Imagine looking for a trustworthy senior care facility for one of your loved ones. You will definitely choose a service that has a stellar reputation online, right? Managing a positive online image is no longer an option for these senior care communities – it has become essential to meet the expectations of those seeking unparalleled care for their cherished loved ones. When it comes to choosing a senior living community, it’s all about trust and credibility. And that’s what makes senior living reputation management extremely crucial.
Do you know that the majority of senior citizens and their families perform organic online searches to find the perfect community?
So the challenge here – to build a positive reputation that can distinguish your senior living facility from the hundreds of other market competitors.
Seems quite a daunting task?
Explore the key strategies that we’ve discussed on our blog to strengthen your facility’s digital reputation and improve its online visibility. Implementing these best practices will also help you leverage these strategies to increase your resident acquisition and ensure your facility becomes a trusted choice for prospective residents and their families.
What Is Senior Living Reputation Management?
It is the proactive techniques of building, monitoring, protecting, and improving the digital reputation of a senior living facility. It’s about influencing how a senior care facility is perceived by online users – making it more visible across online channels to attract new residents and retain the existing ones.
What does it involve? Reputation management for assisted living facilities requires you to effectively deal with online reviews, respond to them promptly, optimize online business profiles, promote resident stories, and more.
Are there numerous ways to manage the online reputation?
Yes, a senior living facility can improve its online image by following several ways. In today’s rapidly growing senior care community sector, the online perception of a facility either makes or breaks its growth. It directly impacts its business growth!
Some significant factors of your community that can be either positively or negatively impacted by its credibility –
- Conveying your brand values and messaging to the potential senior residents and their adult children
- Interfacing with the referral sources
- Managing your team members or employees and providing them with proper training to deliver quality senior care
- Dealing with potential business partners and leveraging what they can bring to the table
Why Reputation Management Is Crucial for Senior Care?
Offering exceptional services and facilities for senior care is an intensely emotional endeavor. On the other hand, finding a senior care facility is beyond just looking for a place for a loved one to reside.
Nowadays, most people turn to the internet to find a reliable senior care provider. Your facility’s digital image is its most valuable asset. When you build and maintain a strong image of your facility, it naturally captures the attention of your potential clients.
Check out the reasons why reputation management matters to grow senior care facilities online.
Reason 1: Builds Proactive Trust
When senior care providers actively manage their facilities’ online presence and encourage positive reviews, it creates a genuine digital footprint of their business.
It allows the providers to address the prospective concerns from the potential residents and their facilities, even before they contact your facility. It immediately fosters a connection of trust and leaves a strong, positive first impression.
Reason 2: Helps in Navigating Crises with Confidence
A reputational crisis can occur unpredictably! Even a single negative review or news can spread like wildfire and erode your potential client’s trust overnight.
Creating a robust online reputational crisis management plan in advance will ensure your senior living community effectively and transparently responds when such crises occur. It’s all about protecting your facility’s brand image and fixing it before it transforms into long-term damage.
Reason 3: Shapes Perception through Stories
Senior living reputation management strategies require you to follow a strategic approach for compelling storytelling and offering compassionate care. While backdated stereotypes can prevent senior living facilities from acquiring new residents, effective ORM techniques will help you highlight the most positive experiences within your community.
This shift can significantly transform public perception about your facility’s reliability and credibility.
Reason 4: Drives Occupancy
A good reputation can directly impact occupancy as it helps in building client trust, improving online visibility, and offering a powerful source of meaningful business opportunities.
Most families largely rely on online reviews when searching for a reliable senior care facility for their close ones. Effective ORM efforts significantly influence the public perception as well, and encourage the families of potential clients to make an informed decision by choosing your facility.
Reason 5: Enhances Resident Satisfaction
It’s not just about attracting new residents to your senior living community, but also about delivering the best possible services to them and meeting their expectations.
ORM for senior care ensures ultimate resident satisfaction, encouraging the satisfied ones to leave positive reviews online. What else do you need as a vocal advocate of your community?
Reason 6: Acquires and Retains Residents
Apart from new resident acquisition, online reputation management for senior living facilities is also related to retaining those residents who are already living in your facility or seeking services from it.
A good online reputation serves as a powerful marketing tool that you can utilize to fill vacancies in your facility and maintain the occupancy levels.
