Wesley Willows is a premier senior living community in Rockford, Illinois. It offers residents hospitality-level living with activities, programs and services that empower them to enjoy an active lifestyle while developing a sense of community. Wesley Willows promotes itself heavily to active seniors researching independent living options. As a continuing care retirement center (CRCC), Wesley Willows works as a partner with residents to manage their long-term needs, even as those needs change.
Solution
Following the development and launch of a new website, Wesley Willows then partnered with Chartwell Agency to create a proactive and attractive digital marketing campaign. The campaign was designed to enhance the number of qualified leads from the site and better target potential leads for the sales funnel by driving prospects to its new “virtual front door.”
Based on the online behaviors of Wesley Willows’ target market, digital advertising was identified as an effective way to present ads to the right individuals, at the right time. In addition to the highly-targeted nature of digital advertising, it also is highly trackable, which offers opportunities to monitor, adjust and measure results in real time.
Chartwell recommended a digital campaign strategy that geo-targeted prospects with three strategies –paid search/pay-per-click (PPC), display advertising, and Facebook newsfeed ads for two demographic and service area targets (independent and assisted living). The digital campaign repeatedly presented Wesley Willows’ brand and key differentiators to targets qualified by the digital profiles and behaviors they share with existing and ideal resident.
Outcome
Wesley Willows saw more new residents move in to the facility than ever before; some of that is directly related to the digital campaign that was specifically cited by new residents.
In fact, the Wesley Willows digital campaign broke the industry standards in several categories:
- Website traffic more than doubled from the year prior (53 percent increase).
- Direct email blasts had a higher-than-industry-average rate (20 percent).
- Facebook advertising earned a click-through rate double the industry average.
- Search engine marketing conversion rates remained more than double the industry average and jumped to triple the average in some months.
