Causeway Solutions
ConnectWithCauseway, Senior Living
July 15, 2024
The U.S. senior living market size is expected to reach $131 billion by 2029. Listen in as we unlock the secrets of blending traditional advertising with predictive analytics for impactful marketing strategies. Join frank discussions about niche marketing with our special guests, Bobby Youngs, Founder of Canopy Advertising, and our VP of Healthcare & Enterprise Insights, Tim Duer. Listen to the full episode.
Podcast Episode 10, published March 19, 2024
Thérèse Mulvey, Vice President of Strategy: Welcome to Connect With Causeway. I'm your host, Thérèse Mulvey, Vice President of Strategy and Insights at Causeway Solutions.
I am really excited today to be joined by two experts who are going to talk about senior living, a growing phenomenon, which impacts a huge number of people, whether it be for them or for a loved one. For example, there's 11,000 boomers retiring daily, and the number will just continue to increase, and obviously, this huge generation is also continuing to age despite their most valiant efforts. This steady growth necessitates an exponential increase in qualified caretakers, assisted living facilities, and healthcare services.
There are so many facets to this category. Senior living represents so much, so many decisions, quality of care, options, who's making the decision; the list goes on. This is one of the many reasons we are excited and honored to talk about this topic with senior living expert, Bobby Youngs of Canopy Advertising. Let me give you a little background on Bobby, and then I will hand it over to him.
Bobby is Canopy's founder and serves as Director of Creative Strategy. He brings in-depth advertising and media planning experiences to each campaign. Bobby's diverse professional background spans multiple disciplines. Throughout his career, he has led creative production, sales and advertising operations for various media groups and is widely sought after as a consultant and subject-matter expert.
Bobby sums up his perspective in direct terms. "Advertising technology and its targeting sophistication are fascinating, but it's still important to keep core advertising principles in mind and how strategic thinking can maximize each opportunity."
And you know what, Bobby? I cannot agree with you more. I'm so happy to lead into you with that really important quote. So welcome Bobby.
Bobby Youngs, Founder, Canopy Advertising: Thank you, Thérèse. I'm glad to be here. It's an honor.
Thérèse: And speaking of marketing and advertising, the other side of this topic is how do we reach these people, whether it's the decision-maker or the person that is using senior living, and exactly what do we need to say? Helping us to understand that aspect is my colleague and frequent Connect With Causeway guest Tim Duer.
Tim is our Vice President of Healthcare & Enterprise Insights. He's been integral in developing solutions and insight for the healthcare segment by using our proprietary analysis to develop targeted healthcare audiences for Causeway Solutions and for our clients. Tim utilizes his balanced background of hands-on clinical care... he is my own personal physical therapist when needed... and business understanding to develop novel approaches to the rapidly evolving healthcare marketplace.
Welcome, Tim.
Tim Duer, Vice President, Healthcare & Enterprise Insights: Great to be back. I feel like I got the fancy intro today with Bobby present, so it's great to be here
Thérèse: Well, my job is actually really pretty easy today and pretty much over because I know these two guys, and they have a lot to talk about and need very little prodding. With that being said, I will start with a question and the two of you can let our listeners know what your perspective is.
We know that senior living targets primarily two key audiences, the senior and the family or significant other of that senior. My question: is traditional marketing working for both of those audiences? And if not, what do you think needs to change?
And I'm going to start with you, Bobby.
Bobby: Yeah, great question. We have been in the senior living marketing industry for the last five to six years. I would say, yes, it is working. Traditional media, whether it be digital or analog media, it does work. From our point of view, it's really not about making it work when it's broken, but just making it better.
One of the really fascinating things about being specialists in online marketing to the senior living industry is that if you think about it, 15 years ago, an online media strategy for senior living industry was kind of quaint. I mean the end user you were trying to reach would be an adult caregiver, for example, who is typically 55 years or older, or the potential occupant themselves, the senior who could be 72 and older. They really just weren't available as a digital audience yet.
Also, the technology we had, as far as the ubiquitous cell phone that everyone's walking around with in their pocket, the time spent consuming media online for that demographic, and that age range was not really prevailing yet. And quite frankly, technology wasn't that sophisticated to target them as well as it is now.
Thérèse: Exactly.
Bobby: It's a happy confluence of events. We have the baby boomers that are aging, and they're demographically the same age as people that retired 30, 40, 50 years ago. But emotionally and spiritually and mentally, they're younger. At 72 years old, they're living vivacious, really incredible lives. They're super connected with technology. They're streaming video content. They're walking around with their cell phones. They're face-timing with their grandkids. I mean, they're really in tune with what's going on.
