The Playbook: Inside One Operator’s Marketing Strategy During Their Boom

Every quarter, the team at Priority Life Care gets its new marketing playbook. New ads. New content customized for SEO. New social media posts and strategies. Updates for their website. A new outlook on how to reach more clients while best serving their current ones.

Every quarter, Priority is armed with something new and fresh.

“One of the things I asked Digital Wolf to help us with is to create messages that were consistent across all channels, and that’s how the playbook came to life,” says Jill Record, Priority Life Care VP of Sales & Marketing. The operator has 67 communities, soon to be 68, across 12 states. When Priority first started working with Digital Wolf, they had three.

As Priority has grown, it has leaned on the Fort Wayne, Indiana-based agency Digital Wolf to continuously improve and update its marketing approach. Here is a look at why it works.

The Digital Wolf Playbook: Why Outside-the-Box Thinking Gives Operators the Inside Track on Success

Priority’s journey with Digital Wolf began with the agency’s standard high-level three-step approach: start a conversation, receive a proposal, execute a plan.

The key is that each senior living playbook is customized for the operator. This comes from a combination of techniques, starting with a one-on-one consultation. Digital Wolf provides branded marketing materials and online location management, all of which drive custom online advertising and custom website and social media development. Their top areas of influence for Priority:

• Marketing campaigns
• Website Development
• Public relations
• Social media
• Advertising

Curiously, one area that has surprised Priority Life Care is Digital Wolf’s willingness to hire graphic designers who aren’t already in senior living. It gives them fresh eyes for design.

“We have designers who’ve worked with Adidas, for instance, or high-end luxury home products,” says Brandon Wolf, founder and CEO of Digital Wolf. “When we look for inspiration, it is from high-end lifestyle brands, high-end hotel brands, high-end fashion brands, instead of looking just within the senior care space. We start there, and then we adapt that to the tone, location and ownership of each community.”

Inside the Numbers of the Playbook

The reason it all works is that Digital Wolf can take operators inside the key metrics of senior living marketing. These figures include:

• 3x website hits. Senior living operators who are advertising receive three times the number of website visits.
• Audience targeting: demographics. Digital Wolf’s playbook has shown that on average, 80% of website visitors are women aged 45 and older.
• Audience targeting: location. Digital Wolf’s playbook has also shown that on average, 90% of website visitors are within 20 miles of the community.

With access to that level of intel, Priority Life Care has been able to build a playbook with Digital Wolf that best suits them. This lets them proactively serve their prospects and stay one step ahead of their competitors.

“When we maintain consistent messaging quarter by quarter, with the same voice, it means even our team with boots on the ground are pushing the same messages to prospective residents and families,” Record says. “They’re hearing it repeatedly and begin to recognize and trust our name. The consistency and familiarity resonate.”

Priority Life Care’s Three Key Takeaways

In the end, Record has taken three key lessons away from her experience with Digital Wolf:

1. In marketing, one person can’t do it all — and that’s okay

When Priority connected with Digital Wolf, “I was the one person who was doing it all,” Record says. “I helped with the initial website. I was creating collateral for all of our communities and helping build our PLC Marketing Toolkit training program. Then we started doing digital advertising. It’s a lot.”

Priority’s work with Digital Wolf, therefore, had two major benefits: the expertise from Digital Wolf, and the newfound freedom for Record to put her attention elsewhere.

“Hiring Digital Wolf literally gave me the time and the space to be able to step up and lead in other ways — to create more strategy, especially with their help,” she says. “It’s important to have those specialists on my side.”

1. Your marketing agency should be a true partner

Priority Life Care is populated with not just delegators, Record says, but “doers.” So part of the appeal of working with Digital Wolf is that they are able to give high-level insights that can trickle down to every person at Priority.

A good marketing partner is also someone who is more than just their own social media metrics, as those metrics — followers, likes, etc. — might be the sign of an agency that is stronger in its own promotion than in strategy for an operator.

1. Partnering with an agency builds strength through specialization

Throughout their partnership, Priority Life Care has found that one of Digital Wolf’s key strengths is their ability to hear Priority’s goals and then build a strategy around those goals. They can do that because they have specialization in many areas, everything from SEO on the website to on-the-ground messaging to an ad campaign.

“They’re not just delivering one thing — they’re delivering an array of items based on our goals, our audience, our brands, and our different levels of care,” Record says. “We want people who we can strategize with long-term. They’re able to help us with everything because of the team that Brandon has built. I’m just so thankful to have Digital Wolf by our side.”

This Views article is sponsored by Digital Wolf Agency. To learn more about how to best optimize your marketing budget, visit them at digitalwolfagency.com.

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