7 Elements You Must Use in Reputation Management for Senior Care
There are many significant components that you can utilize to grow your online reputation. Effective applications of these elements can prove to be a game-changer for building and managing the digital image of your senior care facility.
Explore the list below to identify which element will work best for your facility to implement senior living reputation management strategies.
| S.No. | Elements | Purpose of Using |
| 1. | Earned Content | Social media mentions, shares, reposts, and online reviews that your facility has earned without paying for them (e.g., a 5-star Google review, star-rating on your client satisfaction survey, or a testimonial video on your Instagram reels) |
| 2. | Paid Content | Content that you’ve produced and leveraged through various paid channels to attract your target audience, such as PPC advertising, paid social media promotion, display ads, or influencer marketing |
| 3. | Owned Content | Promotional content that you’ve created to build your community’s reputation and shared through social media, business sites, emails, or other client touchpoints |
| 4. | Referrals and Partnership Content | Resident referral programs to generate referrals from your existing referrals in exchange for referral discounts, gift hampers, or goodies |
| 5. | Word of Mouth Content | Can be achieved through providing high-quality services to ensure resident satisfaction and influence how your facility is portrayed to the public |
| 6. | Online Reviews | Feedback honestly generated from existing satisfied residents and their families, which you can promote on your official website or social media page to highlight the positive aspects of your senior care facility |
| 7. | Online Content | Every piece of content that you see on the internet about your senior living community, one of the most effective ways to create a solid reputation for it (e.g., social media posts, paid advertisements, emails, or blogs) |
5 Proven Senior Living Reputation Management Strategies You Must Implement
Now that you know which elements you must use to manage the reputation of your senior living facility, it’s time to reveal the strategies to you.
Implementing the following strategies can help you build an exceptional online image for your community. You can also make your facility the first choice for those looking for a reliable senior living community for their loved ones.
Let’s get started!
- Be Visible: Claim and Optimize Local Business Listings
Is your facility visible enough online?
If not, you may be losing hundreds of your potential residents. A 2015 Senior Housing News article revealed that nearly 75% of people use search engines to find more information on senior living facilities, most commonly Google.
So, if your facility is not visible on Google, it’s a problem!
What to do? You need to claim and optimize your facility’s online listings on popular platforms like Google Business Profile, Yelp, Bing Places, Facebook, and other senior care directories to help potential residents easily find it online. Doing so can enhance your facility’s local presence and drive more foot traffic.
If your focus is to attract local prospects, this is the best idea to get the local limelight! For online searches like ‘best senior care near me’ or ‘top senior living facility near my location’, your facility will be more likely to rank at the top spot in the search results page. An additional benefit! It will be more visible on Google Maps and Bing Places as well.
- Accuracy in Business Information
Claim your profile on the platform mentioned above and incorporate accurate business information once your profile gets verified.
Don’t forget to add the name, phone number, location or address, website URL, services or facilities offered, and operating hours. You must maintain consistency in these details by updating them over time. Even minor issues, such as an abbreviation or punctuation mistake, can mislead your potential clients. Make sure these details are consistent across all platforms.
Pro Tip: You must add high-quality photos and videos along with detailed descriptions to your local business listings. Ensure that the description showcases the best aspects of your senior living community.
- Save Time with Listing Management Tools
Claiming and managing the local business listings of your facility is time-consuming!
It can increase the risk of errors as well! It potentially results in misinformation that can discourage families from exploring what you offer in your facility. Inconsistencies in information can adversely impact your facility’s local listing rankings.
So what is the solution?
You can use some helpful tools to simplify the process and minimize errors. Here, we’ve mentioned 3 major tools that you can consider using to manage these local listings.
3 Helpful Listing Management Tools You Must Consider
Check out the three popular tools that can help you save your valuable time to manage your facility’s local listings and focus on other significant factors.
| Tools | Purpose to Use |
| 1.BrightLocal | • Helps in citation building, ongoing listing and good post management • Offers active syncing features for managing key listings from a single dashboard • Can be used as a GBP post scheduler |
| 2. Moz Local | • Simplifies the listing management across directories and search engines • Best for facilities that focus on local prospects • Offers features for automated listing management, duplicate deletion, and reputation management |
| 3. Yext | • Best for multi-location senior living facilities • Can help in managing a branded presence across hundreds of platforms and provides real-time review monitoring facilities • Can manage SEO-optimized location pages • Expensive for small facilities and requires onboarding for effective reporting |
Boosts Discoverability with Local SEO
Local SEO significantly improves the discoverability of a senior living facility as it makes it more visible in local search results. When families are searching for nearby senior care facilities, implementing local SEO tactics ensures your facility ranks higher for those searches.