In fact, I had this really crazy experience with a client about three or four years ago. He calls me up, "Bobby, you're never going to believe what I have. I have two extra tickets to the Yanni concert." My wife and I were... in our late 40s, were like, "Yanni? What in the world?" And Yanni was he and his wife's favorite. They would travel around the country to see Yanni, all over the world actually to go see Yanni performance. And he invited us. It was a big deal. It's so great.
The whole point of that is that what was fascinating was, this is three or four years ago, we're in the auditorium, and it was predominantly women. Minnie had blue hair, clearly over 75 years old, all with their cell phones up like they were at a Taylor Swift concert. They had pictures of Yanni. You could see it was their home screen. They were taking pictures and video. You would've thought they were 18. It was amazing. And I'm thinking to myself, "Man, what has changed in this space that seniors are really embracing this technology?"
The audience is huge. The demand for senior living is absolutely huge in the industry for occupancy for these people, this population, the income people have to invest in these and to pursue senior living is great, and the opportunity to reach them through digital channels is all happening at this really interesting time in history.
Thérèse: I haven't thought of Yanni in a long time, but it really made me smile.
Bobby: Hey, by the way, it was really amazing.
Tim: Well Thérèse, I need to follow up the Yanni story with my approach to this.
Thérèse: Good luck with that, Tim.
Tim: Bobby, I think you hit the nail on the head. We do know, generally speaking, who the audience is. As you said, seniors who are potential residents of an assisted living facility or an independent living facility, the age hasn't changed. You're still talking to people, 72 plus, for instance, and the adult caregiver still hasn't changed.
In so many ways, we're still living off of, you could call it a marketing persona, but really, it's a stereotype. And I think that's exactly what you just described there, that people are still holding onto, "Oh, we've got to go to purely print. That's the only thing that'll work for this audience." And not saying print doesn't have its space, and I'm sure we'll get to that later, but there's this thought of you can't go digital to an older audience.
I love what you brought up there because that's the way I've been looking at this all along. The audience is broader than you realize, and they have so many unique characteristics, and if you don't take advantage of that, you're really missing out on some opportunity here.
I've had the benefit of first-hand, or I guess second-hand knowledge, of my wife works in the space personally. She's a physical therapist specializing in geriatrics and neurology and works between subacute facilities, and now for probably the last 15 years, she's been in a continual care community. Knowing what she's seeing, and she tells me stories, you'd be amazed. You walk in and these people 95 years old, and they're still walking their dog, and they've got all these things going on. And that's just not culturally what we've caught up with yet.
I think you're hitting the nail on the head that marketing has the opportunity here to be kind of on the front-runner of how do we connect with this audience in a new, better way and not rely on these old stereotypes in so many fashions.
Bobby: And just to piggyback on that, Tim. Another thing that's kind of interesting is that if you think about the life event, if you will, that would create an impetus for someone to need senior living, whether it be assisted living or memory care or skilled nursing now, or hey, we want to downsize, we want to travel the world, we don't want to take care of a home, we want to find a really cool, awesome, independent living community, have friends, we're moving to Florida now, it's a lifestyle choice. People generally start this shopping process, if you will. It's not like buying a car every three or four years. It's one time in life that you actually start thinking about this.
I'm not even thinking about this now. I'm 51. It's not something that's really on my radar yet. I'm not thinking about that for my father yet. But when that event happens where you start thinking about it, you have to educate yourself. It's just a huge, amazing, life-changing decision you're about to make. It's a massive financial commitment. I mean, you're moving to a place, you're becoming a resident, you're caring for a loved one. It's a massive event.
When people are faced with these big paradigm-shifting events in their life, they tend to take a lot of time to think about it. They ask a lot of questions, and they do a lot of research. And where do people do research these days? Everyone goes online. I mean, Google is a verb, right? I mean, let me Google that. Everybody knows I can go to my computer and I can, in my own time, read as much information and watch as many videos as I want to about can I afford this? When should I be thinking about this? What should I be looking for? What are all the options?
