Client Success: Driving Phone Call Referrals for an Assisted Living Locator Service

For individuals and families seeking out assisted living care options for their loved ones, the task of sorting through and comparing these options can be tedious and exhausting. Between insurance considerations, on-site care services, facility wait lists and other considerations, finding the best fit can be a time-intensive and emotionally difficult process.

Assisted living locator services were developed to help families research and identify solutions to their loved ones’ senior care needs. Raising awareness of these assisted living locator services—and driving referrals from their target audience—has been a top goal for advertising campaigns supporting these organizations.

After three years of working with Cox Media to run ad campaigns focused exclusively on building awareness for its services and ease-of-use, one local assisted living locator service decided to expand its advertising goals to prioritize phone call generation and click-to-call referrals.

The Goal

Awareness-level advertising always offers value in building brand visibility in a local market. This is true for both upstart businesses and up-and-coming brands.

For the local assisted living locator service, though, these advertising goals needed to be balanced alongside other ad campaigns that focused on down-funnel engagement that contributed more directly to conversions and ROI.

A strong foundation of awareness-level advertising needed additional support to drive phone calls and website referrals from interested prospects seeking out information and resources regarding assisted living options for their loved one. By increasing the volume of referrals from relevant prospects, the locator service saw an opportunity to grow its overall number of conversions.

The Solution

Based on the clients’ evolving advertising goals, Cox Media’s digital strategy team developed and implemented a new advertising strategy that eventually combined linear ads with display and search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns.

The ad campaign was first launched using only linear and programmatic display advertising, with display ads being heavily targeted to select users based on their behavioral data. As each campaign progressed, new optimizations were incorporated to improve ad targeting and ROI potential, including the addition of an SEM campaign, and the removal of programmatic ads.

Eventually, the client opted to eliminate linear altogether to trim its advertising budget, while keeping its SEM campaigns active to reach a relevant audience through keyword and search.

The Results

After adapting its strategy to account for new advertising goals and performance indicators, the local assisted living locator service reported the following results:

• More than 2,506 clicks to the client website;
• 549 phone call referrals;
• 542 phone calls answered by a representative;
• Greater ROI from SEM campaigns than from any prior client ad campaign.

Thanks to the strong performance of this campaign, the local assisted living locator franchise saw its website activity rise to among the best of any local franchise within its corporate chain. In an effort to replicate the local franchise’s success in other communities, a number of other franchises have since adopted Cox Media as a preferred partner to promote its services to local audiences.

No matter what your advertising goals may be, Cox Media can help you align ad campaigns with outcomes to elevate your ROI. Contact us today to see how we can help.