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Thank you for choosing a Seasons Seminars, Inc. Self Study Course.
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Effective Marketing Strategies – The Teleclass Transcript
Pre-Test
TRUE OR FALSE:
_____ 1. It is not necessary to document information about your tours that do not admit.
_____ 2. A good marketing strategy is to give someone has come in to tour a brochure before the
tour.
_____ 3. Knowing what is on the Internet about your facility can help you in your marketing plan.
_____ 4. Mystery shopping your own facility is a good idea.
_____ 5. It is necessary to have a formal method of gathering information from inquiries during ―after
hours.‖
_____ 6. Follow up to a tour should include inviting them back to visit again.
_____ 7. You do not want to ask an inquiry why they chose another facility over yours.
_____ 8. Showing the features of your facility is the best marketing strategy.
_____ 9. Explaining the ―why‖ of different areas of your facility will only confuse an inquiry.
_____ 10. Tours are easier to do and more effective if your facility is smaller.
_____ 11. Each area of your facility has a personal value attached to it.
_____ 12. New facilities have no marketing challenges.
_____ 13. Photos in a brochure may inspire people to come look at your facility.
_____ 14. A ―waterfall‖ brochure with lots of information is the better than a trifold brochure.
_____ 15. A yellow page ad should indicate how you are different from your competitors.
_____ 16. Press releases work best if done once a quarter.
_____ 17. You should participate in every community event that you can.
_____ 18. It is difficult to hold an outside marketing person accountable since you cannot directly
supervise them.
_____ 19. A mistake that is often made is giving too much information when setting expectations for
the marketing team.
_____ 20. Marketing can not, and should not, be held to the same level of accountability as the
nursing department.
Name _______________________________________ Date ________________________
EFFECTIVE MARKETING STRATEGIES
OBJECTIVES:
After completing this program the participant will gain a greater understanding of:
Why an effective tour of the facility is critical to the census development effort
How to create more effective promotional tools for the local census development effort
How to create and implement a system for accountability
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Please note for the printed materials/ effective promotional tools portion of this you will
need to: use your facility’s brochure (or that of a competitor ) and the brochure that
we have provided (not available with this self study course).
Handouts for this teleclass are available at the end of the course content.
Effective Marketing Strategies – The Teleclass Transcript
October 28, 2002
Vicki: What I would like to do is have you introduce yourselves to each other just as we
would do if we were sitting in a room. Catherine, please take a few minutes and tell us a
little about yourself and where you are, and a little bit about the marketing that is either in
progress or has occurred.
Catherine: My name is Catherine, and I’m in Houston. It’s a 198-bed facility, four
stories. We have an effective marketing program. We have marketing meetings every
week, with a marketing team. We go out and do our marketing on a weekly basis, and
then we return the next Friday to revisit what we have done and what we have
accomplished.
Beth: I’m President of a nonprofit organization in Dallas. We have residential programs
for people with mental illness, clinical treatment, and vocational programs.
Vicki: Well, I hope you’ll be able to take some of these tools that we present and you
will be able to use them effectively for where you are.
Beth: I bet I will be able to.
Vicki: John.
John: I’m not currently in a long-term care setting, but I am interested in marketing, as I
do marketing in my current position. I would like to get different ideas. Marketing is a
broad term, but comes with any product you want to market, whether it’s resident care or
telephones.
Vicki: Okay, Stephanie—we know you’ve been making some changes.
Stephanie: Yes, I’ve work in Denver City. We have a 96-bed facility here, which can
actually take about 70 comfortably. Right now, our census is 42 and we’re working on
making some changes to our marketing program to make it more effective.
Vicki: Great—we hope that by the end of three days, we will have given you some tools
to go back and implement some changes.
Stephanie: That’ll work.
Vicki: Naomi?
Naomi: Yes, I am in Richland Hills, but I have only been here about two weeks. I just
moved to the Dallas area from Corpus Christi, where I opened a brand new, 120-bed,
nursing home. Marketing is very important in both areas.
Vicki: Naomi, you mentioned your background to me. Would you share with us how
you decided to become an administrator?
Naomi: I am a social worker, and got into long-term care as a social worker. I thought I
could be better utilized as an administrator. On some days, I wonder!
Vicki: Well, we will try today to take one thing off everyone’s plate and make things a
little easier. I was telling Mary this morning about the difficulties people come to me
with in marketing. I have a client for whom we did a feasibility study for a brand new
assisted-living facility that went up, a home that was already existing and decided to
expand their services, and they put in a new unit. In that particular state, the unit cannot
be promoted in any way until the license is in their hands. So, as you might guess, it has
been a big challenge for them. After the fact, it’s a big challenge to promote your
building and increase your census when you are not allowed to talk about it before the
license is in hand. So, now we are playing some catch up, and the administrator calls me
and asks what they can do? We need a marketing plan. Like most of us, she conveyed
the same situation that we hear everywhere we go. She personally could not get involved
and do what needs to be done. She is the president of this organization and there are four
executive directors who report to her from four different campuses. She explained that
her executive director who would be over the assisted-living campus had just been
diagnosed with a major illness, that she had virtually no ability to go out and market the
new unit, and because they are a not-for-profit facility with a lot of indigent people in
their beds, she had very little money to contribute to the marketing effort. So, like many
other people, she called me and said ―what can we do?‖ I said ―well, let’s start with how
we can inexpensively use our resources to move toward and impact your marketing
plan.‖
One of the things I walked through with her was the information that you see on page 2.
It discusses tours. For those of you who are facility based, and those of you who can
tweak it – for instance, in John’s case, this would be how many inquiries and interactions
does it take to convert someone into a customer? This would be much the same with
tours. It all comes down to a big numbers game. As administrators, we often do not
consider this because we are so busy looking at our budget, the meal cost per patient day,
and perhaps we don’t look to dissect what exactly it is costing us in tours. What I would
like to direct your attention toward is the box that is in the middle of the handout. Let’s
just take a minute to look at this, which says ―twelve admits or leases a month are
targeted in your business plan.‖ Now, historically, 25% of your leases or admits never
tour. They are direct admits or leases and just coming straight from word of mouth in the
community, from your hard work. So, right now, we can say 12 minus 3 leaves us 9. We
absolutely must have nine leases or admits that are closing on a tour. Now, were you to
be keeping and tracking information about your tours, you would have an idea of how
many of them actually close and result in a decision to lease or admit in your building.
Let’s just say that historically we find that 50% of the people who come in to inquire and
tour actually admit. We can go backwards and say that we know we need 18 additional
referrals or inquiries every month to be generated to hit our business plan. Does this
make sense to you? Okay.
Now, let’s look at the ―what ifs‖ down at the bottom. What happens in a facility if you
focus your efforts on generating more referrals and more inquiries by having more
marketing contacts, placing advertisements, and holding more special events? Anyone?
John: Well, you get more people coming in.
Vicki: Exactly. Now, you’re out and you’re spending more money on advertising, and
you’re spending money on everything from gasoline to get people to their marketing
contacts, to doughnuts and cookies, if that is what they say the need, and you’re putting
time and money into special events. So, you could be generating more referrals, but if
you’re only closing on 50% of those referrals, and you get out and try to generate more
referrals without increasing your closure rate, you are spending a lot of money and
everyone in your building is working harder to get those referrals, but they are not
working smarter.
John: You would need to have a good system in place, because if you had one person
going out and doing all this marketing, hopefully they are strategically going to places
that will benefit your facility. That person can’t hurry up and run back, be there for the
tour, make sure that inside the facility everything is running smoothly so that when
someone does come to tour, everything looks good. They can’t do everything. But, when
someone does come, as you mentioned, you can close the deal and have everything
organized. You have to make sure that you have someone at the facility to do the inside
tours and someone to answer the financial questions, etc. Otherwise, the marketing
person in the field is wasting their time and lots of money, if the facility isn’t ready to
handle the influx of tours.
Vicki: Exactly. Now, Catherine, I bet that you are down there in Houston with a
marketing plan in place, your marketing meeting once a week, your team that is going out
and doing their work. Who is tending to the tours at home and how did you set this all
up?
Catherine: Well, I make every department head participate in the marketing team, and
they all go out and do marketing. The marketing admissions person does all the
admission paperwork. She and I split it up so that the week I am out marketing, she is
here at the facility, and the week she is out, I am here so we do not miss the tours. It has
worked out very well.
Vicki: That is great. Let’s follow down this path and put you on the spot, Catherine.
How did you train them to do the tours?
Catherine: Actually, the admissions coordinator trained all of us on how to do tours. She
took us all on a tour and taught us what to say and what not to say. She showed us her
path all up on the floors and around the facility, and that is how we learned and how we
do them.
Vicki: Catherine, how long does it take you to go through the building and do a good
tour?
Catherine: In this building, it takes about 20 minutes.
Vicki: You said you had a big four-story building?
Catherine: Yes.
John: We had codes set up in our facility, as well. For instance, we would say over the
loudspeaker ―Code Pink‖ or whatever, and that would indicate a tour coming in about
five minutes, so make sure things are in order and if there are any problems, or odors,
etc., that the tours can be redirected! When someone first walks in the door, they notice
odors first! If there is a bad odor, for whatever reason, even if it’s just something unusual
for the facility, that ruins it right there. Everything has to work together. If the people on
tour see residents just slumped over in their chairs, that leaves a bad impression. It’s not
easy to market a facility like this, because for cost-effective reasons everyone has to
continue with their daily jobs, and they can’t just stop when you announce a tour and turn
on another face when you are doing your job. It’s not an easy task. It takes a lot of
teamwork, planning, and effort.
Vicki: Codes are something I have seen utilized very effectively, but what I have to ask
you as a group is that there have been several times I have mentioned during a
presentation tour codes and I have had some people who felt that it was unethical, and
why would we announce there is a tour and have people suddenly spruce things up and
turn the building into something it wasn’t. How do you feel about that? Naomi, I’d like
to have your input.
Naomi: I don’t use the codes. The way I look at it is that the home should be up and
running just like it would be when they come in as a resident. So, I don’t use the codes
in any of my buildings.
Vicki: And, everybody has a different way to look at it. I look at it in this way. I am
married, and my mother-in-law is a very good housekeeper, and when I know my
mother-in-law is coming to my house, I do a little extra picking up and I can honestly tell
you when my mother-in-law comes to my house, it doesn’t look like it does the majority
of the time. I have had people go to extremes. I once worked with a brain injury facility,
where the tour came in and they would announce it over the loudspeaker and they would
actually move some of their brain injured patients out of the halls and put them in their
rooms, so that people would not see them. That offended me personally. I think that
what John mentioned is true. There is a happy medium we can strike if we choose to
pursue the codes. That would be just a little bit of jogging people to look for things like a
little piece of trash on the floor, moving a bed out of the hall instead of leaving it sitting
there, etc. I think this will continue to be a question as far as people running their
facilities. I would ask Beth, because you have some issues with MHMR. When people
come to talk about your programs, are there any differences in the way you do business?
Beth: No, we really don’t have any differences because we have people coming in all
day long who are new admissions, so it would be very difficult. If I have, for instance,
not an admission, but a visitor come in, we’ll do a sweep through and make sure things
look clean and things are picked up. However, on a day-to-day basis, it’s just a steady
stream of people all day. We would be calling Code Pink all day!
Vicki: Well, some of us wish we had your problem! Along this line, I wanted to ask
Catherine something. You said you are all out doing the marketing, you know who is in
the building, etc. How do you track the tour if, for instance, I came in and said
―Catherine, I’m curious and want to look at the tour records for your building and who
has the higher closure percentage on tours?‖
Catherine: My admissions coordinator keeps all those statistics, and we have to turn
them into our corporate office once a week, and we have a log where she logs them in.
Vicki: Based on the history of your facility, what do you consider to be an acceptable
tour conversion rate at your facility? You know, it will never be 100% because you have
competition and other factors. With keeping track of it every week, you would notice
when the numbers change, wouldn’t you?
Catherine: Right, and we stay full so we think we are doing something right. And, we
are going to open another unit in the next six months. We have one empty station right
now, but we are working on opening that in the next six months.
