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Attract More Clients for Your Home- and Community-Based Services Through Data-Driven Digital Marketing

Published on October 28, 2024 by Dan Wenger

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The demand for Home- and Community-Based Services (HCBS) in senior living continues to rise steadily as more seniors and their families seek services that go above and beyond traditional care that only meets basic needs.

To avoid being left behind, senior living communities have to adapt quickly to these evolving expectations by offering a more person-centered approach to senior care that can deliver a significantly enhanced quality of life.

As this shift occurs, another challenge presents itself: how to stand out from the competition and attract more clients for HCBS and personal care service lines.

To succeed in such a highly competitive marketplace, developing data-driven digital marketing strategies is quickly becoming a necessity rather than an option for senior living communities.

In this article, we explore data-driven digital marketing, why this approach is so favorable, and how your senior living community can incorporate it into your overall marketing strategy to attract more business and guarantee success.

What is data-driven digital marketing?

Digital marketing – as the name implies – is carried out via digital/online channels, including websites, social media, PPC, SEO, text messaging, and email. It’s one of the most powerful ways to promote products/services, connect with potential new customers, build brand awareness, and generate sales.

For optimal results, it’s essential to know which digital marketing strategies and channels work best for your target audience. This is where the ‘data-driven’ aspect comes into play.

Fortunately, most forms of digital marketing lend themselves perfectly to data-driven strategies. 

There are several components to a data-driven approach, which include:

Data collection

This is the foundation of data-driven marketing and involves capturing information including demographics, behaviors, and preferences, as well as digital marketing performance data. Following best data collection practices means systematically gathering information on targeted variables, for example, from your social media channels, website, email campaigns, and other relevant platforms. 

Data analysis 

This entails interpreting the data you’ve gathered and harnessing the power of data analytics and insights. By identifying patterns and trends, you can start to make evidence-based decisions that inform your digital marketing strategies, rather than relying on guesswork or assumptions. Popular tools for in-depth audience insights include Google Analytics and built-in tools on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook.

Application 

This is where you can begin to use the insights obtained from your data analysis to tailor content, campaigns, and customer interactions to improve engagement and maximize the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.

A data-driven approach makes any digital marketing efforts more efficient, enhances the customer experience, and drives measurable results – as well as delivering a higher return on investment (ROI).

For senior living businesses looking to promote their home- and community-based services, it’s vital to understand the value of data-driven digital marketing to get the best results, stay ahead of the competition, and achieve long-term success.

What are the business benefits of data-driven digital marketing in senior living?

With the emergence of advanced analytics tools, data-driven digital marketing has come a long way in recent years, expanding the scope exponentially. 

While it takes some time and effort to truly incorporate data-driven decision-making into your digital marketing strategy, it will deliver multiple benefits for your senior living business and enable you to establish yourself as a powerhouse in the senior living market over time.

The benefits include:

  • Enhanced insights to create highly personalized marketing messages
  • Improved targeting and segmenting – reaching the right people at the right time
  • Customized experiences that enhance engagement
  • Increased efficiency and supports more effective resource allocation
  • Streamlined decision-making – go where the data takes you!
  • Consistent messaging and increased brand awareness
  • Improved service offerings to foster higher brand loyalty, boost referrals, and increase retention 
  • Increased return on investment (ROI)

It’s clear that using data as the basis for designing, implementing, and evaluating your digital marketing strategies and campaigns will significantly impact their efficiency and effectiveness – but where do you begin?

Five ways to become more data-driven in your digital marketing 

If you run a senior living community and are looking for fresh, innovative ways to promote and expand your home- and community-based services, data-driven digital marketing is something you should consider to maximize the potential and ROI of your marketing efforts. 

Creating more data-driven strategies in digital marketing is a vast topic, but here’s a quick guide to some of the tools and approaches that will help take your digital marketing to the next level.

1. Establish and set SMART goals

Improve your staff’s skills in promoting caregiver wellbeing

The first step in creating any successful marketing strategy is to set clear goals. This is your roadmap to success.

Setting SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) is essential for data-driven digital marketing as these give you a clear direction to work towards – and are paramount to tracking progress and measuring the success of your efforts.

For example, ‘we will complete Q4 with 50 additional seniors (current residents or those in the wider community) signed up to use our home- and community-based services.’  

SMART goals then need to be broken down into smaller, data-driven objectives for specific digital marketing channels – i.e., how are you going to achieve each SMART goal? These will depend on the team and budget you have available but may include: 

  • Realize a 10% increase in website traffic to our dedicated HCBS page within the next 3 months 
  • Include HCBS in our monthly email newsletter and increase the sign-up rate by 15% in the next quarter  
  • Generate more positive online reviews for our HCBS – increase by one per month for 12 months
  • Set up PPC ads for our HCBS, one per month for 3 months, to generate 25 new leads
  • Send a monthly promotional offer for our HCBS via our resident and family portal to boost conversions 
  • Increase engagement on HBCS posts (on social media channels) by 20% 

2. Identify key metrics

With SMART goals and data-driven objectives in place, it’s easy to identify the quantifiable key metrics you need to help track progress – and identify where tweaks are required for improvement.

