Superior senior care organizations have bold aspirations. As you seek to meet many of the physical and emotional needs of a diverse and growing senior population, you aim for:
- Congruence between who you say you are and your customers’ experience of who you are.
- Customer health outcomes that validate your organization’s quality.
- Low turnover in both staff and customers.
- Strong financials that equip you to fully live out your mission.
- Each of these builds on and reinforces the others. But you face some powerful challenges in achieving them! The wide variety of needs and changing preferences in the burgeoning senior population, for one. Reduction in Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates—coupled with increases in compliance regulations—for another.
What’s required for success? You know the list: excellence in clinical outcomes, improvements in technology, effectiveness in staffing models, strategic capital improvements. But another key factor that helps your organization thrive and stay on mission is often overlooked: Brand.
Your Brand is really “who you are” as an organization. It’s your promise to all you serve…and that includes your staff. Though it’s expressed in your vision, mission, and values statements, its real impact is when these statements come alive in your team.
Senior care is a people business. Growth and long-term success rely heavily on the quality, nature, and nurture of people-to-people contact. The goal is to build consistency that feels personalized. Anyone who comes into contact with your Brand should have, through your team, the same satisfying experience, over and over again. That’s when things take off!
To achieve this brand consistency, team members must be ambassadors of the Brand. You need to see them, and they need to see themselves, not just as resources to be applied to a need but as sources—sources of new ideas, of trustworthy service, of personal connection.
As team members come together with a common mindset, they will create an exceptional experience for their clients and fellow staff—an experience that will generate word of mouth recommendation and buzz in your community. And that is the most powerful marketing of all!
If you have questions about how to leverage your Brand to achieve your sales and marketing goals, please contact us at dhart@movecommunications.com.
Additionally, you may also be interested in our Buyer Personas eBook, which will help you target your ideal customers in the senior living market. To get your free copy, click here.
