This article is part of a series on how to increase your ROI with StoriiCare, a care coordination and activities recording software. Click here to see the other articles on how to use StoriiCare to its fullest potential.

Care Management Software Can Increase Word of Mouth Referrals

Today’s Competitive Market

What can we do to improve occupancy in our senior living facility?

How can we attract new residents to our care home?

How do we outshine our assisted living competitors?

‍Do we need a family referral scheme?

These are a few of the questions that drive sales and marketing teams for senior care communities.

The ongoing construction boom in senior housing is creating an increasingly competitive market and greater occupancy pressures for providers.

According to a recent report from the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care (NIC), the uptick in new buildings, particularly in assisted living, created a supply-demand imbalance. This resulted in greater competition for residents, better options for consumers and pricing stability.

A lot of senior living providers rely on placing agencies, such as APlaceForMom.com, Caring.com or SeniorLiving.com to get leads. This may be an industry standard, but it is a costly one! For example, let's look at APlaceForMom.com. On top of a $3,000 starting fee, there is an average of a 120% referral fee for every resident placed in your facility.

With that in consideration, it may very well be worth your time and save you thousands of dollars to explore other means of acquiring leads.

Word of Mouth Marketing

Having a nice website and online presence is essential for senior care providers. However, it often isn’t enough to make you stand out amongst your competitors in today’s digital landscape.

In general, people trust recommendations from friends and family referrals over any other type of advertising. Furthermore, beyond friends and family, 88% of people trust online reviews written by other consumers as much as they trust recommendations from personal contacts.

Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM) happens in person and online. Both organic and targeted efforts can be used to get users to share their satisfaction with your service.

In order for Word of Mouth Marketing to work, and before you put any WOMM strategies in place, you must do this one thing:

Create an incredible customer experience.

Good luck getting family referrals or seeing relatives post rave reviews to social media if they’ve just had an average experience with your facility!

StoriiCare Can Help

StoriiCare helps senior care providers with offering gold-standard, high cqc-rated, award-winning care. With StoriiCare, you can easily build the kind of relationships that lead to family referrals.

Why? Because with the Storii Family App, your resident’s loved ones can:

• Stay connected with their friend or relative in care, even if they live half-way across the world. They can share photos, videos, and playlists to their Storii profile.
• Receive live updates, view what activities or events their loved one has participated in, and see photos uploaded by care staff. Families never have to wonder what kind of care they’re receiving because you can show them!
• Communicate quickly and easily with care staff through instant messaging.
• Feel confident that their loved one is living somewhere that’s ahead of the curve with adopting innovative, person-centered digital care processes.
• See that care staff are happy and attentive. They have more time to spend with residents and less time to spend on paperwork.

For a fraction of what placing agencies can cost, StoriiCare can help with so much more than filling beds. An investment in care management or activities recording software builds trust and community with your staff, service users and their families. It shows that you are investing in the future and are a highly-engaged service provider. It also provides you with ample marketing materials to further your efforts in creating connections that convert.