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Jason McCloud: Senior Living Communities Looking to Innovate? Use Your Data: Part 1

60% of lead generation in senior living comes from online, and it’s GROWING. If this statistic isn’t representative of your community’s lead generation sources, there’s opportunity to grab some low hanging fruit.

Joining us this week is digital marketing expert Jason McCloud (formerly of Benchmark Senior Living, and currently serving as Executive Director at SageAge Strategies). Jason McCloud is a Digital Marketing Director, and virtual swiss army knife – having an eclectic, well-rounded 11+ year tenure in Senior Living on the provider, agency, operator, and lead/referral aggregator sides of the business. Jason’s unique perspective provides a vantage point few others have in the space.

In Part 1 of this 2-Part FIFF series, Jason and the FIFF team discuss opportunities in today’s competitive senior living landscape. Jason notes that right now is a great time for investors and providers, but the greatest opportunity? Marketing itself. Huge upside potential exists in terms of tactics and strategies for making an investment in your senior living community’s marketing.

Top 3 Steps to integrate and operationalize Marketing Innovation

“Innovation” seems to have overtaken “Strategy” as the top buzz word for senior living marketers. But innovation is the key to remaining successful and retaining competitive advantage.

But what’s the key to innovation? Data.

Data is power, and your community needs to integrate its data properly to connect the dots to track and determine ROI. According to Jason McCloud, there’s still a data disparity in senior living, with some communities having too much data at its disposal, while others aren’t utilizing data enough.

Innovation does not have to be vague and futuristic. There are things you can do today to make progress. To get focused on innovation, Jason McCloud and the FIFF team recommend communities follow these three steps:

1. Education/Re-Education: Does your community understand the benefits?
2. What are the products & services that will help your team accomplish its goals?
3. Do we have the resources to develop & implement?

In addition to the above, Jason and the FiFF team provokes senior living marketers to answer:

• Does your community have table stakes in place?
• Where does my community fall within the senior living industry?
• Does your community have data?
• Does your community have marketing automation?
• Is your data integrated across all your community’s systems?
• How does your community take in leads?
• How does your community respond to leads?

Jason McCloud ruminates that for communities to truly move the needle, focus on what’s driving innovation today. That means making investments in marketing automation and CRM integration. Machine learning is great to conceptualize and think about, but it isn’t affecting your community’s ROI today.

Truly innovative senior living communities are building out customer profiles from Day 1 and incorporating lead scoring to prioritize between hot and cold outreach. These marketing tactics are automated in nature, but compliment the human efforts happening daily. Automation must compliment and support the sales strategy to maximize lead generation flow. Sales teams can then do what they do best: sell.

Integrated strategies allow teams to connect the dots between traditional and digital channels, marrying them and tightening the sales funnel, while also creating better connections with prospective residents.

We provided senior living marketing teams a lot to consider and ponder. In Part-2 of this FiFF series, we’ll continue the conversation with Jason McCloud.  And of course, if your community needs additional context after tuning into the episode, contact the Linkmedia 360 Fresh Insights from Fresh Faces team. We’ll be happy to discuss your community’s unique set of challenges.