Holiday Retirement has rolled out a new website aimed at communicating with prospective residents, presenting a modern online and mobile-friendly interface and improving its searchability online and across the nation.
Now live after several months of beta testing, the site, Holidaytouch.com, is under way serving as a digital face of the company, which manages more than 300 communities across the U.S.
Rather than to focus on Holiday’s properties, the new site is positioned to help current and prospective residents learn about Holiday’s lifestyle, says Jamison Gosselin, vice president of marketing, communications and resident enrichment for Holiday. The approach was multi-faceted.
“Our new site offers a fresh new design in the senior living space,” Gosselin says. “This is more social media-meets-Pinterest-meets-multimedia. It’s modern and senior-friendly. Second, we wanted to communicate more effectively. Third, we are providing valuable information to people who visit our site that prompts them to want to engage in a community, such as seeing what the food is like, or participating in an activity. Content is king.”
The site’s new features include a platform for searching for a local community based on the visitor’s location as well as an event-finder that can be searched by category; and told to help plan a move to a Holiday community. That includes listings of local stores, community resources and events, and other area information useful to someone moving from a distance.
In addition to improvements from the standpoint of the user, Holiday also focused on driving better metrics, better search engine optimization and more comprehensive marketing through the site.
“One major focus was having our website talk better with search engines,” Gosselin says. “As more and more companies become tech savvy and have embarked on SEO adventures, it is becoming more important to keep up on online dynamics—especially with Google. We’re working with our vendor to constantly improve SEO.”
While it is too soon yet to compile metrics since the launch, Holiday says the data it has compiled around web visits in general are pointing to an improved presence through the new site.
Holiday has seen an increase in mobile visits from 6% to 10% year over year, and a 20% to 25% increase in visitor traffic year over year. Lead generation from the website has risen 52% over the same time period.
“We think those numbers are going to improve even more as we do more with the web site,” Gosselin says. “The site is a marketing tool and an information sharing tool to help us educate more people about retirement living.”
Written by Elizabeth Ecker
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