8 Keys to Create Compelling Events that Drive Sales in Senior Living

8 Keys to Create Compelling Events that Drive Sales in Senior Living

Do you have 50 plus prospective residents at every event?  If not, why not?  Here are just eight keys to keep in mind when planning great events that can fill your building.

1)   Pick a theme that would compel a senior to leave the comfort of their home, spend $4.00 a gallon on gas to drive to your retirement community and want to invite a friend to enjoy the experience with them.

2)   Organize your event, so every first impression is excellent.  Have someone out front directing parking, greet them at the door with a registration table, train tour guides, your community should be spotless, have an exciting program and maybe most important – present excellent food and beverages for their enjoyment.

3)   The goal is fill your building!  If you are going to have live entertainment, there must still be a 10 to 15 minute program with a resident testimonial.   Or maybe you are going to have a Power Point of your benefits and what differentiates you from other senior living communities?  Don’t be boring…

4)   You only have the senior’s attention for about 1½ hours maximum, so if you spend the time feeding and entertaining them, they will be too tired to tour your community.  Strategize out every minute they are going to be in the building.

5)   Invite them to come back and spend more time, so they can get a better feel of your retirement community.  It’s hard for people to decide in 1½ hours where they are going to spend the next chapter of their life.

6)   There should be at least 1/3 new faces at your event.

7)   Some senior living communities draw new prospective seniors best by advertising with direct mail, others with newspaper and still others work best with a combo.

8)   After spending all the time, money and staff resources on a great event, don’t forget to call them the next day.  Invite them back…

I had two events this week for Continuing Care Retirement Communities; one drew 85 seniors to RSVP in a rural area and the other had over 100 seniors RSVP in a metropolitan area.  This traffic will help fill the building for the next two months.

Do you want more information on how to put on a great event?  Chapter 6 of “Senior Housing Marketing – How to Increase Your Occupancy and Stay Full,” offers a step-by-step approach to successful events and many ideas for compelling themes.  Good luck and please share your success…

Diane Twohy Masson is the author of Senior Housing Marketing – How to Increase Your Occupancy and Stay Full,” available for sale at Amazon.com.  If your curiosity is piqued to inquire on Diane’s availability to speak at a senior housing conference (CCRC, independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing or memory care) – please call: 206-853-6655 or email diane@marketing2seniors.net.  Diane is currently consulting in Southern California for Freedom Management Company, the proud debt-free owners of Freedom Village in Lake Forest and The Village in Hemet, California.  For more information:   Twitter: @market2seniors Web: www.marketing2seniors.net Blog: http://marketing2seniors.net/blog/

HELP – I Don’t Have Time to Make My Follow Up Calls!

Is this you?  Is this your senior living sales person?  Unless you have 10 to 15 tours a week, you have time to make follow up phone calls.  Some people share this song and dance with only having one or two tours for the week – really?  Come on…what are you really doing?

A legitimize excuse, for not making calls, would be having five move-ins for the week!  That’s a lot of paperwork!   If you were organizing a health fair with twenty venders to generate more leads – would also be worthy of a pass.

Time management is a beautiful thing and not everyone has this gift.  Sales people need coaching, goals and daily targets to achieve.  Break it down, to connecting with 15 people in a day.  Recent averages for my successful sales people would be about 30 phone calls in a day to achieve 15 voice-to-voice contacts (this can include call-ins, but mostly call-outs).  Out of the 15 voice contacts, they averaged scheduling 3 to 6 appointments per day for prospective residents to come to the community.  Two people, who were called in one day, were actually interested in moving in soon.  One person said, “The timing of your call was perfect, it’s time that I move into a retirement community.”

Phone calling success in senior housing includes inviting them to exciting events at the community, which you should have on at least a monthly basis.  Chapter six in my book Senior Housing Marketing – How to Increase Your Occupancy and Stay Full is Great Events Can Fill Your Building.

An almost imperceptible time drain can include taking too much time talking to residents and/or helping residents.  We love them so much and it’s so much easier to shoot the breeze with residents instead of hearing another “no” on the telephone from our database.  Our residents deserve dignity and respect.  But let’s look at all the employees at your senior living community… 97% or more of the employees are hired to take care of the residents.  Less than 3% handle the marketing to fill the building.  Marketers should redirect the resident to the 97% or more of the operational employees who are being paid to serve them.  I believe in the two-minute rule, any resident can have one to two minutes and then say, “I would love to talk longer, but I have a phone call, meeting or tour that I need to do,” (whatever is really true).

