United Active Living

Record Number Occupancy
Senior Retirement Community

Our relationship with United Active Living

Goals

When the client first engaged us it was with a digital marketing audit. The client was finding stagnation in their marketing efforts and was curious to see how they were performing. The client operates with a very high degree of integrity and therefore wanted to give their former agency the best chance at maintaining the contract. That said with a global pandemic, digital marketing became the #1 priority. Occupancy goals were being missed and the client needed to make a shift quickly. “Do whatever it takes” was the mandate of the marketing director, and thus our relationship started.

Background

Digital Marketing Audit Findings

Before starting work with a new client, businesses often request a comprehensive digital marketing audit. The following data demonstrates where the client was with the previous agency.

Conversions & Google Analytics Setup

Across industries and among small businesses and larger corporations, it is a common occurrence that conversions are not set up correctly. That means your data is skewed providing insights through analysis becomes a challenge or in some cases is not possible. Baselines need to be re-established and that sets progress back.

Typical Waterfall of Bad Consequences

What is equally as common is that agencies take a lazy approach when it comes to Google Ads for senior retirement communities and across other industries. Automated bidding tactics certainly have their place but when you have completely inaccurate conversion data how can you base your bidding on that same data set? You can’t unless you want to waste your ad spend.

That means you’re missing out on over 90% of opportunities in your local area for people ACTIVELY searching for your exact services. Google Ads lets you target people who are ACTIVELY looking for your services and want to purchase now.

Direct Impact of Our Web Design & Development

Bogus Claims of “Websites Built for Marketing” from other agencies

Websites are absolutely critical to the success of your marketing and yet most web design companies make bogus claims of “SEO Friendly Website Design” or “Websites Optimized for Marketing”. In our 15 years, we’ve never found an agency that does proper “built for marketing” websites, even close to what we do. Simply ask any agency to substantiate their process along the lines of marketing. Chances are you’ll get a range of answers such as “we install Yoast”, “we do keyword research”, or “we optimize metadata and keywords”. This very client was promised this exact combination and received ZERO evidence of any SEO. The client saw a keyword research document, but it had ZERO impact on the website. Likely generated by a tool and not a human who cared to devise a strategy.

Find the right agency. Do it right the first time.

This client purchased a new website in 2021 from a well-known web design agency in Toronto, Canada that boasted of its large team and major enterprise clients. Nothing wrong with that, we boast about our clients too but if that’s what is going to sway your decision, you’re bound to make the wrong choice and waste a lot of time, money, and internal resources.

This agency’s pathetic execution yielded negative results that were clearly measurable. While we managed this client’s paid strategy, we commented on the failure of this 5-figure investment and the SEO services they were managing.

The other agency was trying to get our team to train their employees on what they were doing wrong. Not the first time we have been asked to consult for famous digital marketing agencies. We have had agencies white-label our work to some of the largest corporations in the world. Our expertise is measurably unmatched.

After several discussions and a desire to do things right, we decided that the best step was to re-do the website again. What a painful and challenging message to hear and approve. Most other companies would choose not to hire us because they didn’t like our advice.

Bite the bullet

What I really want to highlight here is that this client trusted our judgement to make the re-investment into another new website.

The results made it more than worth it.

People drastically underestimate the impact a website has on online lead generation / digital marketing services. What’s worse they don’t know what to look for.

A few key signs are if you’re discussing you’re business, marketing strategy, and marketing performance with a salesperson or project manager – you’re probably with the wrong agency. If the people working on your account are overseas or new grads, you’re probably with the wrong agency. There is nothing wrong with overseas talent, there are often harder-working individuals that are more talented there – but I’ve never met an actual expert.

Surprisingly there are a fair number of elite-level marketers in Toronto that we trust to operate with integrity and excellence in servicing clients.

Measurable Results – Expert Crafted Websites Built For Marketing

If you wanted to double your paid traffic, you’d likely need to invest twice your paid ad spend budget. If you wanted to double your SEO traffic it might take you a very long time and a very large marketing budget.