Let’s have a look at how you can use local SEo to improve your facility’s discoverability.
- Claim your local listings on GBP – Senior care facilities must list their business in the Google Business profile with high-quality photos, description, contact details, and more to make a more prominent position in Google Maps and Google Search result page.
- Ensure NAP consistency – you need to ensure the name, address, and phone number of your facility are accurate and consistent across all the local directories and online platforms.
- List in the local directories – Facilities must list their businesses in relevant online directories like the Local Chamber of Commerce sites to be more visible for local searches.
- Conduct local keyword research – The next step is to identify phrases and keywords that local families mostly search for to find a reliable senior living community in their nearby location, such as ‘best senior care facility near me’, ‘top senior living community in my locality’, or ‘assisted living in (your city name)’.
- Create location-specific content – Try to incorporate these local keywords in the content for your website, social media pages, and other online platforms. Create blog posts and guides to highlight local events and partnerships.
- Use structured data – Implement schema markup in your website to provide search engines with more details about your facility, services, amenities, facilities, and care types.
- Build local backlinks – Facility owners must try to earn valuable backlinks from authoritative local senior care and healthcare service providers, their websites, local news outlets, and community blogs.
- Sponsor local events – You can collaborate with local charities, events, and other community organizations to earn backlinks from their websites as well. It’s the best method to enhance your facility’s community presence.
- Be Empathetic: Manage Reviews in an Effective Approach
One of the most important parts of senior living reputation management is managing online reviews.
Your facility’s online reputation highly depends on –
- How do you collect reviews?
- How do you respond to the reviews?
- How do you promote the reviews?
In this section, we’ll learn about all these.
Potential residents and their families tend to assess your facility’s responsiveness and reliability when exploring the reviews you’ve received over time.
- Prioritize Popular Review Sites
You must address every review with empathy and professionalism, no matter how positive or critical the review is.
Before you start managing your online reviews, you need to choose some popular review sites suitable for your requirements. There is a wide variety of sites, but you must consider focusing on one to maximize the benefits.
For example, you have decided to prioritize Google. Then you need to encourage your satisfied residents and their facilities to share their experiences with your facility on your Google Business Profile. When communicating with them through email or some other marketing materials, you can provide the link to your GBP profile or send QR codes to ensure your existing residents leave reviews on it.
Top 4 Online Review Platforms for Senior Care Communities
- SeniorAdvisor.com – It’s a well-known platform where residents and their facilities can share ratings and reviews for senior living communities and care services.
- A Place for Mom – This one offers a range of senior care communities and resource listings, along with their reviews and testimonials.
- Caring.com – This platform features detailed reviews, ratings, and other details on senior care facilities and services.
- Google Reviews – It’s one of the widely used review sites where residents can share their detailed reviews about senior care facilities, along with photos. You can implement effective Google review management strategies to leverage the highest potential of your positive Google reviews.
- Collect Positive Reviews and Follow Up Regularly
Do you know that 82% families are more likely to explore online reviews searching for senior care facilities for their loved ones?
To grab the attention of your potential clients, you need to have a good amount of positive reviews. You must collect reviews from your satisfied residents! Even the most satisfied ones may not leave reviews if you don’t nudge them.
Here’s a review solicitation strategy for you.
- You must ask your satisfied clients through emails or phone calls to share their reviews on your preferred review site.
- You can provide the link or OR code to your review page to make them know where they can share their reviews.
- Create templates for review requests in advance, so that you can save your time. You can send personalized review requests to the satisfied residents and their families.
- Ask every resident within your community to share their experience of seeking service from your senior living facility.
- Train your team members to prioritize personalized care for each resident and address their unique requirements. It will increase the likelihood of receiving positive reviews.
- Consider Creating Surveys
Asking for reviews in a structured feedback system can offer maximum benefits.
