We talk a lot about the senior care decision journey and adult children around here. The “who, what, how and where” questions that we use offline need to be answered with our online senior care content audience, as well.
Here are a few of the questions we routinely find ourselves answering:
- Who are you trying to reach with your content strategy? In most cases we know it is the adult daughter or daughter-in-law. We’ve developed in-depth personas for our clients that we use when we write. Lately, we have been helping a growing number of clients develop content to attract professional referral sources too. Surprisingly, those are yielding good results. We are continuing to tie online and offline efforts together for even stronger results. You might want to review how well you are doing at integrating these two worlds.
- Where are decision makers spending their time online? We believe some of the most common places adult daughters can be found online include: Facebook, search engines, sending/answering email, review sites, reading blogs, and shopping (that one goes without saying right?). On a site note, are any of our senior living friends having luck with remarketing ads? Almost every site I visit now tries to pull me in later with one of their remarketing ads. Professionally, I think these ads are a fantastic tool. Personally, I’m still trying to decide if they are helpful or…kinda creepy? I know some of our senior care colleagues are using remarketing because I’m a frequent target. No doubt because I routinely visit so many senior care sites.
- How are they accessing the internet? Mobile devices like tablets and smart phones are the likely tools. Laptops and desktops are still hanging in there but mostly for work and career. iPad research while watching Duck Dynasty or Scandal is a scenario we routinely picture while writing for our target audience.
- What does all this mean? That we need strong headlines and relevant content. You have 8 seconds or less to grab the attention of these busy ladies or they are hitting that back arrow and returning to the SERPs. Your site must be simple to use and fast to load. While our pal Matt Cutts from Google denies they currently factor mobile page speeds any differently, he doesn’t rule that out an algorithm tweak in the future if it becomes apparent that is what users want. Check out the video he posted this week on the topic. (And his new t-shirt!) We know the bells and whistles really only impress other graphic designers. The rest of us just get annoyed when a page we might be interested in takes forever (and by forever I mean 3 or 4 seconds) to load.
I hope this have given you some food for thought before the fall and holiday rush begins again for our industry. As always, if you need help with strategy or help developing fresh, relevant on-going content we’d love for you to consider us.
