbers are all indications that Five Star was improving greatly in reaching their audiences. Our strategy and implementation bridges the gap between Five Star’s marketing and sales departments.
Tools and Strategy
The primary tool used, and still being used in this project is HubSpot. At the same time, Five Star has a deep integration with HubSpot and their instance of Salesforce for transferring lead information. We also drive traffic to these landing pages using Facebook campaigns. The primary use of has been creating eBook landing pages on HubSpot and driving traffic to them via Facebook advertisements.
Boston Interactive employed a robust lead capture and nurture program that is unique for the senior living industry. There are no other large-scale senior living communities that are utilizing a marketing automation tool to attract leads in the ways that we implemented. By using top-of-funnel eBooks and an automated email campaign, we moved beyond traditional marketing methods to fully engage our audiences and provide them with the exact information they seek.
The inbound methodology was also present throughout our work with Five Star’s strategy, especially when it came to the Resource Center that used tactics like social media promotion, paid search, and SEO to attract and engage potential visitors. Our email nurture campaign was another way we utilized inbound methods, as following up with Five Star’s leads is an effective way to further build and reinforce relationships with their prospects. Because of the specific personas that were developed, the emails could be personalized to the needs and interests of the different populations looking into Five Star’s services and offerings.
The work between Boston Interactive and Five Star Senior Living is still an ongoing project, with strategies being implemented on a rolling basis. We think that Rob Poyas, the VP of Sales and Marketing for Five Star, sums up our relationship wonderfully: “Partnering with Boston Interactive for our digital sales and marketing efforts was one of the best decisions we’ve made. We appreciate that the Boston Interactive team is always on top of the latest digital marketing trends and we’re constantly evolving our online presence to drive sales. The key is that Boston Interactive is an active partner and they have committed to understanding our company and industry, and how we’re unique. The true measure of success in sales is measured by customer acquisition and we’ve seen three consecutive years of double digit growth from our digital segment since partnering with Boston Interactive.” We are excited to see how Five Star Senior Living continues to grow and connect with residents and their families.