Vicki: Whether you have people coming in all day long or whether it happens more
infrequently, you really have to focus on converting those tours and tracking what results
from the tours. You heard Catherine mention that the individual in that department does
all that tracking and other work and they turn it into their corporate office once a week, so
they are always focused on it. When I did my AIT, the administrator actually let the
assistant administrator go while I was there, and she was a social worker by background.
She had an excellent rapport with the families. He was very pleased with how she
handled the financial collection, but when I asked him why he was making the change, he
told me it was because she could not close on her tours. He said he simply could not
have her ―costing the building money.‖ I think that is a very interesting comment. Many
people would have focused on what more could he do to go out and market. He focused
on what he could do most effectively, which in his estimation was to convert tours. It
seems very easy when people might come to you and say ―I’d like to have money to run
advertising. I want to put an ad in the booster page of the school paper, or whatever.‖ As
John said, a system has to be put in place so that when people actually come into the
building, you are able to convert that into an admission.
Let’s now look on page 3, and let’s look at #5. I am curious about when you are touring
families. Are they really asking questions about health care, about regulations, etc., or do
they still have the misconception that their family member is going to be warehoused
there and not taken care of?
Beth: I think that is changing rapidly. I think families are becoming more
knowledgeable about what we are doing.
Vicki: Well, that’s a good and a bad, isn’t it?
Beth: Yes, they have access to the Internet, and they can come in asking pertinent
questions.
Vicki: That is true.
Vicki: Do you have people coming in now who refer to what they have read on the
Internet about you? Do they pull up your report from the Department of Health?
Beth: Oh, yes.
Vicki: Let’s pursue this for a second. Do they understand what they have read, or is
clarification needed?
Beth: I think the clarification needs to be there for a lot of families because what they are
reading may sound horrible when it was just a small incident.
Catherine: I agree that people need clarification most of the time.
Vicki: How can we, as facility staff members, provide that clarification, and what do we
need to do to teach our staff to be prepared for it? As you know, when someone asks a
question and they perceive a problem, how are you going to position employees and
educate them, because if they hesitate, we look like we are at fault? John, how can we go
about this and work with employees to make them understand what has been put on our
reports and what it all means?
John: That’s an interesting question because it is unfortunate nowadays that there are all
the legal ramifications. People come in, TV reporters come in with hidden cameras, etc.
You have that granny cam thing going on. Trying to educate employees, some of whom
may not be sophisticated, is a problem because the reporters and families are always
going to ask the employee who will give the response you don’t want them to give! They
will ask a question and that employee will say something like ―oh, yeah, I remember the
day we were out of food‖ and give that type of dumb comment. The answer could have
been stated differently so it would not scare the family. It’s a very difficult process to try
to communicate that to employees. One thing I used to do was work with the employees
and prompt them with questions to give the right answers! I would always say something
like ―we always try to be honest and up front.‖ Like, if we did have a deficiency that
may have happened and they question it, we say ―oh, yeah, it was a particular incident on
a particular day.‖ We did enough training with the employees so that they knew that the
staff was there to be helpful and smile and acknowledge the families and try to keep them
moving along so that they would not interact much with the employees. It’s difficult
because you always want to be on guard, and you have to teach your employees to be
careful because some people are out there to harm the facility’s reputation, which can
reflect badly on profitability and wages, etc. So you try to educate your employees on
how everything works. They tend to be more responsive that way.
Beth: When I have a difficult question, I try to come up with a stock phrase that I repeat,
and I have my directors repeat, so that people hear a positive response to a difficult
question.
Vicki: Can you give us an example?
Beth: We do a lot of grant writing, and we recently wrote a grant for housing through
HUD, and we went to one source and to another as a backup, and the question was ―Why
did you go to the backup? Did you suspect you wouldn’t get funding from the original
source?‖ I came up with a positive way to say that we just wanted to have a secondary
backup, just in case.
Vicki: This all brings up an interesting comment. If we have people coming to us during
regular business hours who need clarification and who do not understand what they are
reading, then what do we do on weekends and nights?
Naomi: Actually, in this facility we have administrative rotation on weekends, so there
are always one or two administrators or department heads in the building over the
weekends. If you have a weekend receptionist, you have to educate the receptionist to
handle the tours or questions because you don’t want to lose the customers. A lot of
people come out on the weekends.
Vicki: I have tried to explain that to people. We have a group here in town that has
retained us to do some mystery shopping, and we generally mystery shop their facility on
weekends or late on a Friday afternoon because we want to know what is occurring after
hours. What are people actually saying to shoppers? Mary and I did a session recently
where a gentlemen said he had been asked by his company if he would like to take a
facility that was 20 miles closer to his home and he, his wife, and his family talked about
it. They were excited about it and they decided that one night after dinner they would
take a ride over there. He presented himself at the door with his wife and two children,
and they walked down the hall. Nobody spoke to them. When someone finally
acknowledged they were there, it was an aide who was walking by and as she walked by,
her arms were full of blankets and she never broke her stride, and she said ―don’t put
your family member here.‖ She kept walking. He said she was somewhat amazed the
next week when he showed up the next week to be the administrator and, needless to say,
she was not with him very long. My question is what do we do to make sure these things
don’t happen? And, how will we even know they do happen?
Mary: You know we were in a town recently where we toured three facilities in the
evening, and you know those administrators the next day at your seminar thought they
had good systems in place until we were able to tell them otherwise.
Vicki: Mary and I were really sneaky. We went to this town and I got in on a Thursday
afternoon. I was speaking on Friday. I called ahead and I knew which administrators in
town were actually at the seminar. Because everything is much more relative to
individuals when you are talking about something in their own city, at 4:45 I started
visiting facilities. I went in one facility, which was quite nice. No brochures in the lobby
at all. I went in and there was nobody in the front office. I called hello several times and
nobody responded. I headed down the hall and the administrator’s office was locked. I
stood by the nurse’s station and patiently waited while a nurse finished her phone call.
After her call, a resident spoke to her. She ignored the resident. I heard the resident from
about 17 feet away. She ignored the resident who was standing beside her, did not speak
to me, took her papers and walked down the hall. I planted myself in the middle of the
hall, since it was a hub, and stood and waited to see who would be the first person who
would speak to me. Finally, someone did speak to me and when I told her I wanted to
see the facility, she directed me back down to the administrator’s office and walked on. I
retraced my steps, back to the administrator’s office, back to the front, started walking
deeper into offices that I was not comfortable in doing, and finally someone asked if there
was something I needed. I asked for a brochure and she told me they were locked in the
marketing director’s office. I asked her if someone could give me a tour, and she asked if
I had someone I wanted to admit. I said yes I do. Well, she said nobody is here to help
me today and I was asked to return another time. Should we consider having our
facilities mystery shopped? Catherine, do you do that?
Catherine: Mystery shopping? No, I haven’t had it done.
Vicki: Stephanie, what about you?
Stephanie: Well, we haven’t done that since I’ve been here, but we’re working on areas
that I know need improvement.
Vicki: Naomi, how would you feel if somebody came in and mystery shopped your
building?
Naomi: Well, I’ve always been with companies that did that and I actually did it with
this building that I just took over.
Vicki: Tell us what happened.
Naomi: Actually, they responded really well. I was pleasantly surprised because it’s an
older building and when I first walked in, it took me back because it’s older, but inside
it’s nice. When I came in the door, there were two people immediately asking if they
could help me. When I asked for a tour, they took me and I was pleasantly surprised.
Usually, it’s not quite like that. I think mystery shopping is important.
Vicki: Some people get put off by it. We had an interesting situation where we had a
marketing seminar recently, and a gentleman had signed up for the seminar, and I had
mystery shopped his building. Furthermore, he was the one who conducted the tour.
When she saw the registration come through, Mary quickly became aware of the situation
and called the corporate office of the company this individual represents and asked if this
would be a problem. He was quite a sport about it. I went up to him that morning and
introduced myself and he commented that he liked the format of what we had done, but I
can say it still put him off because later in the day when I was trying to elicit
conversations and asked people to participate, he said ―what is this, pick on so-and-so
day?‖ In the big scheme of life, I would have preferred this not to happen. He did feel
that there were some positive comments that came out of the whole process, but how will
you work with your employees when this occurs at your facility, when you have to sit
down with them and tell them what the mystery shopper said about them? How can we
make that a positive?
John: I do agree with mystery shopping. It’s a way to see what systems are failing, and
it is a way to educate, but we also have to remember what expectations are being placed
on us for after hours or late in the evening and weekends. Obviously, people are going to
come in the evening or weekends, after they are off work, which is 6 p.m. or 7 p.m. A
nursing home is someone’s home. While it may not be a completely sterile facility, we
cannot afford to have 24-hour marketing folks. The money is not there for it and it is
home to our residents. You can’t just walk in at any old time to a person’s home. There
will always be the type of employees who do not respond correctly. You have to just
keep going slowly with them, and when a problem comes up you have to let them know it
was embarrassing, and we need to work on the problem. It all comes back to the fact that
we don’t have the funding to make the atmosphere what we want it to be and to turn our
programs into big successes. Unfortunately for us, we get a lot of walk-ins on the
weekends because that’s when most people are free and there is typically no management
present to monitor things, so the place might be in chaos. You might have administrative
weekend duties, but you might only be there for 3-4 hours. It’s a Catch 22 – you can
only hope that your employees will do what is right.
Vicki: Exactly – now, my question is what sort of system can we put in place for the
inquiry, so that when someone does come in on a weekend to get information, they don’t
feel mistreated or ignored? Can there be a sheet in place in the lobby with instructions
for getting this inquiry information to the right place, so it doesn’t end up on a sticky note
in the trash? Catherine, what kind of system do you have in place so that after hours
when there is no one available to really help the guest or give them a tour, how is that
information collected?
Catherine: We have cards at each station. We have a big bulletin board in the front
lobby because our first floor is all administrative offices, so there is a big board out front,
and there is a sign that says if you are inquiring on off-hours or on the weekend, and there
is no receptionist at the front desk, please take the elevators to 3E and the charge nurse on
that unit will conduct a tour. She has the cards where she gets basic information such as
names and phone numbers and a little bit about the prospective resident. Then they have
to page the admissions coordinator on her pager and tell her about it.
Vicki: Excellent.
Catherine: Now, I’m not sure that happens as planned all the time, but it sounds good!
The other thing I find that is frustrating is telephone etiquette, and when you get
complaints about employees not taking messages or getting the message wrong or the
phone number wrong. That really puts people off, and I don’t blame them.
Vicki: You segued into one of the things I wanted to ask. Sometimes the follow-up is
more important than the initial tour. What can we put into place for the follow-up to the
tour?
John: Well, you should call the people back the very first thing the next morning. Invite
them back or suggest meeting somewhere. Be proactive. Ask them if they had any
issues or concerns. Apologize and explain why you weren’t available.
Vicki: If I come in to a building and fill out the card, and have a tour, how much is too
much follow up? This is across the line. You can call me the next day and ask if I’ve
made a decision. How many times can we really keep calling a person?
Catherine: I tell my admissions coordinator to call at least 2-3 times to see what their
plans are, or until they have made a decision about our facility or someplace else.
Vicki: Are we checking with these people to see why they may have chosen another
facility? Are we collecting that data and using it? A lot of people are hesitant to ask
those hard questions. When you get that information, is there anything you can do with
it to make our process better? Do you find the usual reasons are things like the other
place is closer to home, we have other friends there? What seems to tempt people the
most in choosing a facility?
Catherine: You mean as far as their decision to go somewhere else?
Vicki: Exactly – what reason do most people give for choosing another facility?
Catherine: The location, etc. Comments I’ve had in this present facility is that the staff
is always smiling and seems happy and they greet them, and the residents look happy.
Beth: If your facility is nicer looking or smells better or just has the prettiest flowers in
the lobby, that’s important to some people!
Vicki: We have covered a lot of the information on page 4. We have talked about the
process, who is handling it, mystery shopping, and some follow-up. The can of worms I
would next like to open is to really look at the sheet in front of you. You will see it is a
grid, a table, on the page after page 4. It talks about curb appeal drive-up in the top left
corner. I would like to have a brief discussion as we wind down on time as to what is
being said at facilities on tours and how we can improve upon it. I have found that
people give what I like to call the Vanna White tours. They are waving their hands and
saying things like ―this is our lovely dining room, where we have meals and other
activities.‖ I also have had people tell me about the resident rooms and things like
individual climate control, and this is the nurse’s station, etc. If you think about it as you
would think about all the bad things in a bus tour somewhere, where they say ―on your
left is, on your right is,‖ and you are speeding by on the bus tour without as much
discussion as you might really like. You are missing a leisurely attitude to enjoy that
tour.