Senior living facilities must consider creating online surveys and sending them via email after positive interactions with their residents or their families. The survey will help you know what has worked and what has not. You can improve your care services based on the data insights collected from the survey results.
It will create a transparent and open atmosphere, enhancing your facility’s online presence. Through the surveys, you can attract your potential residents and showcase how much you value your clients’ opinions.
- Respond to and Promote Reviews across Online Channels
While responding to the reviews ( no matter they are positive or negative), you must maintain a tone of professionalism. For positive reviews, don’t forget to express your gratitude to those who have appreciated your efforts to deliver the best senior care services.
For constructive criticism, addressing concerns and offering a suitable solution should be the ultimate goal.
Some points to remember:
- A simple ‘thank you’ can help you show appreciation and respect toward those who have shared their genuine feedback.
- You must promote your positive testimonials and resident stories on your official site or social media pages to achieve your prospects’ trust.
- Use the feedback received through reviews to improve your care services.
- You should reply to all the reviews you receive! If it seems
- Address Negative Reviews
It’s quite common for senior living facilities to receive negative feedback, as such services are related to the clients’ emotions and comfort. A single mistake in responding to a review can cause significant issues later and reflect a bad reputation for your senior living facility.
Here are some tips and tricks to effectively handle negative reviews.
- Keep your cool: You must avoid being emotional, defensive, or aggressive while responding to a negative review. Why? It can actually escalate the situation!
- Understand their concerns: Read the reviews carefully to understand the residents’ or their family’s concerns, even if these are inaccurate or involve criticism. If you don’t understand their concern, you will not be able to offer them a good resolution.
- Evaluate the feedback: You must determine if the criticism in the negative review is valid or not. If it’s a misunderstanding, try to sort it out. If it can harm your facility’s online reputation and involves an insult and abusive language, you can report it as well.
- Respond promptly: Always aim to respond to the reviews within 24-48 hours to show your residents that you care about the inconvenience experienced by them. If possible, handle the situation offline by requesting the reviewer contact you personally.
- Show empathy: Showcase your empathy for the reviewer’s feelings without being defensive. Apologize sincerely for their negative experience if the claims seem genuine to you.
- Be Informative: Extract Valuable Insights from Feedback
The above-mentioned strategies will help you achieve a noticeable number of reviews from your residents.
Now it’s your responsibility to collect data insights from these reviews and assess them to understand the residents’ sentiment. It’s an integral part of any senior living reputation management strategy.
Without analyzing the reviews, you cannot improve the overall living experience.
Your positive testimonials can go beyond attracting new residents. It serves whether you provide high-quality or poor-quality care services for senior people.
Sounds confusing? Let’s understand it through an example.
Imagine receiving reviews that highlight the lack of cleanliness at your facility. Assessing this review can help you identify the areas for improvement and resolve the issue. Otherwise, you may overlook such a significant matter.
- Be Connected: Leverage Resident Stories
According to a 2016 study, 68% of senior living facilities have claimed that their website is their most effective channel.
Developing and optimizing a great user-friendly website is crucial for every senior living facility.
Why? Most of the people searching for a reliable senior living facility for their close ones perform an online search and then explore the websites of those relevant communities. Thus, you must consider having a user-responsive website where you can provide all the essential information about your facility and its services.
On your website, don’t forget to share resident stories to connect with your target audience on an emotional level. Share these stories and testimonials on your site and social media profiles to make them reach a wider audience.
How to Collect Resident Stories?
Follow these techniques to collect real stories from residents.
- You can request your existing residents and their families to share their experiences and success stories about their lives in your community.
- Another way is to conduct a direct conversation with your residents and ask them to share their backgrounds, reasons to choose your facility, and what they love about the community.
- You can also encourage the family members to share their stories of choosing your facility for their loved ones.
Where to Display Resident Stories?
You can display them on your website and social media pages. We suggest that you request your residents or their families to share testimonials in video form to increase engagement. Consider incorporating community-specific hashtags in your stories shared on social media profiles.
You can even print these resident stories and testimonials into brochures, flyers, newsletters, and other materials.
Using PR to Amplify Resident Stories
Senior care facility owners can collect resident stories ethically and enthusiastically.
