SEM for Senior Living: 4 Common Misconceptions

There’s no time like the present to begin implementing an effective digital marketing strategy that can boost your leads and have a real impact on your occupancy goals. But when it comes to understanding the amazing impact that SEM (search engine marketing) can create for your business, there are plenty of myths and misunderstandings muddying the water and holding your success back. So, in the field of senior living, what might you be getting wrong about your marketing strategy?

My Target Audience Isn’t Online

It might be an easy assumption that digital advertising is meant to target younger, more tech-savvy audiences with products and services for their consumption. However, we live in a digital area – seniors are online more than ever! In fact, 73% of people aged 65 and over are Internet users.

Especially when noting the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital spaces are expanding and time spent online is quickly on the rise for everyone – for video conferencing, remote work, e-commerce, and, yes, even advertising! And, even supposing that your intended audience for senior living isn’t online, there’s an almost-certain chance that an involved decision-maker – like an adult child in the family – is online and seeking out information about your facility. A good SEM strategy is crucial to capturing their attention.

Digital Marketing Isn’t a Good Investment

Digital marketing and SEM isn’t some new-fangled strategy or passing trend. As we just mentioned previously, we’re all living in an Internet age. While there’s still a time and place for print and other traditional media, don’t hamper your marketing strategy by relying on only those methods. A constructive solution is pairing your digital marketing with print media solutions. They can effectively work together rather than having to choose one over the other. Digital marketing can harness both and allow you to experiment with different parameters. Digital strategies aren’t our future – they’re very much the vital tool of the present for marketing.

Furthermore, even if your business has taken to the Internet, be warned that investing in a good website alone isn’t enough. Even if you have the most amazing web content in the world, your investment means nothing if you can’t drive qualified leads to your site to see it! Investing in SEM means utilizing advertising in search engine results to help gain momentum for your online presence, measuring results in ways not always possible with print media alone, and constantly improving your campaigns to hone in on a strategy that creates results. These are all benefits that you’ll only find with SEM.

My SEO Strategy is Enough To Drive Occupancy

So you’ve gotten on board with digital marketing efforts – but don’t get too comfortable with what you might assume to be a one-and-done SEO effort for your site. While both efforts can help you appear in searches and drive traffic to your site, SEO and SEM are two very different efforts.

SEO, or search engine optimization, refers to the process of gaining visibility and higher rankings in search engines through organic, non-paid methods – like optimizing pages to target relevant keywords to your business and link building with quality websites. This is a slow and steady process that builds over months and even years. Plus, it isn’t a one-time fix – you’ll need to add content to your website over time to bolster rankings.

SEM, in contrast, is paid search marketing that happens within search engines like Google. This method will create ads that look like search results – but are targeting keywords to show your business to the right search audience. Unlike SEO, this process can be more instantaneous – helpful to drive traffic and build an online presence while you improve your organic rankings over time. SEM also opens the doors to things the Geofencing, where you can get down to the nitty-gritty with your targeted locations.

Neither method is a full replacement for another – they work best in tandem. Consider them both important parts of your digital marketing strategy!

It’s Easy to Manage It In-House

With the industry constantly evolving – and online search engines and platforms evolving alongside it – the necessary requirements to create the best, most effective SEM strategy are constantly shifting and changing. Skilled digital marketing agencies have the devoted time and expertise to keep up with these changing trends and help your campaigns perform their best. That’s why it’s important to enlist the perspective of digital marketing experts – who can give you an edge over the competition that you may not otherwise hold.

Ready to start harnessing the power of an effective SEM campaign to generate leads? We’re here to help. Contact Canopy and Zgraph Digital Marketing today to discover what your senior living organization is missing to achieve incredible marketing results, meet or exceed your occupancy goals, and elevate your ROI.