Why CRMs Are Important in the Senior Living Industry

There’s a silver tsunami heading our way, and it won’t just affect coastal communities. The reality is that 10,000 members of the Baby Boomer generation are turning 65 every day. If your business is in the senior living industry, it’ll soon be time to sink or swim. An increase in your target market is on the horizon and you have to rise to meet the challenge. So how can you prepare for this impending silver tsunami?

Baby Boomers – Rise of the Silver Web-Surfers

To fully understand Baby Boomers as a demographic and to successfully tailor your sales and marketing efforts, you need to put aside any bias. Baby Boomers might surprise you. They’re retiring later than previous generations; they’re digitally literate; and they’re searching for answers to their questions online, so you need to provide digital solutions for them. That doesn’t mean that traditional outlets like direct mail should be completely abandoned; all of your touchpoints, both online and off, should be coordinated to work together toward conversion/residency.

Capabilities of a CRM

CRMs provide the connection between touchpoints for your contacts – be they current residents, families, or prospective residents. Whether you want to create social media posts, send out a mass email, set up an email drip campaign, create new landing pages or web forms to gather more lead information, send a post-tour survey, or create a mailing list of your top-qualified leads, a CRM can help you gather information about your target audience and put it to good use as you reach out to them.

Benefits of a CRM for Senior Living Communities

There are plenty of CRMs to choose from, but when you go with one that’s tailored specifically for the senior living industry and skilled nursing organizations, you’ll benefit from:

• Lead Management – All the information you’ve collected about your lead (from form fills and subsequent interactions with your content) lives here and is constantly being updated.
• Automated Workflows – No more wondering if progress is being made – you can track it easily.
• Customizable Fields – Which metrics and indicators are important for your business? You can make the CRM work for you.
• Marketing Automation – Follow up with an email when leads schedule a tour. Follow up the tour with a quick text survey to see what they thought. Add leads to a certain email drip campaign based on their indicated interest. All without manual labor.
• Custom Dashboards – You can create custom dashboards with the metrics you choose so that you can quickly and easily digest the important data and the takeaways you gather from it.

Ultimately, it’s the combination of customizability and convenience that makes a CRM a must-have tool. CRMs specific to the senior living industry make the process even more powerful. It also provides a nexus to house all that data that sales and marketing both use.

As the silver tsunami hits and your target market grows, you’ll be ready and able to keep track of all the moving pieces with a fully integrated CRM. You’ll also be able to use that platform for many of your digital marketing efforts – to reach them when they’re out there searching for you. And when you can close the loop between sales and marketing, then you can see the results of your work and investments as resident occupancy increases, and make better decisions for your business with that data backing you.

Charlotte Price – Content Creator