What Are Senior Care Decision Makers Doing Online?
We talked about starting a senior care blog in our last post. This time I’ll share a few senior living providers who are doing a great job building their senior care blog community. But first I thought it would be helpful to understand the online profile of your target audience –adult daughters in their 50s and early 60s.
59% of internet users ages 52 – 62 are what are known as Spectators. Spectators are users who consume what the rest of online users produce. Whether it is blog posts, articles, or videos, they are quietly consuming what you put out there. Only 10% of this age group is likely to be someone who creates content and shares it online. The exception to this is when families become involved in online support groups.
So, excluding our clients since we know that would be cheating, which senior living communities are mastering the blogosphere?
Senior Living Providers with Blogs
Two content rich blogs that rose to the top of the ranks were: Sunrise Senior Living and Erickson Living. Both have put resources toward this area and are likely seeing great results.
Let’s start with Sunrise Senior Living:
- They post two to four times each business day. The only drawback to their blog was it didn’t appear that anyone is posting on weekends.
- Their blogs are developed around 12 key categories that target their audience well.
- Most of their posts are between 300 and 500 words. Enough for the search engines to be interested, but not too long to maintain reader interest.
- Good use of external and internal links, as well as senior living key phrases.
Erickson Living also has a great presence on their blog. We know their communities are primarily CCRCs and their target audience is a little different than a traditional assisted living community. What makes their blog so strong?
- Great use of visuals. They paint a strong picture of what life at an Erickson community is like on their blog.
- While they don’t post every day like they could, they do post frequently. Like Sunrise, however, they neglect their blog on the weekends.
- Their blogs are developed around 9 categories. Probably the best use of categories of all of the CCRC providers we reviewed.
- They have lots of great internal links to bring readers in to their full site. The opportunity for them is to better utilize external links to help build off-page SEO.
- Great job utilizing testimonials on each post. They manage to have strong messaging without the post feeling too much like a sales pitch.
One thing we saw a lot of in reviewing senior care blogs? Senior living and home care providers who set up great blogs and then abandoned them within 60 or 90 days. They are a lot of on-going work. But the results are worth the effort. Families find you and trust you. When they are finally ready to take the next step and set up an appointment, you will be top of mind.
Ready to take the leap in to the world of senior living or home care blogs? We just kicked off our Christmas in July special. Shoot us a note and we’ll be happy to send you more information!