People want immersive experiences. They want to walk in someone else's shoes before tying the laces up themselves and get a first-person perspective before taking the plunge on a new product or service, especially one as life-altering as choosing a senior living community.
That's why resident testimonials are so valuable to your community’s marketing strategy – it allows a prospect to picture themselves thereby living vicariously through the testimonial. In fact, resident testimonials are so important to your sales and marketing efforts, I want to spend a few moments discussing why they are so uniquely powerful and beneficial to your occupancy rates.
As I said, choosing a senior living community is an absolutely critical decision for a prospective resident and their family. Oftentimes, it means leaving a home that a prospect has lived in for decades, one saturated in memories, stories, and laughter.
If you're thinking that's an awful lot to compete with, you couldn't be more right. But as we often say here at OneDay, video content is the most powerful form of communication your marketing team has at its disposal, far more effective at engaging with the audience than text or even pictures.
Therefore, video testimonials featuring current residents combine the effectiveness of video with the immersiveness of first-hand perspectives. In other words, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more beneficial marketing tool to capture the imagination of your potential residents and their adult children, letting them visualize their loved one living within your community.
And research backs up these lofty claims, where 88% of consumers said they trust online reviews and testimonials as much as personal recommendations from family and friends. Simply put, between social media channels, embedded website videos, and email campaigns, video testimonials can be a difference-maker in the fight for move-ins.
Speaking of trust, when family members choose your assisted living community as the new home for their loved one, they're putting a massive amount of faith in your staff’s collective ability to provide the best possible quality of life.
In other words, they trust you, and that's a commodity that's hard to come by as we distance ourselves from the pandemic and realize the senior living industry becomes more competitive each day. Put another way, while trust has always been critical for a community to develop, it's now an absolute requirement. Thankfully, when a prospect can watch a current resident beam with pride and see the happiness in their eyes through a video testimonial, trust is bound to follow.
Finally, I'm sure you've had enough negativity over the last couple of years to last a lifetime. And while some corners of the senior living industry are still getting back to their feet, it's safe to say the industry outlook is significantly more positive than it was just a year ago.
That said, any opportunity to cast a positive light on your community is a chance to not only form essential connections with prospects, but also a way to be hopeful, enthusiastic, and excited for where your community is today and where it's heading in the future.
Obviously, video testimonials are an ideal way to capture these sentiments, where current residents speak more loudly than the glossiest brochures or most eloquent newsletters ever could. And here at OneDay, we take a massive amount of pride in providing a video marketing solution that allows you to quickly and conveniently capture that testimonial magic in a bottle.