The bottom line is that proactive marketers make follow up phone calls the next day after a tour and on a regular basis communicate with their database.  Start increasing your occupancy today…

Diane Twohy Masson is the author of “Senior Housing Marketing – How to Increase Your Occupancy and Stay Full,” available for sale at Amazon.com.  If your curiosity is piqued to inquire on Diane’s availability to speak at a senior housing conference (CCRC, independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing or memory care) – please call: 206-853-6655 or email diane@marketing2seniors.net.  Diane is currently consulting in Southern California for Freedom Management Company, the proud debt-free owners of Freedom Village in Lake Forest and The Village in Hemet, California.  For more information: Twitter: @market2seniors Web: www.marketing2seniors.netBlog: http://marketing2seniors.net/blog/

Great Events Can Fill Your Building

Are you afraid of events or do you embrace them? How innovative are your events? Are they attracting qualified prospects to your community? The sole purpose of events is to have new prospects walk in your door and say, “Wow! This is where I want to live.” This chapter goes into detail on ideas and how to put on a great event.

What is your definition of an event? For example, the community picnic is a wonderful celebration for all residents and their families. It is not an appropriate event to invite prospects because they don’t want to see the sea of wheelchairs and walkers from the assisted living and skilled nursing residents. Please do not call this a marketing event. The community picnic is an event for existing residents and should be handled by resident services/activity directors. Marketing directors can help, but they need to stay focused on new sales or there won’t be any.

So how many marketing events should you be having? My recommendations:

  • Large events should be held three to four times a year.
  • Small events should be one to two times a month, depending on occupancy needs and your ability to attract new faces.

Let’s break each of them down from start to finish for ideas and planning to produce effective events.

A large event draws one hundred to three hundred attendees. Who do you invite? First on your guest list is your wait list. There are people percolating on your wait list who just need a subtle push to call the moving van and order change of address cards. If your event is done properly, it should result in three to five move-ins in the next quarter. Secondly, one-third of your guests must be new faces. These will come from two sources: advertising and resident referrals. I recommend a quarter page ad in your local newspaper. Please see recommendations for a newspaper ad in Media Buying, Advertising, Public Relations, and Community Building with a Skinny Piggy Bank. The third group to invite is friends of the residents. Many communities get 50 percent or more of their new leads from resident referrals.

Tip: The best way to get resident referrals is to let residents know that they have an opportunity to attend this fabulous event if they bring a guest who is interested in moving to your community. Hello? Knock, knock? Many of your residents’ friends probably qualify age-wise and financially to move to your community. Start informing the residents two months ahead of the event.

Tip: Make the event something exciting enough that residents will be able to enthusiastically endorse it and want their friends to attend. Do not have the CEO or a botanist describing the cross section of a leaf to be the main speaker. You may as well have an event to watch your newly painted walls dry. No offense to CEOs, but you are not a big enough draw. A resident’s Disney family vacation slide shows are for the residents to see, not your prospects. That theme will make your guest feel grumpy, dopey, and sleepy. Now if you wanted to invite the real Mickey Mouse and give away a trip for two to Disneyland…but that might be too expensive and that would be goofy.

To summarize your event attendance goals:

  • Approximately one-third new faces
  • One-third wait list members
  • One-sixth will be second looks (their second time in your community)
  • Less than one-sixth will be residents (who have invited a new face guest)

Planning should start a minimum of three months before the event date. Begin planning with the end result in mind. An event starts with an idea…

This was an excerpt from “Senior Housing Marketing – How to Increase Your Occupancy and Stay Full.” The book has step by step instructions on how to have an excellent event.  http://www.amazon.com/Senior-Housing-

Diane Twohy Masson is the author of “Senior Housing Marketing – How to Increase Your Occupancy and Stay Full,” available for sale at Amazon.com.  If your curiosity is piqued to inquire on Diane’s availability to speak at a senior housing conference (CCRC, independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing or memory care) – please call: 206-853-6655 or email diane@marketing2seniors.net.  Diane is currently consulting in Southern California for Freedom Management Company, the proud debt-free owners of Freedom Village in Lake Forest and The Village in Hemet, California.  For more information: Twitter: @market2seniors Web: www.marketing2seniors.net Blog:http://marketing2seniors.net/blog/