One of Pica9's oldest customers (no pun intended) is a leader in the senior-living and assisted-living categories. Over the years, we learned a lot about what local facilities managers need—and what senior customers appreciate most—in local marketing. What we found might just surprise you.
The Senior Living Business Moves Fast—And Marketing Needs to Keep Pace
When we first engaged with managers of senior living facilities, we thought the pace of their marketing efforts might be a little less intense than, say, in restaurants or hotels.
But that misconception cleared up fast, as we found local managers intent on hosting a continuing stream of local events (in-person back in those days) with detailed goals and metrics associated with each. In fact, by document volume, our senior living community consistently outpaced the majority of our clients.
But it wasn't just the volume that raised our eyebrows. It was also the need for rapid turnaround of marketing requests—often measured in hours, with requests that typically came in late in the day.
There's an old saying in the design agency world that you want your marketing fast, cost-effective and good —pick any two. Well, the senior living world, two out of three just isn't good enough.
Fortunately, our CampaignDrive system, known as "Marketing on Demand" helped keep local marketers happy without drowning the HQ marketing team with one-off requests.
Long Content and Large Copy Can Be A Challenge
At Pica9, we know that local marketers often like to squeeze as much content as they can into every marketing piece they execute. And with a large set of unique advantages in each of their facilities, our senior living managers were as likely to put the "squeeze" on their marketing pieces as anybody. The problem was made even more challenging because brand standards called for relatively large copy elements throughout the entire range of brand templates—from direct mail, to online banners, to social media posts and long-form collateral.
How did we handle the challenge? By giving users a curated set of content blocks that they could use to assemble their marketing messages—without putting their hands on the keyboards.
For certain, this content management approach made our templates a bit more complex to install. But the extra hours we spent to get the content management right paid off by saving thousands of hours of time and copy-fitting frustration for the local managers. That meant greater happiness all around.
Compliance Isn't An Option. It's A Necessity.
On top of its fast pace and content complexity, the senior living business is also subject to an ever-changing network of marketing rules and regulations. Ensuring compliance while supporting brand activity at scale means building an approval architecture that kept decision-making as local as possible. Fortunately, the CampaignDrive platform can be configured to set up approval loops at the individual location (or even individual user) level. As a result, we were able to generate documents instantly, and route them for approval within hours—right in line with local marketer expectations.
Local Markets Need Photography That Suits Their Community.
You might not think of senior living as a category with intense digital asset management needs. But local marketers need to deliver messages that speak to their comunity, and that means they need a good bit of flexibility with image content. The good news here is that CampaignDrive's DAM capabilities allowed the HQ team to curate photography so that local marketers could find imagery that fit their markets in seconds—and then plug that creative directly into their designs.
When you have a relationship that lasts for decades, you could go on and on about lessons learned. And that's what we plan to do in the senior living category, with additional installments on Marketing Collateral Management. Look for our next post to focus on... "Charts! The Good, The Bad and the (Hopefully) Not So Ugly!"