When we go into facilities and have our tours, we need to think about the features in
those areas, the benefits they offer, and what advantage is there for the resident to move
in because of what your facility has? Generally, in marketing, we talk about features,
benefits, and advantages. We like to tweak this a little bit and have been trying to take
more of a values and ethics approach, where we look at the relationship to the long-term
care overall goal, and not being the goals of each individual resident, but more the goals
of the industry. For instance, we might say when talking about curb appeal and drive-up,
I might be telling someone where the location is, that it is easily accessible from the
highway for friends and relatives to come visit. Obviously, the benefit is that it does
make it easy for people to come in and have their families visit. It is a tremendous
advantage to the family member and the resident as they live there and progress that they
are able to have socializing and support. This would be for many people an entirely
different way to look at touring, to tell people more why it’s important what occurs in a
certain area much more so than just what occurs in that area. I could talk about the
dining room and you don’t have to be a genius to know that’s where you eat, but if you
were teaching someone how to do tours and you got to the dining room, what are some of
the things you could talk about that would alleviate some of the misconceptions we talked
about earlier? They have pulled off all this information from the Internet, but they
generally don’t have a clue what it means. Yet, it reflects on all the areas when we give
them a tour. Is it clear the way I’m moving this discussion?
John: Yes. In addition, I think it’s important to have the people explain to you what they
are looking for so you aren’t wasting their time or yours. If they have a patient who is
coming to your facility for short-term rehab, then you don’t need to discuss a long-term
residency at all. You need to concentrate on therapy and show them the areas where
therapy takes place. You can introduce them to some of the therapists and they can ask
questions. It’s more of a hands-on approach and a personal approach instead of the
generic tour. If their family member is going to be at your facility for maybe a month at
the most, you concentrate on the needs of that patient and not waste their time showing
them things like the individual climate control and last year’s Christmas party pictures!
You have to market toward what the customer wants and needs.
Vicki: Okay, here we are walking someone around a therapy area and you have
introduced them to therapists and we obviously have a good rehab room. What are some
of the specific things you can say to the guests to push them over into why your facility is
better than another facility? I’m speaking in generalities and not specifics.
John: I never would talk about or compare us to another facility. I just don’t like doing
that. I would just try to do things like indicate that our therapists have been with us a
long time and they are contracted through a reliable company, etc. I explain that if
possible, family members are encouraged to come and participate in the therapy, and we
have a non-sterile environment for the family to interact in. Then I have one of the
therapists discuss briefly the particular patient and what type of exercises and therapy
would be conducted after a thorough evaluation of the patient.
Vicki: Exactly.
John: You want your therapy room to be bright and friendly looking. The equipment
needs to be sparkling clean and looking good, not beaten up!
Vicki: Also, take a critical look at what is stacked on the floor and what boxes are lined
up in the therapy department. What is strewn about the floor? These things take away
from the streamlined, focused, look that you want to show when people are touring.
Catherine, when your admissions person was training everybody to do tours, what were
some of the points she was very focused on and wanted everyone to understand?
Catherine: Because most of the department heads had not done tours before, she focused
on what she said to families when they are taking tours. It’s kind of like your Vanna
White tours! But, then she brings them back to her office and lets them ask any
questions. She told most of the department managers what to say and what not to say.
She told them to be honest. If they asked about survey reports, make sure you explain the
surveys to them, and she always makes sure we have copies of the most recent surveys.
Vicki: Good for her. Letting you guys read over the recent surveys and know what is
appearing on the Internet allows you to formulate what you would say about them.
Another effective technique is to bring up an objection before the guests do.
Catherine: Yeah, we do that! We talk about it so they know we aren’t hiding anything
and when they go home, they know what our sampling is on the survey report.
Vicki: Exactly. Now, what I would suggest that you think about is to just make some
comments on this sheet for us to finish up this section before we move on. Think about
how you can take this sheet and effect a change in my building? How can we go from a
Vanna White tour to why this program is part of the goal for long-term care? I’ll give
you an example in the dining room. People come in and wave their arms and tell me
what a lovely dining room it is, and I would encourage you to work with your staff so
that you talk about two choices for meals, substitutions, meals being planned by a
dietician, work into the MDS conversation about monitoring weight control, how we
have the ability to change diets to super-cereal and super-cookies to boost someone’s
caloric intake along with supplements, and to really tie this all back up in a nice package.
If I personally had a facility with a gorgeous dining room and a chef from the Cordon
Bleu, perhaps that is enough to sell people. If I didn’t, I might need to sell them on why
the dining program is important and what a difference it made in someone’s life when
they had the proper nutrition, and why choosing our facility could make that difference.
It’s different from showing somebody the chandelier in the dining room!
So, let’s take a few minutes to recap what we have talked about today and to talk about
where we will be going on Wednesday. We had a good start here looking at tours as an
effective technique to really convert more of the marketing effort. We all have dollars to
spend on marketing, but never as much as we want, and they generally have to go in
another direction than what we would choose. That leaves us putting in systems in our
buildings with our teams, as Catherine mentioned, to make everything work in the
system. Obviously, if you put more time in on converting what you get, you will be
working smarter and not harder. We talked about the fact that many people come to us
with vast misconceptions and need a great deal of clarification and that perhaps by
proactively using our surveys, we can head it off at the pass! We had a nice chat about
follow-ups and mystery shopping facilities. Next time, I would like to start with some
ideas you might have generated from this grid sheet. We talked about the dining room
and how to see what we could be promoting differently. Also, we will look at some
advertisements. I will ask you to just flip open the yellow pages to the section for the
town you live in and we will compare what people are putting down about themselves.
We have an individual who lets us use their brochure and we have the go-ahead to rip it
apart. As the marketing experts, we’ll be doing that. Thank you for your time today.
Are there any areas you would like us to focus on as we move forward with this
presentation?
John: Yes – how to get more capital spending for marketing!
Vicki: I agree with you. It’s the biggest problem we face, like everything else. If we
can’t get salaries to attract the staff we want to attract, and if you don’t have the tools,
you can’t do it.
John: The owners and corporations and managers need to be educated instead of
educating the community!
Beth: I think that one way to affect your budget is to proactively show the results of your
marketing program.
Mary: Well, Vicki, you are a firm believer that you don’t have to spend as much money
as people think they need to spend in marketing.
Vicki: I think that whatever amount you get, you can take it and squeeze it and it can go
much further than people anticipate. When we’re looking at an industry where every day
administrators have to fight fires, in some cases surrounded by people who are struggling
just to do their own jobs, and mired in an industry with intense regulations which makes
them by default need to be micro-managers, and if you’re looking at time or money and
you have a terrible amount for the marketing budget, and the implication on your time in
making the marketing calls, setting up the system for the tours, there is only so much you
can get out of one person’s body in a 7-day week. The squeeze isn’t going to get any
better. A gentleman I used to work for in Louisiana would say ―you pay one way or
another – either pay with your money or pay with your time.‖ As administrators, our
challenge is what kind of balance can we set up so we can give our time to implementing
systems and monitoring them, and get the money for promotion? That leaves us with a
challenge to think about and we’ll meet again on Wednesday morning, same time, same
channel.
Mary: Any questions for Vicki before we leave?
Vicki: Well, if you would take a few minutes to make some comments on this grid sheet
that we can start with on Wednesday, that’s great. Then we can move on and totally rip
apart a brochure and talk about promotion and how to spend some of that precious money
that we do have. Thanks for spending your time with us. See you Wednesday.
Effective Marketing Strategies – The Teleclass Transcript
October 30, 2002
Vicki: Well, let’s move on to Part II of our effective marketing strategy. We’ll try not to
put you too much on the spot, but try to make it a productive conversation. Our portion
today is to create more effective promotional tools for the local census development
efforts, and really we are going to focus that part of the conversation on a couple of
specific areas. We will talk about really looking at brochures, advertising, press releases,
printed materials and also we’ll touch on special events. I reluctantly put special events
in because I go to so many places and ask what marketing they are doing and what are
you working on and, inevitably, people will tell me about the special events and
advertising they are placing, and these seem to eat up a lot of their marketing resources.
I’d like to touch on the more effective use of them and being a bit stingy with that money
and making it stretch further. Specifically, I’d like to start with that grid sheet that we
referred to at the end of Monday’s session that had the location, features, and benefits.
To refresh your memory, one of the examples I brought out was the dining room and the
food and how we come in and get a Vanna White tour! Even Catherine said that even
with all their planning they still have somewhat of a Vanna White tour. The information
we take from a tour is also applicable to building your brochure, which is why I would
like to spend a few minutes on it.
Because so many brochures talk about the different areas in their buildings, how big they
are, how well decorated they are, how their meals are served by chefs, etc., they focus on
the features but not so much the benefits of all these things. The example that I brought
up was the dining room and how so many people take a tour and they hear from the tour
guide ―this is our lovely dining room.‖ Then they pause for dramatic effect as though I
am supposed to applaud them. We could be speaking about everything from the dietician
to the nutritional supplements we offer, that we monitor weight gains and losses. We
have supplements available. We can work with families to find out what their loved one
likes to eat and perhaps our head of food services goes down to meet with residents and
to take a few moments to interject information about the criteria and regulations that we
have to meet just by something as simple as discussing substitutes and what they mean to
someone who lives there.
Let’s look at some other areas and based on that kind of discussion where we want to
tweak our tour and tweak our brochure, can anybody look at that information in the lobby
and what can you say about the lobby on your tour and what possible benefits can you
derive from talking about the lobby and your receptionist, if you have one? Any ideas?
John: I can think back to my days at facilities and one of the obvious things is that the
lobby is a place for the residents to sit and read and get out of their rooms. It’s good to
show that the residents have the freedom to move about and it’s a gathering place for the
families to come and have a semi-private place to sit and visit away from the room. The
area should be clean and have nice carpeting that isn’t stained, and it should be tidy.
Unfortunately, in a lot of nursing homes, the lobby area is where all the offices are
located. So, it’s more of a front office where there is a lot of congestion. So, if you are
giving people a tour, you might not want to stay there very long and talk about it! You
might just point out on the tour that these are the offices that are available if there is ever
an issue and that the social workers are here, etc. But, at one facility, we had a lobby that
was strictly for the residents, without offices, and we had a TV in there and a miniature
library with books and magazines and it was nicely lighted and had comfortable seating
for reading, flowers, etc.
Vicki: You brought up some good points. You mentioned that the lobby is a gathering
place and the residents have the freedom to gather there. One of the sessions that Mary
and I do is on values and ethics. One of the themes we discuss is that we are really
focusing more now on residents having choices. We want to emphasize the fact that they
stay independent longer now and that means they have the ability to make choices, and
we provide those choices to them. I have two small children, so I can use that analogy.
As the children grow, you want to nurture their ability to make decisions and so you ask
―do you want x or do you want y?‖ Well, in the same way, this is what we are doing in
long-term care because we offer choices for lunch. We offer a choice of getting up early
and having a bath in the morning or do they prefer a bath in the evening? It’s really all
about trying to give our seniors a similarity to the independence they had in their own
homes. So, John is right when he said they have the freedom to come down and gather in
the lobby and that is by their own choice. Choice is one of the values and ethics we stand
on in long-term care vs. the fear that seniors get when they feel their choices and freedom
are being taken from them. You mentioned that it was clean, there was a library, the
lighting was pleasant, there were flowers, and it was very home-like. This is, again,
moving away from institutionalized and moving toward home-like hospitality in health
care.
Beth: When I was doing the AIT, there were two facilities – one which was a nursing
home facing a lot of financial problems and it was older, and then I went to a much nicer
facility. The difference in their waiting rooms and lobbies was so dramatic. The first one
was just an opening off the main hallway. It wasn’t carpeted. It had a couple of plants as
an after thought. The second facility’s lobby was actually closer to the administrative
offices but separated by a much wider hallway and actually had the illusion of
separateness because of the wall structure. There weren’t exactly doors into it, but there
were larger openings and there were two rooms together that you could temporarily
separate and you could have more than one family come and visit and gather in there and
be comfortable. Just putting some thought into it makes a big difference.