Our websites are often the most successful marketing investment any business makes with instant leaps in performance that would otherwise take far more money and far more time equating to lost opportunity.

The proof is in the pudding and here is just one case study.

Overall Conversion Rate

A conversion rate is a measure of the percentage of people that visit your website versus completing a goal. We define a conversion as a sales website form fill (i.e. we do not include blog subscriptions) or a phone call made to a sales team (i.e. not tech support or existing clients). In the case of an eCommerce business, a conversion is defined as a sale.

With that in mind, the average website conversion rate is 2.35%. It is extremely valuable to maximize your conversion rate and businesses who want to be competitive with their marketing invest a lot into improving this through Conversion Rate Optimization including A/B Testing tactics.

Our website instantly increased their conversion rate by 110% across all channels and 356% for SEO.

We have case study after case study with results like this.

More Leads & Better Quality Leads

Looking at those same graphs above, we managed to increase leads by 202% across all channels and 735% for SEO leads. By doubling the conversion rate your paid advertising budget is 2x as expensive. It’s a far superior and more sustainable investment. It’s just most agencies don’t have a clue when it comes to web design.

How do we know the quality of leads went up? We integrate closely with our clients, working with their sales team, executives, marketing team, and even engineering team to represent your business. Our saying is always that if our marketing experts couldn’t sell your offering, they cannot market your offering.

In this case, we know exactly what percentage of leads went in for a tour, purchased, expressed finances as an objection, and more. This feedback is critical.

Any agency that isn’t concerned about sales shouldn’t be in business. Our approach is to help your business grow. Every metric is a vanity metric unless it’s being used to gather intelligence on improving sales.

When we launched our new website we shifted strategy completely.

Misleading Reports by Rookies

Here’s a perfect example, around the launch of this new website SEO Sessions and Users, were down! That’s not good, is it? Well actually New Users are more important and that’s up 4%. An instant 4% jump. But let’s dig deeper

You need to ask the right questions. What kind of traffic do we care about here?

This company only operates in Calgary, everyone else doesn’t matter. Well, that SEO traffic is up nearly 50%! Okay, that’s a good jump!

Let’s ask even better questions. What kind of traffic are we getting now versus before?

Wow, it looks like we’ve shifted away from getting “random” traffic to our blogs to getting targeted sales traffic to our sales pages, an increase of 42%! Wow! That also explains why our SEO conversion rate skyrocketed.

If we look more recently, we’re now looking at a whopping increase of 81%!

It’s not a fluke – here’s our competitions website launch

We use the same KPIs to hold others to account as we do ourselves so let’s take a look.

Tracking What Matters

Guaranteed First Place Rankings for SEO vs. Our Approach

If you promised a friend that you’d go for a walk or you’d pay them $10,000 and you really didn’t want to go for a walk that day, you might just step outside in your PJs, take two steps on your porch and head back inside. You can technically call that a walk. The point is you did it so you didn’t lie.

When agencies “guarantee” your rankings, what they are saying is they will get you on page 1 for what they can do easily and not what’s in your best interest. As you just saw this client had a 4% increase at first glance and 81% within 3 months

Keywords That Matter & Keyword Tracking Honestly

Keyword tracking reports from agencies are generally filtered to show you what worked that month. In contrast, we keep a very honest approach. We perform research and identify where the opportunities lay. We establish objectives alongside you that are in your business’s best interest. Then we track those keywords and hold ourselves accountable for the outcome.

While we track hundreds of keywords, here are a few core keywords and the MASSIVE leaps we have made since the website launch 3 months ago.

The client wasn’t even on the map for most of these keywords. We have no shame in being honest with the client in explaining that we are on page 2,3,4… What we care about is being transparent and demonstrating progress. We take a very calculated approach and put together strategies that are tracked.

Competitor Market Share of Traffic

The following graph shows how our top SEO competitors are way ahead of us. You can see our percentage share at 2.32% the week before our website launched. Since then we’ve moved ahead of our top competitors with the exception of one. We now stand at 6.62% market share and we consistently make gains every month.

