This article is sponsored by Conversion Logix. In this Voices interview, Senior Housing News sits down with Jennifer Lovely, Executive Vice President, Conversion Logix, to learn about growing a business through digital marketing and the impact it has on senior living operators and their residents. Lovely also discusses the company’s new virtual assistant, as well as its “capture, connect, and convert,” approach to digital marketing in senior living.
Senior Housing News: Jennifer, what career experiences do you most draw from in your role today with Conversion Logix?
Jennifer Lovely: One of the first things I learned in my career was listening to prospects and meeting the person where they are. It’s really important to understand their business and pain points. Once you’ve understood that, it’s important to stay organized and follow up. After a prospect becomes a client, it’s key to have open communication with coworkers and employees within an organization to ensure everyone is on the same page.
One of the reasons that Conversion Logix is so successful is we have actual boots-on-the ground experience. We’ve all been in the ‘heads in beds’ industry, so we understand senior living, and multi-family. We understand that business, how it works, and we also understand the revenue management piece.
Conversion Logix is a software and attribution company as much as we are a digital advertising agency. There are lots of digital advertising agencies out there, but not all of them have a software platform that connects and converts traffic. We also look at attribution with all of our clients, which is huge. If you don’t know what’s working and what’s not working and where your traffic is coming from, you’re not able to change, implement, pivot, and update as needed to make sure that everything you’re doing is successful.
Tell us about Conversion Logix. How is the company helping senior living operators scale their marketing based on the needs of their business?
Lovely: Senior living is so dynamic with changing priorities based upon occupancy, levels of care, census, etc. At Conversion Logix, we enable clients to scale their marketing based on the needs of their business. What type of prospects are they trying to attract? What levels of care do they offer? Where are they located? Are they in a downtown area or a suburban area? We look at all those variables, and then we move forward with multichannel campaign management, lead generation applications (the Conversion Cloud modules), data-driven campaign optimization, and then a consultative approach along with it, which I think is kind of that clincher and a real key component to our client’s success.
Anybody can go out and create a cookie cutter digital marketing campaign, but we look at all the aspects of your business and we also have a conversation with you. We have that consultative approach in the beginning, and then as we go along.
Maybe we uncover that there’s a sales issue. Or as we have a conversation and have that consultative approach, we’ll say, “Gosh, it looks like everything should be running okay. Tell me a little bit about the marketplace,” and then we find out there’s two brand new competitors. We’re constantly talking to you and getting those little tidbits that you normally wouldn’t see on a digital marketing report or a campaign report.
Conversion Logix summarizes its continuous approach to digital marketing as capture, connect, and convert. What is the impact on senior living operators and their businesses and their residents of Conversion Logix defining its approach through those three Cs, as opposed to being more broad, more vague, and just saying, “We do digital marketing?”
Lovely: You have to have all of these pieces of the puzzle for your marketing to work. You’re capturing, connecting, and converting. The three Cs represent the process to drive the traffic, generate leads, and then nurture those leads or prospects until they convert.
You have to have your pipeline full all the time in order to continue getting people in the door. You don’t want to have everyone at the decision-making process where you close, and then there’s nothing left and you have a lull for two or three months. This continuous approach allows your pipeline to always be full. Everyone’s at different stages of the journey, so we’re getting prospects’ attention, we’re generating traffic, we’re converting that traffic, and then we’re nurturing that traffic and hopefully getting them to deposit and move in.
You recently added two new applications to the Conversion Cloud, they are Claire and Spotlight. What are these features, and how did they help senior living prospects find the right community?
Lovely: We offer live chat, and recently, we added Claire. Claire is a virtual assistant/robot solution. Sometimes people don’t want to have a live conversation. They just want to ask a simple question and get a simple answer without getting involved in an entire conversation. When questions do become more involved and complex, as they do in senior living, live chat is a great option for prospects, too.
Then we added Spotlight to the Conversion Cloud. Spotlight helps you to feature your community. It’s 100% customizable, because you want to make sure you’re meeting your prospects at every stage. For example, I might be the only sibling who’s on board. I know Mom is in between IL and AL, she’s fighting it, and all my siblings say she doesn’t need a place. With Spotlight, I can feature my community with an event that I know my mom’s going to love. I’m like, “Hey, I found this really cool event. Why don’t we go check it out?” That’s a way to get her in the door and have her change her perspective.
Another feature of Spotlight is I can have an offer message that says, “Request a brochure.” Maybe I’m not ready to have a full-on conversation. I can peruse that brochure, find some tidbits where I might be able to resonate with my siblings a little bit, and get them to get on board.
Maybe you’re meeting people in their very initial stages and they are wondering, “Gosh, what does it look like to live here versus living at home? What’s the cost comparison? Does it even make sense to move into senior living?” A community can actually have a cost calculator one of their Spotlight options. These modules or apps, not only spotlight different features in your community they capture lead information for your leasing team to follow up.
Sometimes operators know that their marketing efforts are not working, but they can’t put a finger on the reason. What do you find is most frequently the reason, and how do you address it?
Lovely: Most frequently, the reason operators can’t figure out whether their marketing efforts are working or not is because they can’t tell what their attribution is. Clients are coming to us because they don’t know where the disconnect is because they don’t have visibility into their marketing campaign.
Not having all the tools to analyze the campaign performance and attribution in the customer’s journey puts the operators at a disadvantage. We’re able to see within the campaign, every step of the journey, what’s working, what’s not working, and where the disconnect is. Our Clarity attribution report and journey visualizer uncovers these insights and helps us to leverage campaigns and performance. If we see, “Gosh, this portion of the campaign is working really well,” then maybe we can reallocate budgeted dollars to that, versus something else that’s not working.
Senior living prospects don’t all come to senior living on the same timeframe. How can operators adjust their marketing timelines and strategies to connect with a range of prospects, including those who when you first made contact with them are further away from being ready to buy?
Lovely: Obviously, seniors, their families, their loved ones, their friends, they all have varying timelines to find a community. It’s really important for the operators or marketers to adjust their marketing strategies to connect with these prospects. You want to meet people at every stage of the journey. It’s really important to make sure that you’ve got different ways to connect, whether that is just sending them a brochure, or actually scheduling a tour.
But ever since we went through 2020, people have just adjusted their ways of doing things, so maybe not only have an in-person tour, but have a virtual tour, a phone conversation, have various ways of touring the property. I think a lot of adult children too have realized, “Hey, I can sit at my computer with mom on Zoom tours/calls, and I can knock out three tours a lot quicker than getting in my car and driving to all three places.”
Because not everybody has the same timeframe, maybe people who are in the beginning stages just want to know: Do I qualify? Can I do a cost comparison? What does it look like? Can I just request a brochure? Could I maybe just come for an event? Maybe having all of those different opportunities, instead of just thinking that everybody’s ready to come in for a tour today, and everybody’s a hot lead. It might take one touch, or it could take 7 to 10 touches, so it’s important to meet them where they’re at.
Finish this sentence: “For operators to best prepare and be best prepared for 2023, one strategy they should employ right now for the remainder of this year is…”
Lovely: People need to learn how to pivot.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Conversion Logix delivers a powerful combination of strategic campaign management, ad creative, lead generation software, and marketing attribution to provide your team with scalable and performance-driven digital marketing solutions. To learn more, visit: www.conversionlogix.com.
The Voices Series is a sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends, topics and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For more information on Voices, please contact [email protected].