Senior Living Industry Average Benchmarks for Sales and Marketing Teams

The senior living industry is continuing to grow rapidly. There are thousands of senior living communities in the United States, and Statista estimates that by 2050, more than one-fifth of the U.S. population will be 65 years of age or older. This means that the amount of senior living communities will certainly continue to grow.

What does this mean for you? The key to improving your bottom line is to make the most of your sales and marketing efforts with data-driven decisions. Let’s explore how using HubSpot Benchmarks can help you do this and stand out from the crowd.

Why Is Benchmarking in the Senior Living Industry Important?

The senior living industry is a crowded market and will be increasingly so as more units pop up. Let’s dive into how HubSpot Benchmarks supports communities and improves your bottom line.

What Is HubSpot Benchmarks and How Can It Help You?

HubSpot Benchmarks offers valuable metrics that gauge the performance of your marketing and sales efforts against the industry average. With it, you track your progress toward key performance indicators (KPIs) through real-time data. 

Tracking KPIs is essential to measuring your progress toward reaching your business goals. You can then use this information to adjust your marketing strategies for better alignment with industry trends.

Which Senior Living KPIs You Should Pay Attention To

When you’re evaluating the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts, pay attention to: 

• Conversion rates: The rate at which a contact is converted into a resident.
• Resident acquisition cost: The amount of money spent through marketing campaigns to acquire new residents. This will help you determine how effective your campaigns are and if you’re spending too much on certain channels. 
• Average length of stay: The amount of time residents are living in your community. This number will help you determine how satisfied your residents are. For example, if they’re not staying long before moving to another community, it could indicate displeasure with an aspect of your community.
• Resident satisfaction scores: This is another metric that will help you determine how happy your residents are. 
• Referral rates: Happy residents are likely to recommend the community they’re living in, which brings in new residents. Make sure you’re focusing as much on retaining your current residents and ensuring they’re happy as you are on launching marketing campaigns.

From a digital marketing and sales perspective, you should also track: 

• Page views per session
• Blog views
• New blog posts published
• Average session length
• Bounce rate
• Landing page submissions
• Total contacts in your customer relationship management system
• Number of new contacts
• Emails sent
• Emails clicked
• Deals created
• Deals closed won and lost
• Average time to close deals

These KPIs offer a comprehensive view of your sales and marketing efficiency. With these KPIs, you’ll also have visibility into the quality of your service and resident engagement.

Common Challenges and How to Address Them with Benchmarks

There are several challenges in the senior living industry. First, you need to make sure your community is standing out in a crowded market and that you’re targeting the right audience. On top of this, you must manage the long sales cycle that’s typical in the senior living industry. 

Additionally, you should consider your potential residents and their families. What are their needs? How do they make decisions? 

The answers to these questions will inform your marketing strategies. It’s about ensuring you’re reaching the right people at the right time in a way that speaks to them.

Granted, this is a lot to juggle. But it’s also where HubSpot Benchmarks with Databox is beneficial for refining your strategy. You can view your performance standards and goals based on the industry average and better understand where to focus your marketing efforts. By using this information, you can ensure your marketing strategies are more targeted, efficient, and aligned with industry trends.

Why Benchmarking Is Crucial in Senior Living

Benchmarking serves as an important tool for gauging your community's performance relative to your competitors. You can use the data to determine where your community is excelling or lagging. You’ll also have insights into what your targets should be for improvement and growth. Most importantly, it helps ensure your community remains competitive and responsive to market demands.

You can also use the industry average data in Benchmarks to evaluate the shifts in your performance. For example, are the shifts specific to your community, or is it the industry average for multiple communities? 

How to Use Benchmarks for Improvement

Now that you have a better grasp of why benchmarks are crucial, let’s explore how you can strategically use them to make improvements.

Identify Areas for Improvement

First, identify where you can make improvements. Analyze where your community isn’t meeting the industry average to spot the weaknesses in your funnel. For example, there may be low conversion rates or high customer acquisition costs. By pinpointing where there are weaknesses, you can determine how to adjust your strategy. 

Use Benchmarks as a Road Map

Think of benchmarks like a road map. They’re going to show you the path to improvement by highlighting where your performance can improve. You can then use this data to refine your marketing campaigns and enhance the customer journey, which can lead to increased resident move-ins. 

Set Your Goals

Use HubSpot Benchmarks to build performance thresholds that align within the top quartile of the senior living industry. This will help ensure your goals are ambitious yet realistic and attainable. It will also help your community create a culture of continuous improvement and see what you can achieve.

Align Sales and Marketing Strategies with Benchmarks Data

HubSpot Benchmarks can help you increase your lead generation and improve your return on investment (ROI). The key is to align your marketing strategies with benchmark data. You can do this by integrating HubSpot Benchmark insights directly into your planning sessions. This will help ensure that your community’s goals are data-informed from the start. 

From this point, it’s important to keep monitoring your strategies’ performance compared to the benchmarks. However, you shouldn’t base your entire marketing strategy on benchmarks. You don’t always know what communities are in the benchmarking group. For example, some organizations could be life-plan communities, whereas others may focus on memory care, which has a narrow scope of care.

Make the Most of Your Sales and Marketing Efforts

With so many senior living communities in the market, standing out is key. Make the most of your marketing efforts by using data-driven insights as your road map to continuous improvement. Check out HubSpot’s Benchmarks for the Senior Living Industry to explore how your data compares.