Expert Google Ads Management vs. Amateur Agencies with Overpromising Sales People

In our average Google Ads audit in the senior retirement space, we have found the highest average of wasted ad spend. Sometimes reaching a verified 90% waste on budgets of $300K annually (Google ad spend alone).

It’s no wonder when you see how accounts are managed.

Amateur tactics.

Lazy – set it and forget it approaches.

The lack of testing and desire to push for better. This agency managed a measly lifetime CTR of 3.58%.

You should strive for at least 5%.

Yet compare that to our achievements of a lifetime CTR of nearly 11.74% with our most important campaign reaching a sustained whopping 20.76%. We’ve been telling the client for years to expect it to decline, it’s quite staggering how successful this has been.

We test and we test and we keep pushing for results. These ads are for a single keyword. Not many agencies put anywhere near the effort into their work as we do. We go the extra mile, and then go an extra 5 miles for things that are over our clients’ heads. We have your back and don’t wait for you to complain before we take action. We partner with businesses.

Advanced Expertise

Part of our success is that we have Google Ads experts working on a hand full of accounts that they can really get to know. We do not use any 3rd-party automation tools as they are a clear sign of amateurs that don’t care about performance.

In contrast, we actually build our own scripts. Ryan Meghdies, co-founder of Digital Seniority is an engineering background and a professor in programming. That in combination with his 15 years of experience in the field has helped put together a team that thinks outside of the box. It’s not about getting in and out with traditional Google Ads management, it’s about building strategies that solve business problems.

For example, Google no longer shows nearly 50% of search terms. Ryan has created proprietary software to recover this information nearly completely.

Google no longer provides ad rankings, they only mention if you are top of Search or not. Yet we have created software to help estimate rankings, cost, and ROI. We think at a whole other level.

Expert Facebook Ads Management Generating Full-Funnel Leads for Retirement Communities (Meta Advertising)

979% increase in brand awareness

Our advertising services resulted in a 979% increase in brand awareness in the first 12 months of taking over their digital marketing.

Proper Facebook Ad Campaigns vs Boosted Posts

We have yet to audit a client in the retirement space that has a proper Facebook Ad strategy in place. If Facebook Ads are being used, it is through Boosted Posts. Boosted Posts is a scaled-down, ‘baby’ version, of the full Ads Manager for those who are not experts at Facebook advertising. We expect this for clients who are ‘doing it themselves’ but are horrified when this is the method employed by Marketing Agencies contracted by the client.

The wasted service fees and ad spend is reflected in the poor results, and the primary contributor to retirement clients saying “Facebook ads don’t work”. Meanwhile, done right, Facebook Ads is a top channel for generating leads at a lower CPA than most contending channels.

Meta Ads Are a Top Performing Lead Generation Channel for Senior Living & Care

Our Meta advertising strategy is robust and guided by in-depth customer journey analysis. We help brands increase awareness, earn trust, and build relationships so that when the time comes, your ideal customer knows who to call.

Today it takes up to 18 touchpoints for someone to take action, especially with a high-ticket action like moving into a residence. Meta ads enable us to create cost-effective and highly engaging touchpoints as prospects scroll.

Often businesses are short-sighted, looking only for short-term success. Without filling the top of your funnel, your bottom-of-funnel leads will dry up over time. We have seen it time and time again. This attitude to overlook the value of full-funnel marketing is what we use to our advantage for our clients.

Target users on the full spectrum of the customer journey. Meta advertising is able to make top-of-funnel prospects aware of your residences, nurture middle-of-funnel prospects, and target bottom-of-funnel prospects encouraging them to take important actions like booking a tour or requesting a quote.

The wasted services fees and ad spend is reflected in the poor results, and the primary contributor to retirement clients saying “Facebook ads don’t work”. Meanwhile, done right, Facebook Ads is a top channel for generating leads at a lower CPA than most contending channels.

Business Impact for United Active Living from Meta Ads

In a 20-day window with $3,600 in ad spend, we generated 36 form fills, and 14 phone calls, at an average cost per lead of $72!