Is it time to ramp up your outreach efforts?

by Tracy P. Lux, October 2005

During my years in the senior housing industry, I’ve repeatedly heard two questions. The first is , “How do we create more urgency to make the decision to move into an assisted living community in both family members and prospects?”

The second most frequently asked question is, “How do we reduce marketing costs?”

I believe both questions have the same answer: by strengthening our community outreach and referral programs and moving them to a higher level of professionalism and accountability.

Seniors in need of assisted living are in a vulnerable state. In such cases, people have a tendency to fall back on the advice of trusted professional advisors whom they have known for years and who may have faced these situations with other clients.

We hire outreach staff because we know we should “do outreach,” but many times the person doing the outreach does not have the skills or persona to command respect from the professionals he or she will be meeting. Additionally, goals and procedures for outreach are usually vague. Instead of a “public relations” staffer, the outreach staff person should be positioned as a director of business development, with the mission of creating solid marketing plans that include goals, objectives, strategies, tactics and some means of measuring results.

Currently our outreach sector has a tendency to rely too heavily on healthcare professionals such as discharge planners and case managers, who are seen as the best and fastest route to higher occupancy. However, your competitors are calling on the same group of people.

Our strategy is to develop an “alternative” list of professionals who influence and advise seniors. We have identified over 50 such professionals. Then we do some brainstorming and come up with a script that addresses “what’s in it for me?” for each discipline. Like everyone else, these professionals need to see a benefit for themselves in referring clients to you.

Finally, we use a ranking system that assigns a value to potential targets so we know where to expend the most time and energy, and we project potential outcomes so that we can see how many referrals we should have coming in based on our outreach.

Forty or 50 professionals referring one or two of the clients to a community every year should keep most communities full—with a waiting list.

Tracy Lux is president of Trace Marketing, Inc, a full service marketing and consulting group that specializes in sales training programs, mystery shopping, strategic planning, advertising and public relations programs and through Trace Executive Search recruits personnel for all levels of retirement housing and healthcare companies.

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