Vicki: In the second facility, which you said was much nicer, did a lot of people use that
lobby as a gathering place?
Beth: I would say this was true on weekends mostly at that particular facility. There
wasn’t a lot of activity there except on the weekends. We did a lot more tours, and the
families seemed to like it! It was a selling point to them!
Vicki: As you mentioned, doing a lot of tours on weekends, and your experiences when
you passed by the nurse’s stations, what is said at the nurse’s stations when we wave our
hands and what could we really talk about?
Beth: It was a while ago. Let’s see. In the second facility, we talked about the
professionalism of the staff and their availability. That staff at the second facility
interacted a lot with the residents. It was a lot easier to give tours there. Maybe that was
the problem at the first facility!
Vicki: The opportunity we have is exactly what you mentioned – the professionalism of
the staff. What I encourage people to talk about when they approach the nurse’s station
is to compare it much to the nurse’s station at hospitals – that this is where we keep the
patient’s information, this is where the staff comes in at shift change and talk about what
has been going on in the previous eight hours, and I really try to focus on the similarities
of the process, of what happens in the hospital to what happens in a nursing home, as far
as the health care. So many people have the mistaken impression that perhaps the staff is
not quite as qualified or they would be working in hospitals. They don’t realize how
demanding families and residents can be, so that’s something to emphasize to visitors on
tour, to talk about the staff. As you will see in the brochure we will talk about in a few
minutes, they have specifically noted in their brochure that their staff chose to work there.
It would be nice as you walked around and toured people that you could say our staff has
the same credentials as the hospital nurses do, the very same RNs, they take the very
same tests. The LVNs take the same tests and they have chosen to work in long-term
care, even though it is very demanding. I think that is a wonderful concept to emphasize
the professional level of the staff. I think sometimes our staffs feel a little left out. When
we are talking about how to motivate staff, to really give them the kudos for who they are
and what they are doing, that is one way to do it, during a tour.
Mary: If you really wanted to push that issue, you could say that nursing home nurses are
actually in some ways better qualified because they have to be the eyes and ears of the
doctors.
Vicki: I like that.
Mary: When everybody talks about nurses working in long-term care because they
couldn’t get a job in a hospital, it’s unfair because your assessment skills have to be
better because there isn’t a doctor in there checking every day.
John: We also say that these people are dedicated to the elderly and like to build
relationships because in a hospital setting you don’t get that opportunity. The nurse’s
stations are also where usually the medication rooms are and the place where you store
the cigarettes and when you’re touring you can bring up these things – that we keep
medications and things like cigarettes under lock and key so Mom doesn’t set the place
on fire! You can ad lib a little bit. I’m not an advocate for smoking, but it is a resident’s
right and in some facilities you may or may not have smoking available.
Vicki: Well, along that line, John, you had mentioned the other day about walking
people into therapy areas. What values can we comment on when taking visitors on tours
through therapy areas, instead of just showing them a room that may or may not even
have a lot of equipment in it?
John: Well, I wouldn’t take them there!
Vicki: I’ve heard people tell me they do hallway therapy in their facility, and I think
―yup, that means you have no equipment.‖
John: At the last facility I managed, we dealt strictly with people who came directly from
hospitals and we had special rooms dedicated to different things. We had a transitional
room, where they had a semi-private room and would receive their therapy and then they
would go to the transition room which was set up like an apartment. We would start
working with them there, showing them how to go to the bathroom by themselves. We
had showers in there and it looked like a house. There were always people living there,
and so when we gave tours, they could see residents using the facility. We would knock
on the door and ask if we could show off their room, and the tour would see how it is all
personalized. That is how we always did our therapy. We would try to schedule these
tours when the mid-morning active therapy was going on and after lunch. We had a lot
of group therapy and we would walk in with a tour and show them what was going on.
At every facility I was at, we were fortunate to have excellent therapy departments and
great equipment to show off. I’ve never been in a facility that didn’t have those things,
so I don’t know if I answered your question.
Vicki: You did, you did.
Mary: Something interesting that I just heard this week about rehab is that apparently the
assisted-living facilities are getting into rehab and putting rehab rooms in at their
facilities.
Vicki: I’ve had several clients who have gone in that direction. Every state has different
regulations on what you can do. In Texas, as I understand it, you can put in that area. In
Oklahoma, I have people who have put in that area. In Tennessee, as odd as it sounds,
you can have a therapy department that treats your own patients in the skilled and long-
term care side of things but if you decide on your campus to put in assisted living, you
then have to contract that out.
John: I found in my experience that you can get around that if you have a separate door
or entrance from the main facility, and then you can start serving outpatients. For
assisted living and retirement centers, on one of the campuses I had they were talking
about doing that.
Mary: In the assisted living, does it have to be outpatient? Is that how they are billing it?
Vicki: They are billing it under Part B, so it comes into a Part B situation, just like home
health care.
Mary: So, it’s not actually the assisted living, because assisted livings don’t have
Medicare contracts.
Vicki: It’s mostly self-pay. They are just billing their Medicare and supplemental if they
have it.
John: Because you know if you live at home, you can have someone come in and do
home therapy, so it’s the same type of thing.
Vicki: If you find someone who is laying in the long-term care bed and gets picked up
for therapy, although they are not on the skilled unit, they can be billed under Part B.
Vicki: Assisted livings are beginning to offer therapy to increase their census.
Marketing new facilities have their own challenges. You can have a great brochure and
all our ads can look terrific. Your special events can go swimmingly, but if there is a
little whisper campaign and somebody down the street says ―well, you know, they
haven’t been able to keep a DON‖ or ―they have had a lot of turnover since they opened,‖
or since they implemented X, Y, or Z, or got a new manager, or whatever, the best
marketing goes out the window. People want day-to-day stability and that is what
attracts them.
Mary: I talked to someone from San Antonio, who was the administrator of a brand new
building in an area where there hasn’t been a new building in years, and he was full.
When I asked him what they did in the way of marketing, he said they had an open house
when they opened. I told him there are a lot of beautiful buildings in Dallas that aren’t
anywhere near full, so you must be doing something right. Basically, what he said was it
was the customer service and the care they are giving. People came into the building to
see it because it was new, but because of the way they were treated when they got there,
they didn’t have to do a whole lot of outside marketing.
Vicki: That customer service is hard to convey in a brochure. Looking again at the grid
sheet, this grid sheet would be a worksheet we would use if you were developing a
facility. It would be an exercise to sit down and ask what is it about these different areas
that tie into the overall goals of long-term care and why there are advantages. We
recently did a project for a corporation in northern California. They were looking at
buying a piece of property and putting in a mixture of assisted-living, Alzheimer’s care,
and I think skilled care. They were going to offer these three products in one location,
and what we found the more we called people and got brochures, was that it was a very
upscale area and every tiny little feature was named in brochures. If they had a 24-hour
beverage bar where you could go, it was in the brochure. The picture of the dining room,
etc., was in the brochure. The focus was on the features and amenities, but not how you
felt when you were there. Several facilities in the area catered to a little different
clientele than the ones I’m speaking of and in some cases, you had to plunk down a
quarter of a million dollars to get in. Since people had lived in the northern California
area theoretically for years, they had the money to sell their homes and facilitate this
move-in. So, the way they were approached was with a brochure very much like that of a
luxury hotel. It’s like you were looking at moving into the Four Seasons, or at the
Crescent for a while, vs. the different organizations that had their smaller tri-folds and
brochures that talked about how it felt to be there, that it was friendly, and they built on
the niche they formed.
Now, along that line, I would like to direct your attention to our brochure sample (not
available in the handouts for this self study course) that we have, which I think you were
able to print. This is from a facility in North Texas and since we are all marketing gurus
when it comes to looking at brochures and ads, I would like to spend a few minutes trying
to see if this has been effective in what it is trying to do. To give you some background
as you look at this, this organization functions in a town where there are approximately
four long-term care facilities. They have divided up the town amongst themselves. One
facility identifies itself as being the one that takes problem patients, another doesn’t really
go out and market much. The third one bills itself as the rehab facility that you would
come to and is part of a corporation, and it is the new upstart in the area, which has come
in and heavily promoted their rehab. This facility in question, where you see their
brochure, has really stepped back and looked at where they were positioned in the
community. They have been in the community for 13 years. Prior to this other facility
coming into town and boosting their rehab promotion, they were known as THE rehab
provider. The hospital in this town is like a throw back to the dark ages, and it does not
have a skilled unit. All the skilled-care patients have to leave the hospital to get care. It’s
a dream situation, but this administrator finds himself in a situation where the other
facility is closer to the hospital. His facility is close because it’s a small town, but is still
perceived as being off the beaten path when it’s no farther than half a mile away, and he
wanted to create a brochure that he felt really said who they were, and that they weren’t
corporate, here’s what we do, and would focus on what he did in marketing. Let’s take a
few minutes to look over his brochure and then we’ll have a conversation about it.
John: One thing off the bat, you need some pictures. Visual stimulus is necessary,
especially if you’re off the beaten path. The statements in this brochure are good, but I
want to see pictures. You know, people might look at a picture and it may be in a
wooded area and they will think how pretty and nice for their family member. You need
something to inspire people to come look.
Vicki: Are you okay with pictures being black and white, or do you feel they need to be
in color?
John: Well, I would prefer color, but I know how the budget is. In this particular
scenario, I think for the extra dollars you will spend for a full color brochure, you will get
it back. If you’re one of 30 in the area who all market the same way, maybe I wouldn’t
spend a lot on things like color, but if you are the only one in a special circumstance like
this, I’d spend the extra money because you’re going to get it back.
Vicki: Let’s talk about if this brochure were stretched into a four-fold instead of a three-
fold. We would have ample room for photos. What type of photos would you like to see
in it?
Beth: I like to see people you can identify with. They talk about ―almost home‖ a lot and
so show them what looks like home.
John: Hopefully, they have set it up that way if that’s the way they are marketing it. It
should have rocking chairs, you know. You don’t want to see a sterile picture of a
facility with no lawn furniture out front, no people around, etc. People love courtyards
and atriums, and private places they can go. I don’t know if this facility has that kind of
stuff, but if they do, they should show it
Vicki: The facility in question has a nice enough drive-up, as you might guess. They are
pretty much in the middle of a big field, without a lot of trees around. However, they
have done a lot outside because it was very sterile and very concrete. He has made it
more attractive from the outside. The inside lobby, just to let you know, has been made
very friendly but there are some points you would all pick up on quickly. As John
mentioned, about the library and lighting and flowers, they have done nicely with flowers
and coziness and the little conversation nooks, but it’s all poorly lit. Unless you have a
really dark home and a really low electricity bill, you might not be excited when you
walk in through the front door. I do agree that homey pictures might make a tremendous
difference.
John: Does this facility do community sponsorships? Do they have a softball league
where they could put that kind of community service and interest in their brochure? Are
they actively involved in the community? You know, people who end up in the hospital
and have to go to a rehab facility, for instance, might just remember that their
granddaughter’s tee shirt from softball said Blah Blah Manor or whatever on the back.
That might help them when the social worker asks where they want to go. It might not
matter if the other one is right next door. If they remember the name because their
grandchild was wearing it, and this facility was good enough to sponsor that kid’s team,
they’ll go to that facility. These things make good pictures in the brochures, too.
Vicki: That would certainly distinguish them from other facilities. That’s a great
comment. Let’s talk about when you go out and you pick up someone’s brochure – the
look and the feel of it, as far as what colors you like and don’t like, paper stock vs.
something heavier, glossy? Any comments as far as what you like and don’t like?
Beth: Well, you want something that stands out, so my philosophy is always pick a color
that is part of your theme and something that will stand apart from the white or gray
brochures.
John: I like the ones that open like a folder. You have the rates, etc.
Mary: Oh, a waterfall.
John: Yeah, a waterfall type of thing. I’m obviously in a dream world with budgets, but
the glossy look is beautiful and shows you care about details. If you have a nice little
insert, laminated, glossy, of, say, the therapy room, it’s great. There should be a place to
insert business cards, a place to take notes when you’re touring, price sheets, etc.
Beth: That would be great for social workers. You have to consider where you are going
to place these brochures. Are you going to just hand them out, place them on a table, in a
rack?
