Are you saying goodbye to summer this week? Ugh. We are. This is the week everyone who enjoys calling northern Michigan “home” during the summer months packs up and heads back to their real home. One of the best parts about being a senior care writer is that you can work from anywhere. Well, anywhere you have internet access of some type. Sadly, the end of summer means no more flip flop days working under the patio umbrella in the sun.
It is also the time when team SCS is gearing up for the final months of the year. We know they are often some of the busiest for our assisted living and home care clients. Families are searching for care options before the snow flies. As we have been finalizing Q4 editorial calendars, the question of evergreen senior care content has come up a few times with newer clients. We thought it might be helpful if we shared what evergreen content is and how it plays a starring role in developing senior care content strategy.
Evergreen Content for Home Care and Senior Living Providers
In general terms, evergreen content is the content that can still be relevant and useful to readers years after you publish it. In a world where content is updated at the speed of light, it is the stuff that sticks and attracts attention for a long time. It should be the foundation of your content marketing strategy.
For our senior living and home care partners, evergreen content is what we write to offer help and guidance that attracts adult children and family caregivers. These are the topics that are timeless for our industry. Here are a few tips to help you understand specifically what those topics might be for your company:
- Talk with the marketing directors and community relations teams at each of your communities or home care offices. No, not the regionals or the divisionals. Go right to the folks who are on the front lines fielding questions from frantic daughters and confused sons. What questions are they asked most often year after year?Those are your evergreen topics.
- When you are taking seniors and their adult children on a tour of your assisted living community or meeting with them to talk about in-home care, what myths and misconceptions do you have to overcome? You know the ones I’m talking about… “My mom needs a nursing home because she can’t manage her medication” or “You mean Medicare won’t pay for private duty home care?” These are great evergreen topics to incorporate in to your editorial calendar.
- Then there are the seasonal but still predictable occurrences in our industry. Such as the spike in phone calls our industry receives during the holidays. Adult children who are visiting for the first time in many months are often shocked and panicked when they see their senior loved one’s condition. Content that helps identify warning signs a senior needs help and explains the options is evergreen.
Make more sense now?
Blogging Works!
One final thought to leave you with today. Since we’ve been such slackers on blogging these last weeks of summer (yep – the whole shoemakers shoes syndrome in action here), our analytics show our site took a nose dive. In the past five weeks since we haven’t updated our blog, our traffic fell by as much as 50.91%. Ouch! But it reinforces what we already knew and that is blogging works! Shoot us a note if you need help developing one for your site… It really is the most cost-effective way to pump up your visitors.
Related Articles:
Six Steps to Create a Senior Care Blog