They spend so much time in that research and consideration phase. One of the really beautiful but sometimes spooky things about online marketing is that time spent online creates all this data about these kinds of digital breadcrumbs, these intention signals that people are giving off based on the content they're reading and the websites they're visiting. To your technology, Tim, the surveys they're filling out, that kind of behavior that indicates they're in the market. It's to your point, a perfect Venn diagram of all these things happening where we can employ the old advertising chestnut of it's the right message to the right people at the right time. That'll never change. No matter how technologically savvy or AI we get, that's still the bedrock of really great advertising.
Thérèse: Tim, don't you think to a certain extent just that variety of audience, it's not just the kind of care that you need, but it's also what you like, or does a health event make you all of a sudden looking for a different thing, or all the different options there are now for a senior living situation? I would think that really leads into some of the work that we do with all of our targeting.
Tim: Absolutely Thérèse. As Bobbie was saying, there's so many more opportunities, especially when you start employing digital advertising and digital marketing. Well, now all of a sudden, you can wait for the SEO and you can start pulling them in there.
What I've been most excited about in some of the work I've been doing in this space is how do we improve that top-of-funnel conversation? How do you identify that audience before they start searching the internet? Because in so many instances when it comes to senior living decisions, a lot of times it feels like a forced decision. You have an illness, you have something that occurs where all of a sudden an assisted living decision has to be made. But the reality is the funnel can start sooner. Honestly, that's what I've been seeing more and more of.
We can now start constructing audiences that aren't just that stereotype, again, as a segment. Traditional marketing would've said, top-of-funnel for this audience is purely based on age. And it's, as Bobby said, are you old enough to say you're the target or are you in this age where we're going to guess that you have a parent that's the target, therefore, that's the audience.
Income is typically used here to make a demographic cut if you can find somebody's income, depending on the facility, where do they fall of being able to afford the care potentially or not, and then geography. And that was the segments.
Bobby, I'd love to hear your thoughts of having a little more experience in space, but in so many crossovers I've had, that is what they consider the market segment; age, income, geography. And if you're not an advanced audience conversation, that's pretty much where it stops. That's the audience they're reaching out to.
How have you seen that in the past, and how do you see it evolving now?
Bobby: We have been successful with what I would call foundational demographic targeting; age, income, address, location, that sort of thing. It's really important. The kinds of filters you would use to create a direct mail campaign, it's really, really smart and that is effective.
I remember Tim, us meeting at Argentum and you were speaking, talking about the nuances, the audiences you were able to create. I don't know if there's actually a term for this or not, but I describe it as kind of a psycho-demographic. It's not only the who, but now we're able to further refine the who audience that we start with, the people in the market, these are our addresses, this is the age range, this is the relationship to the potential occupant, but now we can get the who, but now we can get kind of the why. It's the opportunity to do what mass media doesn't do, which is go big and large. The more mass we can reach with a message, the better.
Well, what we want to see, and this is what Causeway really helps us think through, is in an ideal world, if I could get down to one individual and know that that individual wanted to hear the message this certain way, "Bobby Youngs is my target out there. If I could deliver an ad so custom to Bobby Young's, that would be the perfect scenario. I really could get right to his motivation. What's he really looking for," and those sorts of things. And we can't do that. But we can, through that psycho-demographic targeting, understanding someone's motivations, what are they interested in, what's going to motivate them and move them to make a decision, what's going to impel them to click on that ad, other than just being my target, then I'm actually able to have a smaller audience and with my client's budget, increase the actual impression share onto that smaller audience, serve the more ads that are much more custom.
A lot of people... My kids and wife... This is funny. I've been advertising all life. I love advertising. There's something that's really interesting about art that motivates people to action. I just think it's really cool. We'll be watching television and stuff, and they'd be fast-forwarding commercials or getting annoyed when there's a commercial break. I'm like, "Hey guys, that puts food on the table." We wouldn't even get to enjoy a Super Bowl if it wasn't for people buying ads. Advertising makes all these things work. All these really cool phones that we get to walk around with and have basically this supercomputer in our pocket, exist because there's some way for marketers to sell ads on this.
So hey, thank an advertiser. We need to have an advertisers' holiday. Just like veterans out there; thank a veteran for defending our country. We should have a thank somebody in marketing for making capitalism work. I don't know if we're appreciated enough, Tim.
Tim: We can do an advertising appreciation day.
Thérèse: Yeah. That's right.
Bobby: We get to enjoy all these wonderful things in life because we market them.
