5 Useful Tips To Improve Senior Care Display Advertising Campaigns

In recent years, we’ve been working on and refining online marketing and advertising projects in the senior care industry. The growing demand for trusted assisted living, nursing home, independent living, and home health care experiences brings with it the challenge for senior care organizations to get their branding messages out to those who need care.

Online Senior Care Marketing Strategies

We’ve developed a six-part marketing strategy that has produced increasingly good results for senior care organizations to attract visitors to their business.

1. Emotional Connection display (banner) ads and retargeting campaigns
2. Other digital ads
3. Reputation management and marketing
4. Website and email visitors lead generation
5. Optimized Google My Business pages
6. Stacked Press Releases

In this article, we’ll discuss display and retargeting ad tips. Future posts will cover the other 5 elements.

Display ad spending now exceeds search ad TV spending. An effective display ad campaign can boost brand building, site visits, and calls to the facility. Remember that however you choose to advertise, senior care advertising can target not only the seniors, but also the senior’s family, referring professionals such as doctors, and community organizations.

Some senior care marketers are having success with Facebook ads. I think in the case of senior care, Google and other more broadly accessible ad networks are somewhat better than Facebook ads. Why? Because Facebook’s closed ad system means that people must be logged in and paying attention to Facebook in order to view your ad. And even though the number of Facebook users is huge, it makes more sense to use ad networks with a broader reach.

The good news is that it’s not an either/or. You can use them both in your ad portfolio and determine what’s more effective.

5 Useful Display Ad Tips For Senior Care Ad Campaigns

But here’s five things we’ve learned are important about display ads and retargeting in the senior care industry:

1. Use a combination of Retargeting ad campaigns (targeting prior visits to your website), and cold traffic campaigns. Cold traffic campaigns will expand your reach to relevant audiences.
2. Retargeting campaigns are absolutely necessary. I don’t have specific senior care industry data, but most likely this niche follows the general norm – over 90% of web page visitors will arrive and leave without taking action. Retargeting campaigns will show ads to these visitors so that you stay top of mind. Without retargeting, these prospects could be lost to you forever.
3. When running cold traffic ad campaigns (without retargeting), the quality of the targeting is critical if you’re to spend ad dollars wisely. Demographics that drill down into those who are in-market looking for senior care services is often better than targeting interests. Interest targeting tells you who’s interested in senior care topics. Demographics targeting finds more people who have actual buying intent. In a recent senior care case study, we were able to show how proper targeting and effective display ads increased the click-through rate of senior care cold traffic campaigns by 1900% over the industry average.
4. Emotional connection display ads are important. For example, images of an older woman reading to a young child such as the one pictured in this section strike an emotional chord with the viewer that an ad image of the facility never could, no matter how great the facility looks. (see how to get a free ad at the end of this article.)
5. Ad themes, images, and copy should alternate between branding, offer, reputation (testimonial), and service description ads. Do this because:

• It displays the full spectrum of who you are and what you have to offer.
• It avoids the ad blindness so common when an ad is shown repeatedly over a short period of time.
• It can cover different submarkets, for example, branding display ads often appeal to prospective employee talent as well as to families.

There’s obviously a lot more to senior care digital ad campaigns than this article can cover. For example, I also like Youtube video and click-to-call ad campaigns for mobile users, both can be very effective in certain circumstances.

What’s Next:

What’s best is to set a monthly ad budget and goals, layout an initial campaign strategy, split test and optimize, then select the ads and elements that work best to create the brand recognition and increased patient numbers that meet your goals.

In the next post, we’ll talk about senior care reputation management and marketing, and how it can grow your brand. It’s a topic that every senior care organization needs to pay much more attention to.

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Greg Jordan is the founder of the B2B Resource Team LLC, an online presence marketing and advertising agency. For more information go to www.b2bresourceteam.com.

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