There’s a good chance your senior living community’s sales and marketing people have a full plate. And that’s probably a drastic understatement. The reality is, even with the many efficiencies that digital marketing brings to the fold – video marketing, in particular – senior living is still a very competitive industry that seems to change by the day.
That means your community’s marketers should not only use the right tools to stay ahead but, just as importantly, make the most of the limited time and resources they have. So to that point, I’m going to discuss five time-saving tips you can start using today to create video content on a daily basis. Coupled with our insights on connecting with prospects through video, these tips can be the rocket fuel you need to send your occupancy metrics into orbit.
1. Designate and Maintain Recording Space
Finding the right space to record is one of the biggest challenges in creating video content. That's why it's always a good idea to carve out a spot in your office, community, home, or all of the above to make filming a fast, convenient, and easy process.
Remember, video and audio quality play a significant role in how well you engage your target audience with your videos. Ideally, you want a quiet space with a relatively sedate background that won't distract from your video’s subject or message.
Also, different types of videos will require different environments so, whenever possible, designate a space in the community for resident testimonials and staff interviews. A quiet and calm office space with good lighting – preferably natural – will work for intros, explainer videos, tutorials, and similar short video content.
2. Set Time Aside on Calendars
Schedules fill up quickly across your sales and marketing team, often making it a mad scramble just to find time for video creation. However, I have found that communities that set aside time in advance every day are able to generate new video content more consistently. As a best practice, I recommend blocking off a few minutes after any prospect interactions so you can focus on creating video follow-ups.
3. Use Video For Your Follow-Ups
Speaking of follow-ups, when it comes to digital marketing in senior living, many of the most successful communities look beyond social media, webinars, landing pages, case studies, and paid marketing campaigns. Of course, all of those are vital to a well-rounded digital and content marketing strategy that leverages search engine optimization (SEO) and the like. However, there’s an even more potent tactic that will drive occupancy rates for your community – personalization.
When you use personalized OneDay videos for follow-ups after tours, calls with prospects or families, and for general lead outreach, you’re automatically differentiating your community from the competition.
Likewise, from a prospect’s or adult child’s perspective, imagine how much more engaging and empathetic a high-quality, personalized video is rather than a boilerplate email response. While a OneDay video only takes a few minutes to record and send, it can have a massive impact on the buyer’s journey and your move-in rates. This is especially true when you pay attention to and address a prospect's specific needs and include a compelling call to action (CTA).
4. Tap Into Your Leads and Contacts
If you find it challenging coming up with content, I recommend tapping into your leads and contacts every day to identify at least one person to create a OneDay video for. In the hustle and bustle of your team's daily workflow, it can be easy to forget about video content creation. However, I have found that going through that daily exercise of identifying at least one prospect or family member for a video can help keep your video marketing strategy's target audience top of mind for your team.
5. Celebrate Events and Occasions
Video is a great way to let your team’s collective imagination run wild and infuse excitement into your messaging. Celebrating various events and occasions with video content – prospect or referral source birthdays, holidays, community promotions, and others – is a fun and creative way to engage, form emotional bonds, and communicate with leads and key partners.
Using OneDay’s platform as your primary video creation tool makes all of these tips easy to integrate into your team’s workflow. And because it’s so intuitive and convenient to use, video creation with OneDay still leaves plenty of time for the countless other tasks that your sales and marketing people must address. In other words, with OneDay, your digital marketing strategy really can have its cake and eat it, too.