But in my mind, the potential future of advertising is that it's not annoying, and it doesn't feel like it's interrupting you, but it's actually a real value benefit to your life. You're on the way to go get lunch somewhere and the world we live in understands your patterns and where you're going and says, "I'm going to send you a coupon." "Hey, I know you're going to Chick-fil-A, but right across the street is a Mexican place, and if you'll go there instead, we're going to give you a free burrito for trying us today." That'd be awesome. I got a free lunch, and I got this great ad, I tried this business out, but it was so customized that every ad was really helpful in my life and made my life more meaningful. I think that's the potential of where we're going. I know we're on the forefront of that.
Tim: Yeah, I think that's it. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I know I've talked about it before. People now have come to expect personalized advertising. That is the expectation now. Something that gets delivered to you that feels like it was a miss, actually. There's been studies showing people almost feel insulted. You don't know me, if you're sending me this.
Bobby, I think you teed it up exactly. That's the way I look at all of this. And maybe Thérèse, we can put a show note in here. I don't want to go through the whole modeling background and the details of predictive analytics, again, for those that have listened to our previous episodes. But that's what drives me here is the idea of promoting value.
When I was a clinician, value meant value-based care. And now I look at it as there's still value in what we're doing to make it better for any client we're working with.
So in short, what you're describing, Bobby, is exactly what we're trying to do all the time of how do we predict somebody's likelihood of taking an action or predict their likelihood of holding a belief, so that we can be much more personalized in our touch-points, be much more personalized in how you deliver that message as opposed to just saying, "Well, you fell on the age bracket, and it looks like you might have the right income, so now we're going to reach out to you."
And once we start adding those predictive aspects to things, like you said, the funnel gets smaller and smaller. Yeah, it might not be a sample size of N equals 1, but if we can take it from N equals 100,000 people in a region to here's the best 50,000 like you said, now you're talking about doubling your frequency of touches because you have half the number of people to touch. You've already identified 50% of the audience isn't really applicable to what I'm trying to promote or what the conversation I'm trying to have.
Once you do that, that's value. Maybe you have the same ad spend, the budget might not change, but you just doubled your frequency of touch-points to that audience and that, as you know, that's your world more than mine, but that's gold. Now you're not trying to have two contacts; you have four contacts. Well, that might be what it takes to move the needle when it comes to somebody's potential as an audience member here.
Thérèse: Well, and it's not just efficiency. It is efficiency for the client, which is obviously really important, but in some ways, to your point earlier, Bobby, it's efficiency for the consumer because you do want those messages, and you do want that information. That is the information you're looking for. I think when advertising is the most annoying is when it isn't relative to you. Not so much anymore, but you used to see ads for restaurants that were 100 miles away. And it's like, "Okay, if I have to watch this, and I can't go, then that's kind of a double annoyance."
I think almost every episode we talk about the fact that people complain about targeting, but ultimately, they totally want it, and they have for years. It's just we've gotten so much better at it that we can really provide things to the right audiences that we couldn't in the past. And in this topic, which I think is so important for the two of you to be talking about, is that there are so many assumptions made that if you get beyond those and see how much information there is on this market, there are lots and lots of choices being made and lots of different targets that do want to hear these different messages.
Tim: Yeah, for sure.
Bobby, we've been talking about audiences, developing advanced audiences that are smart, that are predictive and prescriptive about who any client should be speaking to in any industry. While we're digital centric, it's really important to note that once we develop the audience, it becomes a multimedia approach. For a direct mail campaign with a more refined audience size, you can get much more bang for your buck – whether that's a more advanced material being delivered or more frequency.
From your perspective, because again, I don't live in this part of the world, how do you handle that of making sure it is multimedia given the audience?
Bobby: I would say, Tim, that's one of the biggest challenges of marketing. The other old chestnut that people have heard expressed is, half my advertising works, but I just don't know which half it is. There's just this idea that I've got five different channels. Some are print analog channels, radio, TV, print, cable, outdoor, those kinds of things, and then I've got all this digital stuff online, and I'm getting results. But how do I attribute the result directly to a particular campaign?
That's the gold ring of all marketing agencies is attribution. Did that click generate a sale? Or did somebody move in because they saw this display ad on this website? There are things that we do to track attribution between analog and digital space, and we can see a lot of correlation through tracking online results. KPIs that clients would use like a phone call is generated or there's a form filled out. We can also track a physical conversion. We can track a mobile device that we've targeted with an ad.
Does that mobile device actually show up on a client's property? So there's a physical conversion that we can even track.