You identify residents who have unique experiences. However, you need to take written consent from both the resident and their facilities before using their stories for promotional purposes.
- You can ask your staff to collect these stories from residents with impressive and unique backgrounds.
- You can also use resident spotlights to interview them.
- Create a survey and incorporate questions regarding resident satisfaction.
Transform these raw interviews into compelling, high-impact content to share across a variety of media platforms. Share as blog posts, social media posts, and video testimonials. You can pitch these stories to the local media to feature them in their publications. To boost your PR efforts, you need to strategically distribute this content through multiple online channels, such as email campaigns, social media posts, and more.
- Be Proactive: Improve Your Quality of Care
Do you know that the online search for ‘senior living’ by senior citizens has grown to 15% in the past year?
If you provide exceptional care services for your residents, there’s nothing to worry about building a positive reputation. Quality senior care will not only lead to satisfied residents but also can generate positive word-of-mouth referrals.
From generating a good amount of positive reviews to establishing a strong position in the digital world, it will help in your facility’s overall reputational growth.
Online Reputation Management for Senior Living: A Plan of Action for You
We hope that now you have a proper idea of the strategies you should consider implementing to strengthen the digital image of your senior living facility.
Here’s a complete plan of action for you.
- Identify Your Areas of Focus: Public relations, social media, service positioning, digital marketing
Choose the areas that you will focus on for your senior living facility’s reputation establishment.
- Create a Task List: Creating marketing materials, training staff to collect reviews, promoting reviews across online channels, and claiming local listings
You can create a list of tasks to be completed within a specific timeframe.
- Allocate Responsibilities: Allocate responsibilities to the team members for collecting reviews, communicating with residents and families, tracking audience sentiment, or sharing stories across online channels
After creating the list, you need to assign duties to your staff and provide them with a time frame to complete the tasks
- Track Progress: review types, volume, audience sentiment, and progress tracking to check the current online reputation of your facility
Keeping track of the progress and understanding how your strategies to build a positive reputation for your senior living facility are performing.
- Analyze Sentiment and Improve – if the audience sentiment is positive or negative, the type of reviews you are receiving, collecting data insights from the reviews, and improving the quality of care services
To protect and maintain a positive reputation for your facility, you must thoroughly examine the reviews and collect insights that you can use later to improve your services.
Conclusion
When you provide senior living services, your facility needs effective strategies to build its reputation. You can take your facility’s reputation to new heights, aligning strategies with the unique needs of the senior living landscape.
With the right approach, your senior living community can thrive in today’s digital landscape and be the ultimate destination for those actively seeking a reliable senior care provider online. We hope that our senior living reputation management strategies will help you achieve your desired reputation for your facility.
A Pro tip for you! If you don’t have an in-house ORM team or the proper skills to effectively implement the strategies, you can consider hiring a renowned online reputation management agency to seek their professional services.
FAQs
Here are some frequently asked questions about reputation management for senior care facilities.
Ans. A reputation management agency is likely to have a team of skilled ORM professionals with expertise in handling senior care reputation management projects. If you seek professional services from an agency, the team will help you monitor online reviews, optimize your business listings, and prevent reputational crises. Facilities that don’t have an in-house team to work on their ORM requirements must consider hiring such services to seek expert guidance. Then you can proactively build and manage a positive online image to attract new residents to your community.
Ans. You must maintain a positive reputation for your senior living facility in the specific location where your property is situated. When you keep the property clean and well-maintained, it reflects how much you value your property and your residents’ satisfaction. This will also help you maintain a good reputation with the residents. Always remember that happy residents are more likely to refer your senior living community and leave good reviews about it.
Ans. Just like maintenance, operations in the senior living facility are equally important for the community’s online reputation. You must create a team of well-trained staff who are empathetic towards the residents and can meet their requirements. Apart from this, you must have an organized housekeeping team and a well-run laundry operation. Try to provide nutritious and tasty foods to the residents, keeping their age-related health issues in mind.
Ans. Communicating with the residents of your senior living community can prevent negative sentiment from spreading. When you proactively communicate with them, it helps you understand their needs and fulfill them. You can also promote positive reviews and resident stories to build a strong online reputation and attract new residents. Even during a reputation crisis, communication is the key. Communicating properly can help you connect with the staff and prevent reputational damage.