John: What about posters, like a print ad? Not things that go in newspapers, but
something you could put in a community center or place like that, where you don’t have
to hand out a million brochures. You might put it in a common area, and it would be
laminated and have most of the information that’s in your brochure, but maybe hang it on
a bulletin board or wall. I’m thinking of the kind of posters they have for movies at the
theaters, that kind of thing. That’s something different besides a brochure.
Naomi: Have you done billboards before?
John: I did a television ad, and that was fun making a commercial. It actually helped, for
a while. We saw an increase in referrals, but then we stopped those ads because it’s very
very expensive. We did it as a test, and it worked. It was mainly for the rehab center.
We did get a lot of referrals. We had a very good network with our doctors, and they
would refer to us because we have an excellent therapy program. I’m a bit biased.
Vicki: That’s great because I always tell people if they don’t believe in the facility, why
are they still working there? If you can’t believe in it, you can’t provide it.
John: You have to try different ways. If they don’t work, you cross that off and try
something else. You have to be constantly coming up with new ideas. Now with Internet
and other ways to market, hopefully the black-and-white brochures will be going bye-
bye.
Vicki: As are the Yellow Pages ads. When I got ready to spend some time on Yellow
Pages and started dragging out ads, I was so surprised at the lack of ads in the Yellow
Pages now for long-term care facilities as opposed to a few years ago.
Mary: Well, yeah, people advertise now more on the Internet.
Beth: Is anyone tracking that to check results?
Vicki: Most of the people I know say they aren’t getting that many people who are
referring to it, but they are afraid not to have it! They feel like if they have family spread
out all over the U.S., that will, in effect, act as a brochure that they don’t have to mail.
John: I think the demographics of where your facility is located affects how you market,
too. Obviously, you wouldn’t want a lot of Internet access if you are located in a lower
income area where the families don’t necessarily have Internet access. You wouldn’t
want to waste your money there. If you are in the Plano area, for instance, you have a
population with Internet and you can market that way. You market based on where you
are and what’s around you.
Vicki: Well, it certainly made things easier for me doing research for clients because all
you have to do is go onto a website on the Internet or some of the other search products
and go around the nation to compare your client to others. It’s been great for me.
John: Nowadays, too, you could have a link listed on your brochures to where people can
go to that website and get more information about your facility and its overall care.
Vicki: That’s right, and sometimes it helps because it can explain the pages that were
just read in the brochure. What I would like to do at this point is a little review of this
morning’s session and discuss what we will cover next time. We will spill into some of
the other ads, as John mentioned, things like supporting local teams, sponsor groups, etc.
We will talk a little about press releases and special events and how to critique and make
your decision on the yea or nay of a special event when it is presented to you. I will also
touch on the critique points of comparing brochures side by side, colors, themes, etc.
Does it have all the bells and whistles such as glossy photos, business cards, notes, etc?
Generally, when you write press releases or brochures, you are very aware that every
word counts. We will look at some of the words and concepts on the next sheet in the
handouts. We will ask what can we include in our printed materials in words, graphics,
photos? We will look at the descriptions, the services we provide, and take words on the
list and craft sentences to best portray where we are, that not everybody is going to have
the brochure with all the photos and the swans on the front lake, but what could you say
about your building using these words and concepts that would totally convince me that I
was making the right decision to come there? A lot of people focus on the fact that they
want a brochure, but they don’t put the time and thought into it so that it really sells their
building. We will also get into my favorite area, accountability, and how to make certain
that your staff is aware of what you want and that you have communicated it to them
clearly and to make them responsible and accountable for their actions. Would anybody
like to make any comments?
Before we convene on Friday, just take a few moments of your time and open a couple of
phone books. Look in the sections for assisted-living, retirement homes, nursing homes,
etc. Look at the differences in the ads and what statements are made. Look at what they
believe are the selling points, because if you only have one shot to talk to a person, you
need to make the most of it. As John said, we could put a poster up. Obviously, the
poster he is talking about could say a whole lot more than a Yellow Pages ad. Not as
much as a brochure, but more than an ad, and if you only had the opportunity to say a few
things, the question would be what would you pick to say? So, if you could just spend a
couple of minutes flipping through the Yellow Pages, that would be good. We will talk
about the words and concepts that we looked at in brochures and apply them to Yellow
Pages and press releases, and then we will talk about accountability. Have a great rest of
Wednesday and a great Thursday, and I look forward to chatting with you Friday
morning.
Effective Marketing Strategies – The Teleclass Transcript
November 1, 2002
Vicki: Let’s get started. In marketing strategies, we have talked about starting on tours
and brochures, and what we moved onto last time was the information that should be
included in the brochures. What I’d like to begin with today, before we move into the
ominous accountability area, is a wrap up from the effective promotional material, how
we talked about Yellow Pages, ads, boosters, press releases, etc. Did anyone have a
chance to flip through the Yellow Pages and look at advertisements? What did you find
when you looked at them?
Beth: A lot of people don’t put in big ads. They just put in the name-type ads. If I were
new to an area and didn’t know any of the facilities, I would automatically first call those
that had the ads that stood out, the ones that drew your attention and your eyes. Then I
would go to the line ads.
Vicki: So, naturally, it’s the bigger ones that catch our attention, and we think if they
have a big ad, it must be a good place.
Beth: Yes, that’s true, but it’s also a convenience. The numbers are bigger, you can see
them better!
Vicki: For those of us who are in need of bifocals, we do appreciate that kind of ad!
Beth: They have to reach their target, after all! The usual people who come to these
facilities are older and can barely find the Yellow Pages book, much less the little line
ads.
Vicki: And, their children who are looking for a facility for them are older middle age
and, theoretically, have the same sight problems! So, the interesting thing is that some
people are trying to force everything into one ad and what they end up saying in the ad
may or may not be effective. I pulled one out. We have an ad from a large group in
Dallas that says, ―Serving seniors with quality and dignity since 1947. A 180-bed health
care center providing 24-hour skilled care, private-pay, Medicare, and Medicaid. Also
provides independent living, assisted living, Alzheimer’s care, and homecare services.‖
Their ad is about 2‖ tall by about 3‖ wide. It’s on the left-hand topside of the page and
marketers would tell you that you want to be at the top of the page. Primo placement is
the right-hand page at the right hand top. This is because most people are right-handed
and when they open the page of a newspaper, they follow their right hand and that is what
they see first. When we talk about this ad, you’ll notice that they hit the fact that they
have a history since 1947 of serving seniors with quality and dignity, and then they told a
little about the products they have. When you compare this to some of the things you
would see when looking at the Yellow Pages for hotels, there are some similarities. It’s
very interesting to me that now we see a lot of people who are promoting their hotels or
their hospitals and they are telling more about the features than the benefits. This
particular group is not for profit, and they very much focus on their values and ethics and
the touchy-feely of establishing their historical background. If you were designing your
Yellow Pages ad for your facility, what would you choose to say? Naomi?
Naomi: I would try to highlight some of the amenities. If you’re really trying to promote
rehab, put something in about that. If you’re more nursing, or wound care, try to show
that, because you don’t want to make it appear too crowded and jumbled up.
Vicki: It’s a good idea to have something that maybe the others don’t have in their ads so
that you appear to be the more comprehensive provider.
Mary: I think that whole issue of saying things like ―providing care since 1947‖ means
something to me. If you’ve been in business that long, the perception is that they are
doing something right, although that isn’t necessarily the case. But, you do have an
advantage when you say that.
Vicki: Right. It makes you feel you can trust them. You know, we’ve been open this
long, haven’t gone bankrupt, and our CEO is not in jail! It’s very comforting.
John: I did actually have access to the Yellow Pages on the Internet and you can see the
difference between the printed books and the Internet. If I search for nursing homes, it
takes me to attorneys first. So, if you do a search for nursing homes, it takes you directly
to litigation! Then, as you go down, you finally get to nursing homes and you click on
that, and then the first 7-8 appear and then these pop-ups come up and are all about the
attorneys again!
Mary: There is a way that you can put in just the right words on your web page so that
when people are searching, your website will pop right up. The other thing is there are
services, if you don’t want to do it yourself. You register your website on different
search engines and you can do that yourself or pay someone else to do it. I personally
pay someone else to do it because it’s reasonable. They go through my website at least
once a month and re-register because the newest registration will pop up at the top more
often. They also look for more key words. There is an author I list on the website and I
don’t have him as a key word on that website and if you search for his name, I pop up as
#3 even though he has his own website. So, for a reasonable amount, I can pay someone
to keep me out front.
Vicki: For most of us in nursing homes, who don’t have the extra money to pay someone
else to do these things for us, we end up doing a lot of it ourselves.
Mary: It’s about $150, and to me it’s worth it because I don’t have that much time.
Vicki: It depends on who you are working for! Some frown on $150 being spent. This
is the stingy marketing person talking.
Mary: I know. If you open the Yellow Pages for Plano, there is a facility that to this day
has a bad reputation, although nobody can remember why it does, and their information is
in a heart, and it says ―Where families come together.‖ They also list that they are a
member of THCA.
Vicki: They are probably trying to repair the damage to their reputation.
Mary: I can’t remember why it does, and I was talking to someone the other day and we
couldn’t come up with it either.
Vicki: But you remembered that it did, and that’s one of the indications to step in and try
to repair things with press releases. You are looking for ways that are low cost
alternatives to change the position of your building. You need to make sure you have a
brochure that says the right thing, make certain the Yellow Pages ad conveys that they are
a member of this group and families come together, etc. Another way to take this a step
further is with press releases. The press releases go back to the concept of the list of
three columns of words in the handouts. When you look at these words, it really would
stand out to you very quickly what words you would want applied to your facility and
what you are trying to accomplish. In marketing, we are trying to communicate a
consistent message to the public. This is a perfect example, in what we heard in the
Yellow Pages ad that I saw, where they are communicating that they have a history, and
they are caring for seniors with quality and dignity since 1947. They took concepts off
this sheet and have made it very concise into a few words, conveying what they want to
convey. If they were designing a brochure or other printed materials, those concepts
should transfer and be seen across every message they put out, so you have consistency
of the message. For instance, when you look at a McDonald’s commercial, you have a
lot of things you can say, such as fast food, play area, etc. Nowhere in a McDonald’s
commercial does it mention quality dining. It talks about play yards and what they have
that is under a buck. But, their message is consistent. You can walk up to anybody on
the street and they can tell you about McDonald’s. Because there is so much controversy
in our industry, we have to work harder to convey our images. An effective way to do
this is with press releases. I encourage people to do this once a month, and it would be a
press release about an event at your facility, something that’s going on, etc. For instance,
November is National Alzheimer’s Month. If I were in a building with an Alzheimer’s
program, I would want to make sure I got some press out on Alzheimer’s Month. I
would talk a little bit about my facility because the likelihood is that it has a greater
chance of getting picked up in November than any other month of the year. People are
concerned that they are not writers and that they have to do a great job. It’s only
concepts or bullets. You don’t really have to do an entire press release. You can send
over bullets about the residents, some special aspects of your program or staff. I’ll put
that bug in your ear for the month of November. Has anyone had any experience in
doing press releases or in contacting the press?
Stephanie: We’ve done a little of that at Denver City.
Vicki: Good. Would you share a little of that with us?
Stephanie: My social worker is in charge of that. I told her I have to read them before
they go out, but it has helped in the community to see that we’re doing positive things,
because this particular facility did have some bad things going on that we’re not sure why
they happened, but they’re here. Press releases out here have really helped the public
look at us more positively.
Vicki: And you can assure us all that your social worker is not a prize winner in
journalism.
Stephanie: Not hardly! I sometimes redo some of hers and I’m certainly no journalist.
Vicki: All you have to be able to do is convey an idea and they have the ability to rewrite
it. Point your social worker in the direction of Alzheimer’s Month coming up.
Stephanie: Oh, we’ve already done that one.
Vicki: Oh, you’re good.
Stephanie: Actually, they have never done the Memory Walk. People in this town didn’t
know what it was, so we got to be the first to help host it this year.
Vicki: This is too perfect. This helps to discuss whether or not you should so a special
event. This is perfect, Stephanie. Tell us how you went about deciding to do this and
why it was worth your resources, your time and money, to do it.
