Facebook Ads. We’ve all seen them. We’ve all ignored them. But we’ve also all clicked on them, sometimes without even knowing.
At first thought, you might assume that Facebook Ads are only good for highlighting low-cost, impulse-purchase products or for retargeting online retail shoppers who have been eyeing that one pair of sneakers for about three months now but just haven’t been able to commit to buying them yet.
And you’d be right, Facebook Ads do work extremely well in these circumstances. But that’s not all they are good for and by reducing their effectiveness to just ecommerce (or essentially replacing those classic late-night infomercials) you would be severely underestimating their power and importance in the world of senior living.
In short, YES, Facebook Ads can be effective for senior living communities looking to reach and engage potential residents and their families. Facebook has a large user base including many active users over the age of 55 as well as their families, making it an invaluable platform for reaching your target audience.
However, running Facebook Ads for your senior living communities is not a plug-and-play operation. We’ve worked with multiple senior living communities and property management companies who have approached their Facebook Ads exactly this way and that is the very reason why their Facebook Ads generated little to no revenue or increases in occupancy.
It All Starts With A Plan
Like everything else that goes into your marketing plans, Facebook Ads should be treated no differently and should not be taken any less seriously. If set up correctly, Facebook Ads can be a fantastic marketing tool for your senior living communities to (1) increase awareness about your community to prospects in your local or targeted area, (2) inform those prospects about your community’s programs and unique offerings, and (3) convert those prospects into leads by encouraging and educating them along the Buyer’s Journey until they ultimately become a resident.
The Question To Start It All
When getting started, we recommend clients to do a marketing audit to establish their overall marketing goals. Once those goals are clear, it’s time to look for opportunities to implement the power of Facebook Ads. A key question we like to ask at this point is “Where can Facebook Ads be used to bridge the gap between marketing touch points?”
If you’ve been running ads for your senior living community for a while and are familiar with your community’s web analytics, you have probably seen that the majority of your tour requests and other bottom-of-the-funnel conversions typically come from high-intent sources such or Google Ads, email marketing campaigns, or even Direct. This is most likely never going to change. However, those high-intent sources might not perform so well during the research stage at the top-of-the-funnel or even in the consideration stage throughout the middle. This is where Facebook Ads can truly shine and help to bridge those gaps that often occur from the awareness to engagement stages and then ultimately from engagement to conversion.
Now, Facebook Ads can be set up to focus on what we would call direct-response conversions but this is by-far the most expensive, and least-likely way to generate leads from Facebook Ads for Senior Living. An example of this method would be: the only Facebook Ads you have running are direct calls-to-action to schedule a tour. Unfortunately, this is the method MOST senior living communities are actively using right now.
If you are considering running ads on Facebook, please do not use this method.
This is a fantastic call-to-action, but only if your prospect knows who you are, is at the bottom of the funnel, is financially qualified, and is ready to commit enough to physically come to your location with the intent of leaving their home behind and potentially selling a large portion of their possessions to move to your community. Users seeing an ad from you for the first time on Facebook will most likely not be at this stage. By contrast, a user searching on Google for your community by name very well could be.
Each of these platforms serves a unique purpose and neither one should be fully relied on to do all of the work. But too many senior living communities and property management companies approach both platforms as equal and give each of them the same task. When Facebook fails to generate the same quality and quantity of leads that Google does on the surface, they assume it is useless and a waste of their marketing dollars.
Conclusion
Facebook Ads can prove to be an incredibly effective tool for senior living communities, provided they are utilized correctly. To see great results with Facebook, it requires a willingness to think creatively and to approach the platform with an open mind. While Facebook Ads does have its limitations, it is important to collaborate with the platform to leverage its strengths. In the end, you might end up creating marketing opportunities that you wouldn’t have had previously, providing you with an advantage over others in this competitive market.
We’ll talk more in future blog posts about how to incorporate Facebook Ads into your marketing plan, but we hope we’ve given you some thought to take to your existing team to have some healthy dialogue and get the ball rolling.