Digital marketing KPIs can be high-level and focus on how they will impact overall business performance or lower-level and focus on how they will impact your marketing department specifically. Key metrics will vary depending on the goals you set, but may include:

  • Website traffic sources
  • Returning visitors
  • Leads
  • Engagement rate
  • Click-through rate
  • Conversion rate
  • Customer acquisition cost
  • ROI

It is obviously essential to prioritize data security and privacy as you leverage data for digital marketing. Be sure to familiarize yourself with the regulations and implement data security measures as appropriate.

3. Collect relevant data

Team seated together, using laptops and collaborating with colorful papers featuring digital marketing and social media icons, symbolizing creative strategy and planning.

Once you’re clear on the data you need, you can start collecting it through social media insights, website analytics, CRM systems, and online surveys.

For example, tools like Google Analytics will automatically track user behavior on your website, such as clicks, video plays, page views, downloads, etc., as well as conversions (sign-ups, purchases). They can also tie user behavior back to traffic sources, like paid search campaigns and social media, to help you understand how visitors interact with your digital materials and identify areas for improvement. 

Likewise, social media channels like Facebook and Instagram offer built-in tools with analytics dashboards that will reveal valuable audience demographics, engagement, and interest in your content.

Over time, these data sources are extremely helpful in knowing where best to focus your marketing budget.

It can be helpful to create a data roadmap, so you have an architecture for collecting, storing, and processing your selected data. Ideally, you want to avoid having multiple bundles of data scattered across various systems, as you’ll never find time to collate and analyze them all. 

You can opt for a solution that streams your data in real-time for real-time insights to collect, store, process, and analyze your data in an efficient, scalable, and cost-effective way. 

Aaniie’s all-in-one platform for senior living communities offers solutions through integrated tools, including a built-in marketing and CRM system and real-time Business Intelligence tools (BI). For example, you can track marketing campaigns, referrals, number of client leads, and many other KPIs, all viewable via customizable KPI dashboards.

“We signed up with Aaniie because of their easy-to-use scheduling solution and mobile App for EVV, but it was their marketing automation suite that really made a difference for us. It took our agency from the middle of our market to the clear leader in care for our area. We couldn’t have done that without their comprehensive CRM tools”.  – Alina 

4. Analyze data regularly for actionable insights

Once you’ve collected enough data, it’s time to start analyzing it to find the insights that will help you make data-driven decisions to optimize the marketing of your home- and community-based services.

When you’re first starting out, keep it simple and focus on the key metrics most relevant to the marketing goals you’ve set yourself. 

Tailor-made dashboards with actionable insights, where you can introduce KPIs and weekly reviews of the dashboards with your team, will ensure everyone is making decisions based on real-time data and not gut instinct.

Tools like Google Data Studio and Excel can transform raw data into easy-to-understand visuals that will help you view your data in a more accessible way, for example, with charts and graphs. This is also a helpful way to see how results change over time, making it easier to identify trends and patterns in your data – and make use of predictive analytics.

The point of collecting and analyzing data for digital marketing is to use it to make informed decisions to drive success. Different digital channels aim to achieve different things; therefore, they all require tailored approaches to succeed. So it’s important to regularly review if the data you’re collecting serves the intended purpose – and tweak as necessary.

5. Put the data into action

In establishing a data-driven approach to your digital marketing, you can leverage your new resources to gradually improve outcomes by relying on data rather than assumptions.

Some simple ways to leverage data insights for impactful digital marketing of your home- and community-based services include:

Personalization 

Tracking the customer journey and how they engage with your content can provide valuable insights. You can use this data to deliver targeted marketing messages and campaigns for maximum impact, such as personalized emails and social media content that caters to specific demographics. Personalization will significantly increase engagement and boost your conversion rates.

Customer segmentation 

Images of people on hexagonal figures, representing customer segmentation concept

Using the data you collect, you can divide your customers/prospects into distinct audiences based on shared characteristics, such as demographics (age, gender, location), frequency of visits, or type of content they access. This can help you tailor your digital marketing messages to address each segment’s specific needs and preferences and enrich their experience with your brand.

Campaign optimization 

Tracking metrics such as lead source will help you optimize conversion rates and cost-per-acquisition, as well as the performance of individual digital marketing campaigns across various channels (email, social media, PPC advertising). The information you gather will help you optimize campaigns by allocating the budget to the most effective strategies and adjusting those that are underperforming. 

Predictive analysis

Past performance indicators can decipher customer preferences and behavior patterns, which help reveal future patterns and trends that you can use to inform future marketing strategies.


Data-driven digital marketing is one of the most effective tools senior living communities can use to promote their home- and community-based services, connect with new and existing customers, raise brand awareness, increase referrals, attract new business, and generate sales. 

To find out more about how Aaniie for senior living communities can help you achieve marketing excellence and realize sustainable growth, please get in touch.

Alternatively, you can request a free demo that will demonstrate our comprehensive solution to supporting the marketing needs of your senior care community.