Stephanie: Actually, the decision was made before I came here in May, so I came in at
the middle of the planning. We were able to get a lot of people who stopped at the
facility and asked questions, and we were able to bring them in to talk to them – people
we probably wouldn’t have gotten in here otherwise. And then we got contact with a lot
of people when we actually had the Memory Walk.
Vicki: Based on what you saw and how it went this year, obviously someone will ask
you next year if you want to do it again, and now people may come with other special
events they would like you to consider. How do you go about making that decision?
Stephanie: What we’ll do is look at each opportunity, and we’ll have to look at it from
the question of what benefit is there to doing this? What type of people will be drawn to
it? We pretty much do everything, because it’s a small town and you participate in any
way. We’re always right there.
Vicki: This would be an excellent opportunity to put in your brochure some of the things
you sponsor and participate in for your town. That was just brilliant. I’ve written down
four ideas to examining the opportunities surrounding a special event. Those would be:
When is it? Time of year, and why it’s important to you; To think about planning
things with staffing concerns; At a time of year when our census is down, right
before seasonal census periods. Perhaps you would look at something in July if
your census falls in August and September. Look at something in November to
get you through the end of the year and holiday season. Strategically to know
what are the right things for you.
What is it? What is the rationale for our participation? In Stephanie’s town,
which is Denver City, it would be necessary to participate in as many things as
possible. If you’re in a larger metropolitan area, more people will come to you
asking for your participation. You need to think what is the rationale for our
participation? For Stephanie, the event was a Memory Walk for Alzheimer’s.
That’s an excellent tie-in. We would think about what are the opportunities
presented to us and why should we be there?
What is the cost? That includes the pre-preparation, the preparation on the day of
the event, the follow-up. Look at the advertising costs, personnel cost, time,
resources, and something we in marketing call the opportunity cost. This is, if I
choose to do ―A‖ it costs me the time I would have perhaps been doing ―B.‖
Decide what is best for our facility. Is this the best direction for our dollars?
How does this fit into our plan?
So, those are some of the ideas I would like you to be able to apply to what direction you
move in to assess. You can go into all sorts of sublevels of this, and there are hundreds
of questions you can apply. Just make sure you make a good decision about everything
brought to you. Back in 1988, I actually developed a sheet for this because I was a new
marketing director for a facility and it seemed like every week someone came to me with
something they heard about in town and wanted to know if we could participate in it. I
put these questions you see in the handouts on a sheet and basically told them to fill out
the sheet and submit to me what it would take and convince me of why we should do this
in lieu of something else. The requests dropped dramatically and I think we made better
choices for that reason. So, do you have a lot of people coming to you these days asking
you to place money or do an ad in a booster, or get involved in events?
Beth: They come out every day.
Vicki: When I was at a 202-bed not-for-profit facility in Pittsburgh, I had what I called
the ―sorry, but‖ letter, and we drew up a letter that said we have a budget for charitable
giving every year, and our charitable giving is by taking people who are underinsured or
don’t have a secondary, and we choose to take them even though we know it’s not fully
covered, and this is how we give back because we take residents in the local community
who may be turned down at other facilities. The letter was notoriously known as our
―sorry, but‖ letter, and told them we wished them luck in their endeavors and were glad
they support us in ours. We’re proud to be a part of your community, giving back. Many
people do not realize that there are so many people we take care of who are not fully
covered. It costs us to provide that care and we never get the money back to provide that
care, not fully. So, what do you think about having a ―sorry, but‖ letter?
Mary: Sounds good.
Vicki: Well, I want to move on to the last topic, which is the ongoing topic of the day,
and this is managing the community relations effort as far as assigning responsibility and
accountability. Now, Stephanie, I know you have your social worker who is doing the
press releases and has the relationship with the press. How did you go about
communicating that with her and putting the standards in for what you expect her to do?
Stephanie: Actually, she came to me and asked if I had any problem with her doing it! I
told her I had no problem and it needs to be done, and then I told her what I expected. I
rewrote a couple of her press releases, but now she knows what I want. She’ll just write
them and then I’ll retype them before we take them to the newspaper.
Vicki: Part of this is talking about we really need to delegate this responsibility.
Stephanie is fortunate enough to have someone who came to HER saying she would like
to do this, but most of the time it’s us approaching someone else and telling them what
we would like them to do.
John: Are you talking about accountability for the overall, complete, thing or are you
talking about when we delegate the chores, who is accountable?
Vicki: Actually, I’d like to discuss both because we assign responsibilities and many
times never communicate them clearly and never follow up.
John: I guess it goes back to most facilities having a teamwork effort, where everyone is
involved in some type of marketing, because even a nurse’s aide or housekeepers can be
out in the community and can mention your facility and can market it. You have to be
careful on a managerial level because you can be held accountable for anything you
market, even statements like ―high quality care,‖ which can get you into trouble! You
have to have a very clear-cut policy about releases to the press or if the media comes to
the facility. Ultimately, the accountability is always thrown on the administrator. You
can delegate responsibilities, but ultimately the corporation is always going to hold the
administrator accountable for the drop in census, bad press, etc. At least, that’s been my
experience. So, the buck stops usually with the administrator of the facility, and the
administrators have to learn who is the best person to delegate marketing responsibilities.
I think you mentioned in the last couple of sessions about someone in marketing who was
let go because they couldn’t close on a tour. They did everything else right, but they
couldn’t close on a tour. The administrator had to make that decision, even if he/she
didn’t want to. I’m sure the corporate office has reports they want filled out and if they
don’t reach the right numbers, someone has to go. To get better results, if you have fun
with it instead of issuing ultimatums, you’ll do better. You really have to WANT to sell
your facility. You need to provide a relaxed, fun, atmosphere for employees so they will
be enthusiastic about marketing. You need limits and rules, but you can’t have it be so
harsh that you take away the fun and the desire. Talking about Alzheimer’s before, one
of the companies I worked for was big on raising money for Alzheimer’s and we would
go to a place like Wal-Mart and ask for a donation of something like a big TV and we
would go to flea markets and set up a booth. One year we raised about $2,000 in a
couple of days. It was fun, we had a good time, and we raised money for the cause and
marketed our facility at the same time. We had a marketing person who was always out
visiting doctors’ offices, hospitals, pharmacies, etc., and I never wanted to see her ever in
the building. She would only come back to visit her desk and report to me who she met
with and we always had a joint effort in marketing. Everyone knows that if the
marketing person can’t bring in the business and get the numbers where corporate wants
the numbers, you’ll have to find someone who can, but it has to be a team effort.
Vicki: That makes me want to pursue a question with Naomi because she is in an
interesting situation. She was a social worker who grew to be an administrator. Naomi,
when you were a social worker, were you approached to do marketing and asked to go
out to hospitals, etc.?
Naomi: Oh, yes.
Vicki: How did you feel about that?
Naomi: Personally, it didn’t bother me because I could talk to a wall. I know there are
other social workers who are forced into those situations and they end up doing more
harm than good. They are not marketing people. They can talk and counsel, but they
can’t market a building. On an individual basis, you need to pick and choose marketing
people carefully. Even with people who are in marketing, some do really well one-on-
one and others don’t have that knack. Some do better speaking to groups. It just depends
on the individual.
John: That’s a good point. I would almost force my social worker to get out there to
market, and they didn’t like it generally. But, my thinking was who is better to talk to
other social workers in hospitals, etc., than a social worker?
Vicki: That’s right.
John: I would tell my social worker to go and be themselves, don’t try to talk about
anything except social work as it pertains to our facility. Let them know about the type
of patients we can deal with, etc. The marketing person can go into other aspects of the
facility with the hospital. Marketing people can get in and talk to administration in
hospitals, etc., but social workers can do a lot of good if they deal with hospital social
workers. I would occasionally send a nurse, not every week but every so often, to go talk
to other nurses. Who better than a nurse to talk to another nurse about our facility? I
know a lot of social workers, nurses, etc., prefer to stay at the facility with the residents,
but every now and then it’s a good boost for the facility. You send them out for just one
day and they often find they really enjoy it because they aren’t really marketing like a
marketing person. They are just talking with colleagues about our facility.
Naomi: It does depend on how you talk to them, too. A nurse from your facility can take
a nurse to lunch or bring the nurses at the hospital some goodies and then get into the
discussion about the nursing at your facility. I always find if I don’t use that horrible
word, marketing, I get more cooperation from my social workers and others!
Vicki: Along that line, I want to toss out an idea and get your opinions on it. I have a
client, as I mentioned before, in Tennessee and as she looked at revamping her
Admissions Department, the individuals in that department were all social workers, as
this was a large facility. She found that they were extremely uncomfortable in discussing
finances with people and looking them in the eye and telling them the facility needs to be
paid and paid by a certain day of the month. It got to the point where the administrator
had broken apart the inquiry process. When a family comes in just for a tour and wants
to ask questions, at the end of the tour she now has them meet with the manager of the
Business Office. They get the finance side strictly from the Business Office Manager and
the social worker/admissions coordinator never gets involved in that discussion.
John: That’s the best way to do it.
Vicki: How would you feel, Naomi, if you never had to talk to anybody about finances?
Naomi: Uh, as a social worker, you have to talk to them about finances at some point,
whether it be collections, or the process of getting the Social Security check sent to the
facility, etc.
John: Yeah, but that’s just cut and dry. When it gets to the part about a particular
patient’s bill not being paid and what are we going to do about this problem, that need not
come from the social worker.
Naomi: Right. I agree.
John: A social worker needs to maintain a certain bond with the family and resident.
Stephanie: My social worker doesn’t talk to them about it at all.
Vicki: Was it always this way, or did you change it?
Stephanie: Oh, no, because my social worker just likes to take charge of every situation.
We had something come up right after changing Business Office managers at about the
same time I was coming to this facility and somehow or another there was some
miscommunication somewhere, so I just made the decision that all financial would take
place through the Business Office or with me. My social worker has no problem with it.
It’s one less thing she has to cover.
Vicki: Do you feel like that policy helps set the tone early on with families about the
expectation of payment?
Stephanie: Yes, and that’s something we need to straighten out early on. There are
things that need to be addressed immediately, and I feel the sooner the families
understand the payment requirements, the better off we all will be.
Vicki: Have you seen a difference in collections? Are more people paying on time?
Stephanie: It’s been a whole lot easier, and now they can’t say things like ―well, Glenda
told us this,‖ because Stephanie told them and Stephanie is the one who calls and tries to
collect the money. They know what’s going on.
Vicki: How much of your time would you say on average you spend in collections? I
know it varies, but give an estimate. I just have a feeling that it’s much more effective
coming from the administrator than anyone else.
Stephanie: Hmm, I spend very little time at all doing collections. It has decreased a lot
since we changed the way we do things. If you set down the requirements immediately,
it makes a difference.
Vicki: John mentioned how he was getting other people, such as his Director of Nursing,
out to do marketing calls. John, how did you pull them into that effort? What time
commitment did you ask for from them?
John: Our DON had come from a hospital setting, so she already had major contacts in
the acute care settings. She had great contacts, and I would have her go utilize them. She
prefers staying at the facility, but I would give them like a day off type thing and some
other incentive, like they didn’t have to start so early when they market. They would
usually get to the hospitals after rounds, and I’m not going to say it was a leisurely day,
but it was a day away. When they were out, I was in the building, to assure that the day-
to-day running of the facility went on smoothly. I also went out marketing, but I took a
different route. I went to Chamber meetings and out into the community. The only
person out of the building all the time was the marketing person we had hired for just that
purpose. Of the rest of us, there was always just one person gone at a time.
Vicki: That is a good way to operate. It’s a perk in a way to get up and manage your
own schedule for that day, but how often did you say the DON went out?
John: She usually went out about once a month, but the social worker went out a couple
of times per month, and sometimes the marketing person would include the social
worker, if it was a social work luncheon type thing, back when we could do those! Those
were the days when I had a very large marketing budget. I could also use other funds for
marketing. We used to have safety committee money that we would get from the
company if we didn’t have any incidents with the employees, so I would use that money
for special events. That is how I did the sponsoring of sports teams or whatever. One
thing we did on paydays was to take a big box of Pay Day candy bars and leave them at
the nursing desks attached to a business card or a pen or something like that. I learned
that one years ago from someone in marketing. I tried to make it fun, not a chore. I really
enjoyed going out and meeting people.