We can track those things, and we can see correlations between those conversions and events such as ad targeting online. And we can actually connect the dots between that targeting and offline events. Like an ad running in the New York Times, how does that produce website traffic, things like that. So we're always trying to put those things together.
The best campaigns I think are cohesive in the sense that there's a project manager, typically a marketing director who says, "Okay, here are all the different channels by which we're going to try to reach the audience. So we've identified the audience, and we want that audience to see our message from a myriad of mediums, whether it be outdoor, digital, pay-per-click, whatever it might be, radio ads. The more of that you can do all to the right audience, right message, right people at the right time, the worst case scenario is you're increasing brand awareness, and that's a fabulous thing to do."
In my space in senior living, we just don't know when that life event is going to occur to the person who's a certain age, even though we know we're targeting because of the right age, the right income to afford the facility. And we've even gone down further and gotten that psycho-demographic target; they're really motivated by luxury, but we just don't know when that individual that we've identified is going to experience a life event where they're now in the market for that service. We just don't know exactly when that's going to happen, but we want to be top of mind when it does occur.
The more mediums we can have work together, that's our strategy. It takes a great marketing director who can get all the different vendors, whether it be us and the newspaper company and the radio advertiser all working on the same page to where they're all working cohesively together to create that top of mind awareness for when that event happens.
Does that kind of answer your question about how we approach that?
Tim: I think that's exactly right. The key to me is if you have the right audience at the table.
Bobby alluded that he and I first met at the Argentum Senior Living Executive Conference. I was presenting on predictive analytics. How could data play a role in the future of marketing and the senior living space? And we’d just started introducing a couple of the model audiences we were creating. And now we've expanded by leaps and bounds of modeling audiences with their potential motivator to pursue a senior living facility. And more importantly sometimes, is what is their potential barrier?
One of the more exciting ones is not just who's favorable or unfavorable of senior living as an industry, but we just finished creating who's a decision maker for another adult. And as Bobby said earlier, it used to just be, "Well, if you're somewhere between 40 and 70, let's send you some messages about mom and dad because you might be in that situation." What we found actually is we identified about 20% of the country, give or take, that fell into that bucket. And most of them are baby boomers, as you would expect. And again, sometimes that persona is not wrong.
But we also learned that there's a good chunk of people out there that are Gen Z or millennials that are falling into that category that might possibly be B, the fringe targets that are kind of forgotten about.
I love the idea that if we generate that kind of an audience, then how you reach them becomes the decision of the agencies or the client. Anyone else can figure out how they want to do it, but now they've got opportunity. That's what I'm loving, we're getting to take that gigantic segment that was just demographic only and start putting in some of these other conversation pieces. Because you're right, you don't know when that life event's going to occur, and you also don't know when somebody decides on their own.
You've got to have a high frequency and keep the marketing churn going in this space because you never know when somebody's going to make this decision. But, if we add more value, all of a sudden now you know who you're speaking to and likely to exclude from your message.
Thérèse: Well, it's just such a deep well of information. It's really interesting to see the things that we've been developing, but also see it happening in life, just hearing from different people and experiencing different friends and family and how it does impact such a huge percentage of the people in some way or another.
Well, I think we're just about out of time. Before I wrap this up, Bobby, Tim, anything else you need to share before we let this audience go?
Bobby: No, thanks for having me. Hey, one day when you're enjoying all these wonderful things, this great technology, the capitalist environment we live in, take a moment and thank an advertiser. They could use a pat on the back.
Thérèse: I love that. I say to my children, "It's not direct mail. It's not junk mail. It's your college fund."
Bobby: Amen.
Thérèse: Tim?
Tim: I think we covered it. I loved getting to just bounce some ideas back and forth. Over the last year, it's been great chatting with Bobby and his team and seeing how we can connect in the past and keep moving forward. This has been a great chat.
Thérèse: Awesome. Well, it was a really fascinating discussion. You guys were easy to talk to, and it was a lot of fun. I feel like I learned something. Obviously, we're also just kind of touching the tip of the iceberg in terms of the amount of information and evolution and opportunity there is in this topic of senior living.
We're digging a little deeper into this topic at the Argentum Senior Living Executive Conference in Phoenix. On the afternoon of April 30th, Bobby and Tim will be on a panel, “Navigating the Challenges and Opportunities of Ethical Marketing in the Age of AI and Predictive Analytics.” It will be a really great session of information and insight.
Once again, thank you both so much. It was great to have you here, Bobby. Tim, I know you'll be back.
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