3 Ways Families Can Experience Your Senior Living Community (Before It's Even Built)

A major element of the senior living search is the experience. But how do you let prospects and their families see your community before it's even a reality?

The answer: interactive 3D content.

Before you can prepare to market your latest senior living communities during lease up, however, you need to understand how to market appropriately to your audience and the impact 3D content will have on your prospects. After all, the senior living transition is nothing short of stressful - both for seniors and their relatives.

Understanding Where Families Fit In During the Search

When it comes to marketing your senior living developments, it’s important to remember that you’re not just targeting senior consumers - but their families, too. In fact, adult children are involved in their parents’ senior living transition 73% of the time according to Care.com.

A Place for Mom found that actively-searching families are 1.6 times more likely to feel high levels of stress before moving in their loved one. And AgingCare.com reports that 22% of adult child caregivers feel guilty multiple times a day.

To intensify the matter, a senior living community seeking deposits (before it’s built) can be quite unnerving for families. Your community isn’t established and there are no units to tour (yet). How do you guarantee occupancy before completion while also offering seniors a comfortable and smooth experience when researching your community?

It’s up to senior living providers to offer meaningful experiences that educate, comfort and ensure seniors and their families that they’ve made the right decision - especially during that crucial lease up phase.

What follows is a list of senior living lease up solutions to help you stand out and help families engage with your new development prior to completion.

3 Ways You Can Help Families Experience Your Senior Living Development

1. Offer a 3D Virtual Tour

The senior living lease up phase may feel limiting, but you can still let prospects explore your community with the use of a photorealistic 3D virtual tour.

A 3D virtual tour is very much like a typical 360 virtual tour you’re used to seeing, but it’s built with photorealistic 360-degree 3D renderings instead of traditional photography.

Below is an example of a full 3D virtual tour of a senior living community:

With a tool like this, you give your prospects the ability to:

• Explore your community amenities
• Walk through model units
• Browse floor plans
• Get a better feel of the space
• Decide if the style of the community fits their needs and wants

A 3D virtual tour is also viewable across any device - mobile phone, tablet or desktop - so there is that added flexibility for your audience.

From a marketing perspective, this kind of interactive content is a valuable asset to capture leads and inquiries from traffic that lands on your website. With specific calls to action, you’re likely to guide more users down your conversion funnel.

Related: How to Meet Senior Living Lease Up Expectations

2. Take Prospects on a Remote Guided Tour

How you leverage your senior living 3D virtual tour will also be a deciding factor in your lease up success. One way to make the most of this interactive content is to take your prospects on a guided tour.

Considering that your building is in its early stages of development, this is the perfect opportunity to offer virtual meetings with prospects and their families. An agent can call up a prospect and quite literally direct viewers through the virtual tour, pointing out specific features and amenities of the community that they may miss in a self-guided tour.

Keep in mind that seniors don’t always live in close proximity to their families - so a guided virtual tour brings them together from remote locations to view the community together. You can invite multiple viewers to a single virtual meeting so that all participants receive the same information and can address all questions in one setting.

What’s more, a guided virtual tour is a brilliant strategy for follow-up. You’ve already captured that lead and taken them on a virtual meeting of your new community. Now it’s time to nurture that lead and make sure they have all their questions answered. You can send them the 3D virtual tour in a follow-up email, send along 3D flat renderings, and even pass on your interactive site plan that allows prospects to immediately apply for a unit.

3. Showcase your community with 3D animation

Not to be confused with a 3D virtual tour, a 3D animation is a fly-through video that uniquely showcases buildings in development with cinematic effects.

Not only will a 3D animation spruce up your website and marketing channels during lease up, it acts somewhat as a guided tour for seniors. Rather than clicking through scenes on a virtual tour, a fly-through animation is a simple video they can watch to get a better understanding of the style and feel of the community.

Some of the advantages of a 3D animation in senior living are:

• Visual appeal
• Engaging content
• Promote brand awareness
• Credibility during development
• Share across channels for more online traffic

Create Meaningful Experiences with 3D Visualization

Increasing leads and capturing more deposits may be your end goal, but remember that your content should aim to alleviate the stresses that result from the senior living search by catering to the needs of the prospect and their adult caregivers.

With 3D content (whether it’s a virtual tour or a fly-through animation), you set your community up for success on two fronts: by helping the prospect feel more comfortable and by boosting your marketing efforts with truly unique and engaging digital content.

Contact LCP360 to learn how our technology helps families experience senior housing communities prior to completion.