OVERVIEW

RiverSpring Living is a senior living community located on the Hudson in Riverdale, New York, dedicated to helping older adults live full lives. They have a full range of care solutions including the nationally recognized Hebrew Home at Riverdale, managed long-term care, assisted living programs, senior housing, and specialized services such as elder abuse prevention and memory care. Part of the RiverSpring Living umbrella also includes River’s Edge, NYC’s first and only luxury life plan community. RiverSpring Living has been committed to healthy aging for over 100 years and currently empowers 12,000 patients, residents, and members.

GOALS

Generate Leads & Improve Data Tracking 

Generate leads and sales

RiverSpring Living’s primary goal was to generate leads and sales for all branches of the organization. Although we had different goals for each separate part of the organization, our two main priorities for generating leads were River’s Edge and RiverWalk. 

Focus on lead quality & tracking

Before we started, RiverSpring Living was not effectively tracking lead quality and they were not able to attribute paid media to sales. This led us to our second objective which was to start tracking lead quality and actual sales. Instead of generating hundreds of leads without any value to our overall goal of sales, we wanted to focus on generating quality leads who were much more likely to convert. 

CHALLENGES

Facebook Special Ad Categories

One of the biggest challenges we faced was that our Facebook prospecting initiatives were limited due to targeting restrictions. Since RiverSpring has residential offerings, we were under special ad category restrictions. We were limited to only using existing data/customer lists and running lookalike audiences. We needed to make sure our message was extremely targeted and specific to avoid wasting ad spend on the wrong users. 

Lack Of Consistent Overall Brand Message

 RiverSpring Living lacked a persona for their overall brand. Before we could start working on campaigns, we needed to have goals and an understanding of our audience. For RiverSpring Living, our goals and audiences were drastically different for each part of the organization and there were different teams deciding those goals. We had to track down the team for Rehab, the team for RiverWalk, the team for managed care, etc to meet with each team individually. We needed to make sure we understood each audience and each individual goal in order to develop a strong, cohesive brand message for RiverSpring Living as a whole. 

River’s Edge Opens In 2024

River’s Edge is a top priority for RiverSpring Living. It’s expected to open in 2024 and will be NYC’s first and only luxury life plan community. However, we needed to create excitement around this new community and entice people to commit to putting down a deposit. This presented a challenge because the building itself does not exist yet and we needed to reach a high income audience who would be willing to commit to this community far in advance of the actual move in date. 

STRATEGIES

Branding & Targeted Messaging

Branding and messaging were key for us, especially because of the targeting restrictions on Facebook.

It was clear that we needed to establish a consistent brand message for users to associate with the RiverSpring brand. In focus groups, RiverSpring Living actually found that when The Hebrew Home was mentioned, users recalled the brand name but they associated it with a nursing home. However, we wanted users to understand that the Hebrew Home was only a very small part of a large organization of care for older adults. 

We put together a creative brief for RiverSpring Living and established all campaigns off of one, simple key insight: “People want a future they can look forward to.”

By using a consistent brand message, we were able to establish unified campaigns and increase RiverSpring Living’s overall positive brand association. This is especially important for an older demographic who may be confused by inconsistent messaging and nervous about what the future holds for them. 

YouTube & Programmatic Video/Display 

Once we established our brand message, we used YouTube and programmatic display to focus on new customer acquisition and brand awareness. 

Through YouTube, we used custom-intent and retargeting audiences to target the loved ones and families of older adults and establish a strong level of confidence in RiverSpring Living. 

We used advanced targeting for elder care through programmatic video and display. This included targeting anyone who has searched for care options or has researched elder care, leveraging 3rd party data, and geotargeting around our physical location. We used native ads, video ads, and display ads for both River’s Edge and RiverWalk to establish trust with potential residents and families that may be looking for care for a loved one. 

Lead Quality Tracking

An important objective was to improve data tracking. Using CallCap, we were able to tap into a feature of the call tracking software that had never been used before by RiverSpring in order to track lead quality. This was a big step for RiverSpring, and allowed our team to optimize for quality leads. Using this feature in CallCap allowed us to send lead data to their CRM, which then allowed the team to identify if the leads resulted in sales and where those leads came in from. To take this a step further, we were then able to optimize our ads based on which ads resulted in sales.

Phone Call Campaigns

One of our most effective initiatives was driving qualified leads to call RiverSpring Living via call extensions on Google. On Facebook, lead generation call focused campaigns were the main driver of qualified leads. These campaigns resulted in a massive increase in calls and because we could track quality, RiverSpring Living was able to drive quality calls/leads to their sales team.

Remarketing 

Since RiverSpring Living has a very long conversion window from lead to actual sale, remarketing was a key component of our marketing strategy. We first remarketed to form abandoners. We then segmented further to remarket to the top 25% of users by time spent on the website in a 30 day period, users who viewed specific pages/services, and users who have visited the website multiple times in the past 15 days. Using these audiences, we were able to boost conversion rates tremendously. Through remarketing, we were able to push our leads to take the next step in making a sale. 

Targeted Search Campaigns

Targeted search ads were a key driver for our prospecting efforts because we were advertising for many different services. Using image, call, and phone extensions, we were able to lower RiverSpring Living’s prospecting cost per lead significantly and generated quality leads based on search intent and location.

RESULTS

Overall, we outperformed our original goals over the course of just three months. We completely transformed tracking in order to improve lead quality. We started sending platform data into the CRM, in order for RiverSpring Living to track which campaigns resulted in sales. We also started sending lead quality data back into our ad platform in order to optimize for better quality leads.

Our effective brand messaging along with quality lead data allowed us to see a significant decrease in CPA and a significant increase in quality leads. We beat our CPA goal by over 50%. The most promising result was that our initiatives saw consistent improvements in performance.

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