| Jim Huinink
Editor, Comfort Life
October 2021 |
In a survey of seniors released last year, only 3% of them said they want to move to a retirement home. 95% believe their own home is the safest place to live during the pandemic. How do we change people’s minds? One step at a time.
Here are a few of those steps.
For members, your inclusion in the 19th annual Comfort Life Retirement Guide—home delivered this month—makes you part of a story told through personal testimony and candid narratives of people living a better life in retirement communities. Features bring together more than 50 references from older Canadians or their family members sharing compelling testimony.
Examples include Denise Foster sharing how a move to senior living transformed her mom from someone “not really motivated to connect to other people,” to someone who “participates in everything and has come full circle.” It includes Ben Nuttall-Smith sharing his enjoyment of “so many happy faces around” his community, “the lively conversations,” and how he “loves every moment.” It shares Anne Whittle’s ebullient “love [of ] keeping myself busy by spreading joy and positivity” in her Hamilton retirement home, “[wanting] everyone to feel as happy as I do.” It includes Rin VanHemert telling how she and husband Alex “can’t say how many new friends we’ve made since moving” to their active adult lifestyle community. Those are just a few highlights people will read.
The more stories like those that we can share, the better, and if you have more, we want to hear them. Another step we see members taking is including increasingly high quality video on their websites and social media. One series worth highlighting is Tapestry’s Ambassador series, with the latest video profiling Boston Marathon runner Yul Kwon, an exemplary senior who has been at Tapestry Wesbrook Village for several years. For our part, we’re looking forward to adding Family Insight videos—where we interview resident families about why they chose their particular community—across our website next month.
There are yet more ways to gain people’s trust. While your presence on ComfortLife.ca is an implicit confidence-developer with people, there are easy ways to get even more value. For example, adding The Comfort Life Trust enhancer to your own website will demonstrably increase people’s trust in your brand. Numerous studies show the value of trust enhancers, as noted by everyone from Forbes to Moz.com to Yieldify. Crazyegg advises to “go overboard with credibility indicators” because “third-party trust seals give instant visual feedback to visitors.” Adding this sale closer is easy (see below).
Another way to leverage your Comfort Life membership is to fill out your ComfortLife.ca profile with all the relevant information you can. Every month, 70,000 people come to our site through purely organic web traffic, via Google or other search engines. A survey last year showed that 72% of people trusted Google enough to make financial decisions, 51% of them often or frequently. Indeed, 10% of those people took direct action from ComfortLife.ca profiles, to book a tour, click to call, or click through to your website to take next steps to research your community, instilled with confidence by our site.
The steps above will bring you closer to gaining and deepening trust you have with people in your market. We’re all working together to restore—and improve—Canadians’ belief in retirement communities, and the enhanced lifestyle and loving care they provide.