Vicki: Now I’m going to put you on the spot. You said you never wanted to see your
marketing person and I went to a large not-for-profit facility, and I want to share this
story. The executive director asked me to come in and do some work for them, and he
communicated that their census was going down and he could not figure out why. I
started spending some time with the admissions coordinator/marketing person, who
diligently went out often to make her calls. People in the building perhaps did not
understand her role and were grumbling that she was well dressed and would return from
lunch with her nails done, etc. There were a lot of comments about whether or not she
was doing what she was supposed to be doing. Just as John said, her director didn’t want
to see her, either. He wanted her to be out and marketing. He felt that her lunch break
was her business and he didn’t care what she did during that time, as long as she was
making her calls and bringing in people. So, time passed and this person perhaps was not
making all the calls she stated she was making, and as she began to have more and more
supervision and required to show more and more accountability for her actions, she
deserted her job. I was going out in the meantime, trying to meet social workers and
letting them know we were in a transition period and imagine my shock when the social
workers looked at me and said, ―who?‖ and I repeated her name and said ―you know, so-
and-so from Blah Blah.‖ They would say they’d never met her. The more I asked
questions, they would say ―oh, yes, we quit referring over there because we would call
and not only did she not come to see the patients, she never returned our phone calls for
referrals.‖ How do we make sure that isn’t happening?
John: I had a checks and balances system. She would give me a report on Monday
mornings and I would spot check and call the places she had gone to and she would bring
back business cards, etc. from the places she went to. If she took people to lunch, I
wanted their names on the receipt, etc. I did very thorough reference checks, which
you’re not supposed to do anymore, and I trusted her. Never once did I have a problem
with her. I had a problem with the social worker a couple of times, but we resolved the
issues, and it was because she didn’t want to do marketing. When we talked about it, I
learned that the word ―marketing‖ to a social worker was not the thing to say! When I
hired someone, I trusted them or else I wouldn’t have hired them. If they prove me
wrong, they’re gone. I have heard those kinds of horror stories, though. When people
don’t really like their job, and don’t care about the residents they serve, you’ll see it. It
comes out. You have to be able to be a good judge of character. Most of the time, it
worked out well, but I did spot check, and they knew if they were caught, that was it.
Vicki: One thing an administrator down in Houston taught me was that he figured out
that everyone’s bank of trust was full and that every time there was a problem, that was a
withdrawal from their bank of trust and that if they should have a deficit bank of trust,
they would probably be going to work somewhere else. Like John, he had a process
where he would just randomly ask the marketing person where she was going today and
she would give him her itinerary. He would strategically wait until around noon, when
he assumed her calls for the morning were complete, and he would make a couple of
phone calls to the offices she said she was going to in the morning and just say he was
trying to reach so-and-so, and he said most of the time, they would say he had just missed
her. In that way, he was able to build his confidence level that the person was indeed
doing what they said, and he would spot check occasionally just to make sure everyone
was where they said they were. On occasions where they would say they hadn’t seen her,
he would ask her later that day how the meeting went and sometimes would find out that
she ran late at another office, or the doctor was so busy she just told them she would
come back in a few days. He said he didn’t hold her feet to the fire on every single call,
but that he did need to know that he could trust her.
Enclosed for you in your packet, I offered you two separate types of monthly census
development reports, two back and front sheets, one that would be a contact record. As
John said, he asked people to write down who they had seen, where they went, what they
talked about, etc. To direct people as to what they need to find out, we put a cheat sheet
on the back of one of the contact records, which has the assessment of what they needed
to know. Did they refer to skill, sub-acute, assisted living, Alzheimer’s, long-term care,
home care? Did they find out how many per month? What are the deciding factors?
What do they like and dislike, and what do we need to know to work more successfully
with these folks? This doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the process of an
admission, but maybe who is the key player. Who do we need to be nice to? How do
they need to have things made easier for them? These are the sort of things that a
marketing person should be able to discuss with you. We also put in another brief report,
depending on what works for you. It is a summary of what a marketing person does in a
week, two weeks, a month. This way, you would know what was tackled and what were
the results. Does anyone have some sort of written report in place right now?
Stephanie: I’m not sure yet what they have in place here.
Vicki: This is the biggest challenge. It’s easy to ask someone to go out and do it, but
when you ask someone to document it, they either get everything you could have ever
wanted to know about the call, or else there is a lot of resistance to making those reports.
Our challenge as administrators and managers is to make certain that they truly are
recording what they do. If there had been some kind of record in place, imagine when
you come to a new facility, you could pick it up and have a snapshot in advance of what
has been done in marketing, and it’s a key to different referral sources. I would
encourage you to consider some type of written report, no matter how brief, so we can
find out where people have been spending their time.
The last thing I’d like to discuss today is the sheet that talks about calculating the time of
a person doing marketing. If I am your marketing person, and I don’t have that bank of
trust established yet, I could give you a litany of how busy my week actually was and,
believe me, I could make it sound like I am just slaving down here. The bottom line is
whether or not that person is really that busy, or are you not getting all the bang for your
buck in marketing? You could come in and tell me as a marketing person that you are
going to need X number of dollars to take around the Pay Day candy bars with the
company pens and that you need money for gas and mileage, but how is that time pay off
for you? Is that time worthwhile? As you heard earlier, Catherine, I believe, said that
tours took about 20 minutes and there was a constant stream of people going on tours. If
you look at our example and if someone is keeping a summary sheet of how much work
they are doing, there is a time value attached to everything, and this is just an average.
You’ve got really needy families who take double or triple the time on a tour. You have
to really find a way to truly show the value of the time in the facility, because if you look
at the sheet and I told you there were five inquiries, three just walked in, and two on the
phone forever, three admits, four referrals from referral sources at the hospital. I had to
go to the daily stand-up meetings and they always run over (you know how that goes). I
had to drive to the hospital and I went to the QA meeting. Next week I go to the
Activities meeting, so it’s a different meeting every week. Then I had to sit down and do
all this paperwork on these reports you’re making me do. Sounds really busy, doesn’t it?
But, if you went back and added the time value to it, you could assess this person.
Obviously, I’m not asking you to account for someone’s time every week on an ongoing
basis. That would be crazy, but do you see the value in knowing what sort of time is
needed to judge the effectiveness of the individual? John, have you ever put a mental
number on the work being done?
John: I would always do the dollar amount value. I would take how many admissions I
got that month and divide it by her salary and see if it was worth my while. I always
came out way ahead. This is years ago, but there were pay incentives if she did better
than the average.
Vicki: In many situations, administrators have incentives to come in under budget.
John: I always came in way under budget. But, that’s how we did it. If we only had one
admission that month, which was rare, then I would always joke that she didn’t earn her
pay this month. This kind of report is what I would use when I wanted to document
things so I could get rid of a person.
Vicki: I guess you could think of it that way. We have implemented this on a corporate
level to find out if people are really spending their time doing what they were hired for
because we have shareholders to respond to. I will tell you something interesting. Mary
and I did a presentation to a large not-for-profit organization, and the VP of that
organization asked how do you get people to fill out contact records. She said we just
want them to jot it down. I don’t care if they just tell me during a meeting and I can jot it
down and figure out where they’ve been.
John: Sometimes corporations are headquartered in other cities or states, and they don’t
really know what’s going on here. It’s very difficult when you fill out the reports and
then they say things like what took all this time, etc? They don’t know because they
aren’t here and they don’t know what went on.
Vicki: There just needs to be a general yardstick for measuring so we know what they
are doing for the 40 hours a week they give us. We need a rough idea of what they are
doing and what they are accomplishing. Not that every month, you have to hold up a
piece of paper and say ―you only got x amount of your salary this month.‖ There just has
to be some sort of system for accountability. In many cases, we have been very lax about
effectively communicating what we expect from people and then holding people
responsible for what we have asked them to do. This is one of my favorite topics because
it always generates so much discussion.
The comments that I usually make during seminars is that I want them to look at the
marketing effort the same way they look at any other effort. You know, what are the
meals-per-patient day, how much housekeeping supplies are you using? You look at that
in the same way as a resource or an area to be managed. What is the percentage of
breakdowns? What is your percentage of weights going down, falls out of bed? You
need to look at managing this process the same way you look at managing any other
process, the way you manage your budget.
John: Yeah, but your expectations obviously would have to be much higher for resident
care than for a marketing person, in terms of accountability.
Vicki: Yes, but the amount you are paying a marketing person for 40 hours a week
should see effort and results. You have to watch that effort, just as you did, and compare
the salary and how many admissions there have been this month.
John: Right – you would assume that if you had two skin nurses, the skin healing should
be increasing, and if not, you have a problem.
Vicki: Right, then you have to wonder what are these two doing? Are they physically
examining the skin, are they trying to head off problems before they occur and turn into
major skin breakdowns? This is the same as the marketing person. If you knew you had
referrals coming in, you would want to know if they were generated by your marketing
person.
John: I’m just saying that you would hold a skin care nurse to a high level of
accountability than a marketing person. You’re talking about resident care. If a
marketing person messes up, no one has been hurt.
Vicki: It’s still accountability, but if you tell me that I’m supposedly calling on all these
people, taking my gas money, taking money for doughnuts, and turning in receipts, you
said you did spot checks and had people write on the receipts who had lunch, who ate the
doughnuts, etc. You did check to see if things were going along as they should, just the
same as you checked on whether or not there was skin breakdown. So, the checks and
balances were there, but the implications were different. Of course, if you had no
residents in the beds, it wouldn’t matter if there were skin care nurses and skin
breakdown. It’s a few minutes after 11:00. If there are no other questions, I thank you
for your participation.
Session One:
Tours:
Depending upon your facility, a significant number of admitting or leasing decisions may
be made based on tours. Even if you feel that tours do not drive the decision, the ability
for multiple personnel in your facility to conduct effective tours can have a dramatic
impact on the local reputation of your facility.
Consider how an effective tour can affect the day-to-day marketing. Let’s just use a very
simple example:
12 admits/leases a month are targeted in your business plan
25% of your admits/leases historically never tour they just are direct
admits/leases
= 3 admits/leases
12 needed less 3 direct admits/leases = 9
So 9 leases/admits must close on a tour –
(historically, you admit/lease to 50% of those who do tour so basically you
must generate 2x the number you need to actually lease or admit.)
18 additional referrals or inquiries must be generated monthly
Discussion
What Ifs:
What if you focus your efforts on generating more referrals/inquiries by
making more marketing contacts, placing advertisements and holding
special events?
What if you focused your attention on converting more inquiries/referrals
to admits and leases by conducting more effective tours?
What if you conducted more effective tours and also generated more
referrals/inquiries?
The Keys to Converting Inquiries/ Referrals and Tours:
What is the process—during business hours, after business hours?
Who is handling inquires and tours?
How were these individuals prepared to perform their duties?
How are their capabilities measured?
Have/should/how often do you mystery shop your own facility or have mystery
shopping performed?
Are/Should inquiries and tours be monitored and tracked to generate a report/statistics
related to outcomes for your internal CQI processes?
Feature or what is being
Location Benefit Advantage/Value Relationships to LTC overall goal
presented currently
Curb
Appeal/Drive Up
Lobby
Halls
Nurses Station
Resident Room
Activities
Dining
Room/Food
Therapy Areas
Specialty
Programs/ Other
Session Two:
Effective Promotional Materials:
We will discuss
Brochures
In addition to our comparisons, refer to page 5 and ideas that you had that could
be used in tours. We will discuss review these ideas and apply techniques to
create effective brochures
Yellow pages ads and other ads (small community based products and senior
publications)
Press Releases
Printed materials
In order to evaluate printed materials you will need to use your facility’s brochure and
the brochure that we have provided (not available with this self study program).
Please note that the trifold brochure used as an example was used with the facility
owner/operator’s permission. It is a proprietary document and many not be copied for
use in another facility.
