The Marchex Blog

Meet the Expert: Catherine Erikson, VP of Senior Living

Catherine Erikson Image
Tell us about yourself.

At the core, I’ve always been someone who thrives on embracing new and emerging technologies. With more than 20 years of experience in Senior Living and Healthcare, I’m passionate about helping the Senior Living industry embrace innovating marketing strategies and analytics. I look to inspire marketers to adopt new and exciting tools to drive exponential growth and success in this booming industry.

How can the Senior Living market benefit with conversational analytics?

It is the best way to create more revenue-generating conversations with your customers. By leveraging conversational data, you will be able to make data-driven decisions to build your perfect marketing mix and maximize the number of opportunities and tours for your properties. Additionally, you can improve operational issues such as call handling and responding to customer complaints to reduce move-outs.

What are some tips to make the most use of marketing attribution?

1.  Use a different call tracking number by location, campaign type, and creative campaign to track both online and offline (Print, Radio, TV, Paid Search, etc.) marketing sources. This will allow you to monitor the success of your marketing strategies.

2.  Follow a structured naming convention for building campaigns and their locations. Make sure you name your campaigns in a way that is easily identifiable to anyone else.

3.  Utilize reverse lookup to gain further valuable information on your consumers, i.e., enhanced demographics, financials, geography, lifestyles, media consumption  and more. This will help you zero in on your target customer and personalize your marketing campaigns to suit your audience.

4.  Use local Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) pools because local numbers have a 60% higher answer rate over toll-free numbers. DNI pools are perfect for tracking all digital online traffic sources.

5.  Add SMS/texting to nurture and convert more leads, create better resident experiences, and manage employee satisfaction.

SMS Marketing is a major trend this year. How can it benefit Senior Living? 

SMS Marketing is top of mind for marketers across the board. In fact, 61% of marketers have increased their SMS marketing budgets this past year. This is because the read rate for text messages are nearly 10x more than email. Moreover, there is a 5x increase in engagement when businesses add texting to their campaigns.

For Senior Living, SMS/text will offer a significant improvement in self-serve appointment/tour scheduling and increase after-hours responses and support. To learn about SMS Marketing for Senior Living, check out our blog here.

How can marketing leaders increase their relevance and influence in their organizations?

Track everything! It’s all about letting the data speak for itself. Provide 30,000-foot views to leadership and have real granularity into what is working and what is not working. Then, you can enable Sales Engagement tactics for the lifecycle of prospects to increase conversions and catapult your business.

Any final thoughts or anything else you would like to share?

Don’t be afraid of change. It may be daunting to open yourself up to complicated technology, but I promise, your courage will be greatly rewarded. You will be empowered to make smart, informed decisions for your properties to increase revenue and cut costs while decreasing your dependency on third-party lead aggregators for your properties.