Paid Advertising in senior living can be a unique challenge, but Markentum is here to help!

What's Your Goal?

In order to start building your campaign, you need to have a clear goal in mind: 

• Do you want more eyeballs on a particular blog article?
• Do you want engagement around the social media posting of that article?
• Do you want specific conversions driven by intelligent forms and beautiful landing pages? 
• Will this campaign be image or video-heavy, or will you be relying heavily on long-form copy techniques that transpose well from content creation strategies?

If you'll be using extensive video or imagery, make sure to follow the guidelines set up by Facebook for image/video size and text in imagery ratios. Google also has a useful style guide for banner images using their ad network.

Once you have the why and the how of your message, it's time to decide on a platform. Depending on your budget and target audience, this campaign may be multi-platform, ranging from Facebook Ads, Google Ads, or LinkedIn ads. 

Understanding Pixels

Even if you're running very basic traffic ads (getting clicks to your website), a pixel is a small piece of ad tracking code that lives on your website and helps better count your traffic, as well as helping each network learn about your audience as you run ads and people begin to interact with your site. It separates a simple ad that drives clicks from an intelligent ad that can learn about the audience and react based on incoming data from the pixel the information sends.

Installing a pixel can be easy if you use an existing CMS (Content Management System) such as HubSpot or others. Otherwise, you might need to edit certain aspects of the HTML in your site, which can be daunting, but once it's tracking, ads get more effective! See Facebook's pixel implementation, Google's pixel implementation, and LinkedIn's pixel implementation.

Once you confirm pixels are working, you're ready to go with consistent tracking for your ad's performance!

Stay Organized and Monitor Your Results

While every campaign is different and your goals may vary by campaign, organizing things neatly so that you can track/test as things progress is paramount to a successful, ongoing, and evolving campaign. Making sure that similar ad groups, concepts, and keywords are organized in a way that allows you to see clear winners and losers among your many tests will help you in the future as you begin to evaluate your results. An example campaign structure for a senior living community would be:

Schedule a Visit Campaigns

• COMMUNITY NAME - IMAGE DESCRIPTION - COPY DESCRIPTION 

Once launched, make sure to check ads are initially approved or disapproved to change anything necessary based on the platform's feedback. Continue to closely monitor over several weeks, and clear winners will begin to emerge based on the stats you're gathering. Now's the time to evaluate your results, see what's working, and press further in that direction with fresh content.

As the campaigns progress, you will begin to see an eventual need to refresh content - some content seemingly remains "evergreen" and popular among your audience. Still, eventually you may see prices rising for the same group of traffic that has been providing consistent and usable results for you.

To combat this, keep an eye on what's been resonating with your audience and refine that further. An update to a video, a new testimonial, a story in a similar vein or theme, or even try new audiences that have overlap with your existing ones. 

With Facebook Ads and Google Ads, you can utilize their algorithms to generate audiences that are similar to certain groups based on your pixel data ( yet another reason why early pixel implementation prior to campaigns is super important!). For Facebook, these are called Lookalike Audiences, and for Google, they're called Similar Audiences.

Essentially, a pixel can analyze your incoming traffic. For example, a person visits your site, fills out a form, and schedules a visit. With the proper pixel implementation, an ad platform can intelligently mark the people who filled out the form and scheduled a visit as an independent group from people who simply visit your website and leave without filling out a form. Utilizing algorithms running on their ad network, the ad platform analyzes traffic and behavior of a new audience based on your criteria of people who take action on the site. This expands your reach by a wide margin and in an intelligent fashion based on user behavior instead of demographic targeting. This “seasons” your pixel with good data over longer amounts of time that eventually helps you find more relevant groups of potential people.

Using these methods, you should be well on your way to launching your first ad campaign. If you find it a bit too daunting or still don’t know where to start, Markentum can help you out there too!