WORDS OR CONCEPTS
That could be included in printed materials whether in words, graphics or photos to
effectively represent your facility or program—Now look at page 5, descriptions of
different areas and apply these terms
Structured Spacious Discreet
Respect Delicious/Nutritious Reliable
Activities Outdoors/Nature Integrity
Honesty Freedom Affordability
Caring Choice/ Options Excellence
Professional Elegance Intimate
Independent/Independence Array Homelike
Private/Privacy Active Solitary
Autonomy Honor Trust
Commitment Safety Dignity
Local Community Team
Array Cozy Friends
Social Secure Corporate
Transition Convenience Access
Assistance Cuisine Seclusion
Relationships Accommodations Interest
Suites Standards Friends
Family Quality of Life Capable
ADDITIONS:
OUR BROCHURE SAMPLE YOUR SELECTED SAMPLE
Simple trifold from a rural Texas facility, faced
with competition from a large corporation
dedicating significant resources to the
marketing effort
Format: trifold Format: trifold, foldout, packet etc.
Theme: ??? Theme:
Colors: Buff and maroon Colors:
Style: folksy Style:
Paper: Buff colored Paper:
Coverstock: Not Applicable Coverstock:
Photos/Graphics: graphics only Photos/Graphics:
Focus: ??? Focus:
Info Presented: ??? Info Presented:
STRENGTHS WEAKNESSES
Session Three
Managing the Community Relations Effort—Assigning Responsibility and
Accountability
Some administrators find that they are under equipped to manage the community
relations effort. In many cases, the admission coordinator or community liaison may be
perfectly capable of handling paperwork, but ill prepared for promoting the facility. In
either scenario, administrators must dedicate time to spearheading and directly
participating in the efforts, instructing others and also managing the entire Community
Relations effort.
The focus areas for this will include:
Communicating expectations and clearly assigning responsibilities
Instructing individuals in conducting tours and contacts
Implementing/Improving the admissions/marketing meeting to develop and
systematically review the progress
Performing and Reviewing Research, and Trend Analysis to appraise the success and
modify plans.
Monitoring personnel and holding them accountable for their responsibilities and time
Systematically addressing these areas will allow administrators to delineate
responsibilities, identify goals, and hold employees accountable for their roles in
community relations.
Keys to Success are to
Have a plan: Know who to see, how often and why
Hospital Based Referral Sources
Physicians and their office staff (NP, PA, RN, MA and other team members)
Community Referral Sources: Realtors, Bank Trust Officers, Ministerial
alliances, Salon Operators, DME and medical supply houses, Community groups,
the public at large
Employers, and Insurors, Case Managers, EAPs, Etc.
Empower employees with Information – Clearly communicate quantifiable goals
for census and mix (payor and diagnoses)
Share that every special event is not an opportunity – Be accountable for choices
What is the apparent cost or fee?
What is the actual cost in personnel time, associated expenses such as
mileage and promotional items?
Is the timing advantageous?
What is the opportunity cost (should this time and money be allocated to
another project)?
What is the projected value to the organization?
Marketing meetings can be held optimally every two weeks to focus everyone on
facility goals. Core attendees may include:
Administrator
Director of Nursing
Community Liaison and/or admissions Coordinator
Medicare Coordinator
Director of Therapy
Other Program Directors as appropriate (Retirement, Assisted
Living, Alzheimer’s Units)
The focused and time managed meeting should follow an agenda to include:
o Current census- by unit, mix, compared to goals
o One to one education contacts conducted in the last time period and those
planned – with results – these will identify opportunities and challenges to
your success
o Planned or conducted PR events, ads or other media
o New program enhancements
o Progress on the Community Relations Plan
o What is going on with key competitors and referral sources
o The efficiency of the process, reflected by conversion rates (example: #
Inquires related to # Referrals and # tours)
Hold team members responsible for their time -- By nature the marketing
activities have a need for autonomy however, this does not mean that there should
not be accountability for time. Implement a reporting tool – Here are two
samples of activity records. It is more important to implement a system than
agonize over what type of report to implement. Are you getting bang for your
salary buck???
Calculate their time based on what you know, This example:
Your marketing rep said they had a “busy week” Reporting:
5 tours
5 inquiries – 3 were walk ins; 2 were on the phone
3 admits
4 referrals from referral sources
Daily stand up meetings that run too long (30 minutes)
One trip over to the hospital – (marketing, visiting residents, etc)
One weekly facility meeting (different types weekly)
One weekly report
HMMM --SOUNDS BUSY DOESN’T IT??????????????????
BUT what does this actually take out of a 40-hour week.
IF tours are 30 minutes 5 x 30= 150 minutes = 2.5 hours
IF inquiries via phone are 15 minutes 2 x 15= 30 minutes = .5 hour
IF walk ins are 45 minutes 3 x 45 = 135 minutes = 2.25 hours
IF admits are 3 hours (?) 3x 3 hours = 9 hours
from ―on their way‖ to paperwork done
+ into bed or in suite
IF referrals take 15 minutes 4 x 15 = 1 hour
Referral coordination – 4 x 1.5 hours each= 6 hours
facility/family /assessment paperwork,
getting NO/GO decision - criteria etc
1.5 hours each ?.
Daily stand up meetings 5 x 30 minutes = 2.5 hours
IF A TRIP takes one half day 4 hours
IF the weekly meetings average 1 hour 1 hour
IF the time to prepare the report is 1 hour 1 hour
TOTAL TIME ACCOUNTED ONLY 29.75 hours !!!!!
MONTHLY STATUS REPORT - CENSUS DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES (page 1)
Name: Month/Year:
New Contacts: #
List (Name, Address, Title):
Speakers Engagements:
Special Events:
Important Comments/News for the Month:
# Inquiries __________
# Tours __________
# Admits/Move Ins/ Leases __________
Follow Up on Inquiries:
# Phone Calls _______
Summary of Contacts (page 2)
Letters/Faxes Phone Calls In Hospital In Office
Physicians: List
Hospitals
SW/RN/Therapy:
List
Home Health: List
Physicians' Nurses
or Office Staffs
List
Groups
(Presentations):
List
Pharmacies: List
Travel Agents
Beauty Shops
Clergy: List
Patient or Family
(evals)/conferences
Totals:
CONTACT RECORD (PAGE 1)
Name Title/Specialty
Location
Address
Phone Secretary/Office Manager/Nurse
Next Date
Date Type of Contact Reason for Contact/Comments Referrals Made Follow Up
NEEDS ASSESSMENT (Page 2)
Types of Patients Referred Out
Circle Yes or No & Enter approximate number per month
Skilled/Subacute Units Yes No # per month _______________
Assisted Living: Yes No # per month _______________
Alzheimer’s Care Yes No # per month _______________
Long Term Care Yes No # per month _______________
Home Care Yes No # per month _______________
What are deciding factors when making referrals to such services?
What are their current facility preferences for the above services and why?
Profile of the Referral source: What do we need to know to work with her/him more successfully
Effective Marketing Strategies – The Teleclass Transcript
Post-Test
1. In the hypothetical situation presented, what percent of leases or admits never tour?
a. 25%
b. 30%
c. 50%
d. 60%
2. A good marketing strategy for the tour process is:
a. To give them a brochure before the tour
b. To focus on converting the tours
c. To increase the number of tours
d. All of the above
3. An important issue related to information about facilities found on the internet is:
a. To ignore it, and hope that those touring do not bring it up
b. To tell those touring that the information is all wrong
c. To be ready to clarify what the information means
d. None of the above
4. To help your staff answer difficult questions:
a. Tell them not to talk to visitors
b. Have them refer the visitor to the administrator
c. Trust them to answer appropriately
d. Prepare them with a stock phrase that has a positive response
5. In the example of the presenter’s experience of trying to get a tour in a facility late in the
afternoon which of the following happened?
a. All went well
b. She was ignored by several staff members
c. She was told that there was no one to give her a tour
d. B and C
6. To assure that information is obtained from inquiries ―after hours‖ and passed on to the
admissions coordinator:
a. Have a form or card for staff to complete
b. Have staff give the pager number for the admissions coordinator to the inquiry
c. Do not allow ―after hours‖ inquiries
d. A and B
7. Follow up to a tour should include a call back the next day to:
a. Ask if they have any questions
b. Invite them back
c. Ask them if they have made a decision
d. All of the above
8. Asking why someone chose another facility is important to:
a. Determine if your pre-admission process needs any changes
b. Determine if there are any facility operations issues that need to be addressed
c. A and B
d. None of the above
9. A good tour includes:
a. The Vanna White approach – introducing the area of the building without any other
information
b. Very little discussion of your services
c. The features, benefits and advantages
d. A and C
10. Features, benefits and advantages explain:
a. The ―who‖ of different areas of the facility
b. The ―what‖ of different areas of the facility
c. The ―where‖ of different areas of the facility
d. The ―why‖ of different areas of the facility
11. The participant Beth said that giving tours was easier in one facility than another because:
a. The staff interacted more with the residents
b. The building was smaller
c. She was more experienced
d. All of the above
12. The presenter suggests promoting the facility’s values during the tour process such as:
a. Choice
b. Customer service
c. Freedom
d. All of the above
13. A challenge to marketing a new facility is:
a. Having great brochures and advertisements
b. Overcoming the rumors that may occur about new facilities
c. Having a great special event
d. There are no challenges to marketing a new facility
14. In the discussion about the sample brochure, it was mentioned that photos might:
a. Inspire people to come look
b. Let other see people they can identify with
c. Show them what ―almost home‖ looks like
d. All of the above
15. Other suggestions made for changes to the sample brochure include:
a. Promoting community involvement
b. Turn it into a ―waterfall‖ brochure
c. Make it a four-fold rather than tri-fold brochure
d. Use glossy paper
16. What is the best location for a yellow pages ad?
a. Right page, top left corner
b. Right page, top right corner
c. Left page, top left corner
d. Left page, top right corner
17. What is a good idea to have in your yellow pages ad?
a. A map of your location
b. Something different than your competitors
c. How long you have been in business
d. B and C
18. In marketing:
a. You want to present a consistent message
b. Different types of marketing should carry different messages
c. You want to change your message on a regular basis
d. None of the above
19. The presenter suggested the following about press releases:
a. Do one once a month
b. It should be about an event at your facility or tie into a newsworthy event
c. It can be only bullet points
d. All of the above
20. The points to examine when considering a special event are:
a. When is it; What is it; What is the rationale for participating; What is the cost
b. When is it; What is the cost; What is best for the facility; How does this fit into our
plan
c. When is it; What is it; What is the cost; How does this fit into our plan
d. What is it; What is the cost; What is best for the facility; How does this fit into our
plan
21. Suggestions for holding the marketing person accountable for outside calls are:
a. Have them bring back business cards from those they saw
b. To call a location after he/she should have been there ―looking‖ for him/her
c. Use a contact record for documenting marketing calls
d. All of the above
22. Another approach for determining accountability of the marketing effort is:
a. To follow the marketing person
b. To have a weekly report turned in
c. To determine the value of the time of marketing activities
d. To have daily marketing team meetings
23. ―Value of time‖ is:
a. Assigning a time frame to each of the activities reported
b. Assigning a dollar amount to each of the activities reported
c. An approach to determine how much time a person is actually busy
d. A and C
24. A mistake that the presenter suggests often happens in regard to the marketing effort is:
a. Not budgeting enough money
b. Expecting too much from the marketing coordinator
c. Too many people involved in marketing
d. Not effectively communicating expectations and holding them accountable
25. The marketing effort should be managed:
a. With the same accountability as every other department in the facility
b. By analyzing the budget for possible misspending
c. By analyzing the data available for trends
d. All of the above
Name ____________________________________ Date ____________________
Seasons Seminars, Inc.
Participant Program Evaluation
Program title: Effective Marketing Strategies – The Teleclass Transcript
Date Home Study completed: ______________________
Objectives:
1. Discuss why an effective tour of the facility is critical to the census development
effort
2. Discuss how to create more effective promotional tools for the local census
development effort
3. Discuss how to create and implement a system for accountability
Scale: 5=Excellent, as good as I’ve ever attended.
4=Good, meets high standards, would recommend to others
3=Satisfactory, acceptable but not outstanding
2=Poor, having at least one serious deficiency. Would not recommend.
1=Terrible, as bad as I’ve ever attended.
Rate the following aspects of the program:
_____ Learning objectives and content material
_____ Appropriateness of topic and content to current job
_____ Usefulness of the knowledge/skills acquired
_____ Course writer’s knowledge of topic
_____ Presentation of written coursework
_____ Overall rating
Time spent completing course: ___________________________
Comments (If you answered 1 or 2 to any of the above, please comment):
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