Lead Quality vs. Quantity: Why Senior Living Executives Should Demand More

As a senior living operator, how many times a week do you receive an email offering to fill your pipeline with leads? I receive a couple of those emails a day. I don’t even open them–and yet, they keep coming…promising me a HUGE pipeline of leads. 

What these emails don’t promise is a pipeline of QUALIFIED leads. That’s because it’s easy to bedazzle buyers with the promise of leads; it’s harder to generate qualified leads. Much harder. 

Today’s latest email got me thinking: Every senior living operator I talk with says they want quality over quantity when it comes to lead generation. But, do they know what it takes to do just that? 

The Cold Hard Truth

Most technology is designed to generate quantity–not quality–leads. Let’s take Google Ads for example. Using Maximize Conversions in Google Ads will help you optimize your paid advertising strategy to generate leads. It learns your viewers’ preferences and then feeds those preferences automatically. It’s basically a “set it and forget it technology.”

Let’s say you’ve launched a new paid advertising campaign on Google, and you have several actions. CTA “A” is “Call this Number” and CTA “B” is “Click this Form.” Because your viewers are mostly mobile–especially in the evening–it’s easier to find visitors who will “Call this Number.” Maximize Conversions quickly learns this and optimizes your ads campaign to generate a phone call. 

Except, what Google Ads can’t see is that one of your resident’s sons uses Google every day to search for the phone number of the community where his mom lives, and calls the number from the ad–thus consuming the budget and skewing the results (this really happens!). 

Suddenly, your paid ads are generating a bunch of non-lead phone calls, and until a human being catches it, Google Ads will continue to optimize the campaign to drive that behavior. Because it does not know better, Google assumes those phone calls are valuable. 

A Better Strategy

If you want a paid advertising strategy that delivers results consistently, you, or your  digital marketing agency, should do the following: 

1. Audit your leads. Are you getting at least a 30% lead-to-tour ratio? If not, you need to adjust your strategy.
2. Confirm your bidding strategy matches your goals and objectives. In other words, is it sophisticated enough to drive the traffic you need?
3. Review your reporting attribution to make sure you’re tracking leads all the way to conversion.
4. Optimize your paid ads copy and test your CTA offers frequently to match the constantly changing user behavior.
5. Tailor landing page copy to match the CTA (one of the biggest mistakes we see advertisers make is to send viewers to a generic landing page).
6. Prioritize metrics such as time spent on the page, bounce rate, and pageviews to optimize the engagement you want.
7. Review leads daily to make sure the campaigns are working as intended.
8. Spend consistently. Do not start and stop paid ads campaigns; every time you do, your media has to relearn your preferences.

Use a Partner

Managing paid advertising programming well takes time and skill. It is not a novice sport. In fact, beginners should be supervised. Better yet, work with an expert partner. And make sure that partner is going to tap into your ads every day to make sure they continue to respond as expected. 

If you’re ready to set aside the allure of MORE leads for QUALITY leads, then talk to Markentum. Our internal paid ads team can help you optimize your digital ads budget and deliver qualified leads that convert to the active buyers you need.