Digital Marketing for Aging Services ft. Josephine Levy

Josephine, founder of Mix Candy Media, shares her advice for helping aging services reach their audience effectively. Gain valuable tips on developing trust through relational marketing and learn about the importance of language and content in this specialized field.

Key Points:

• Integration of Digital Marketing in Broader Strategies: Focus on defining marketing goals for the organization, and then aligning digital marketing with overall marketing goals

• Target Audience and Content Creation: Understand your dual audience: older adults and their adult children. Tailoring content for both older adults and their adult children is key to building trust and an identity for the business

• Practical Advice for New Businesses: Start with one channel (e.g., blog or newsletter) and build content gradually. Focus on providing value and establishing a trusted presence online

Episode: Spotify

Full Transcript

[00:00:00] Ariadne: Welcome, everyone. And thank you for tuning into CareCraft. And today we're so happy to be joined by Josephine Levy, a digital marketing expert specializing in marketing for aging services. She's worked with health care, community living, social nonprofit businesses, helping support older people on their marketing campaigns. And she founded Mix Candy Media in 2022, which provides digital marketing consulting services. She also has a background in care management. So we are super excited to have her on the podcast today. How are you doing?

[00:00:38] Josephine: I'm doing well. Thank you for having me this morning. Of course.

[00:00:41] Ariadne: It's so great to meet you and to start off, would love to just learn a little bit more about your background and what inspired you to focus on digital marketing for aging services.

[00:00:54] Josephine: Well, I think to go back a bit, I became interested in what it means to age and to grow older. When I was a hospice volunteer for several years, I became very interested in how we think about death and dying, and then kind of by extension, how we think about getting older and how those things are related.

And so I went back to school and studied gerontology and worked in various capacities and aging services, and just found that this was an area that was important, but often overlooked and not intentionally necessarily but important. As everyone listening knows, folks who work in aging services are busy.

And so I thought if I can help people shape their messages to reach their potential customers or current customers then that might be a fun thing to do. And so that, that's where I'm at.

[00:01:51] Ariadne: That's awesome. And what do you think is the state of digital marketing in aging services today?

[00:01:58] Josephine: Well, I think most businesses know that they need to be in those spaces whether it's social media or email newsletters or a regular blog post on their website. But I, I think too, that again, that is a full time job. And so how many full time jobs can each of us have? And so whether they assign that work to someone in their organization or whether they actually are large enough to hire another company to manage that for them or hire someone to work for them in house

 I do think that smaller independent businesses are key, I think, for care management especially. And for marketing and for social presence in the public arena that they can do a lot to significantly develop their business that way.

[00:02:56] Ariadne: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I guess, where do you see digital marketing fitting within like a larger marketing strategy? Is it in this day and age, is that kind of like where you recommend people start? Or is it, you know, like once you've kind of established other channels, you start thinking about your digital marketing.

[00:03:15] Josephine: Well, yeah, I think digital marketing has to support your broader marketing goals. So the first thing you'd want to do is figure out what are those and how do we support those in these, these various capacities.

[00:03:29] Ariadne: So how do you think about setting that goal? And how do you help organizations set their goals for their marketing?

[00:03:38] Josephine: Well, I think you have to think about who your client is and for care managers you have to think about the older person that may be in need of your services, but you also have to think about their adult children.

With aging services, a lot of times the question is, how do you get people to sign up for something that they may not want, or they may not think they want it or need it. And you have to think about how your potential clients are view themselves and view their own needs and their own ways to solve their problems.

So you have to ask yourself, is your customer the same person who will be using your services? And I think with older people, you have to really develop a sense of trust and a sense of identity For your business so that they are comfortable knowing that you understand them.

And I think right now there's a very public movement that's anti ageism. I think you see it a lot in the social media platforms, especially Instagram, where you might have Ashton Applewhite who wrote This Chair Rocks some years back and is a noted advocate for ending ageism. Also, other organizations that are out there that are working to kind of reframe how we talk about growing older.

And I think that's a really important thing for even small businesses to be aware of is you know, the language that we use the words that we select. All have an impact. And so it's not necessarily a question of always choosing the exact correct word. It's just an awareness of where society is headed.

So, for example, the word senior was found to have less respect overall than the word older people. Or older persons. And so I would recommend using the words older people or older person. The one issue that I found with social media marketing in particular, is that you're always reading about how you need to do keyword research and the key word for a lot of these industries is senior.

And so it's really hard to back away from that. If you want to kind of mingle in that group, not to use the word senior. So it's not that there's a hard and fast rule. It's just FYI. These words tend to have more respect from the general population than these other words. Similar is if I were an older adult community, I would never use the F word.

I would not describe myself as a facility. Right. Because who wants to live in a facility? Nobody. We want to live in community. We're human beings. We want to live in community.

[00:06:48] Ariadne: That's some really great insights into, you know, how every word matters and the messaging you put out there and the way in which you like talk about yourself you had made the comment that, you know, especially in this environment, it's not usually, or it's not always the older adults that you're marketing to, right?

Like it might be their adult children. It might be other kind of stakeholders and their care. How do you think about that as? An organization and the messaging you put out. Like, are you putting out, you know, different messages on different channels for, for those audiences?

[00:07:23] Josephine: You can and probably should put out messaging for both levels for the older person themselves who may be 80 years old or older, and then for their adult children who may be in their 50s or 60s. So we're not talking adolescence necessarily here. We're still talking solid middle aged folks who are looking for help.

To help provide what their folks need what their parent needs that they are not able to provide it for themselves. So I think it's important to realize that almost half of people 65 and older are on social media mostly Facebook. The younger you go, of course, the higher percentage of that population uses social media. So older people use social media, they use email. And they're online, and so I don't think your messaging has to be completely distinctive for one group than the other. I think that if you do a good job of sharing your services and what they provide to people that you can appeal to both.

I will say that I do think that And I wondered if care managers would agree that more often than not, the phone call they get is from an adult child, an adult daughter, typically more often than, say, someone who is calling on their own behalf. But that may change as our population ages in the next decade or so.

You know, a lot of us, we, we want to remain at home. We want to age in place as they call it. But when we tend to think about that, we, we imagine ourselves in our home as we are today. And not 20 years from now. So, so if I'm in my, my house right now, I think, well, I'm going to live here for the rest of my life.

How do I change a light bulb? You know, how do I get groceries? All of the things, how do I not fall in the, in the, in the bathroom? All of these things, Are out there somewhere in this abstract future, whereas at some point they're going to be immediate needs. And I think we need to appeal to people who are still thinking that those things are in the abstract future, so that when the need does become immediate, they're comfortable reaching out to ask for help with the kind of help that they may need

[00:10:05] Ariadne: Really fostering that relationship. You mean, basically before, you know, there is a real crisis, but, you know, making sure that people are aware of you and the services you provide.

[00:10:17] Josephine: Yeah, that's how you develop trust is through relationships. So your, your media, whether it's social media or email marketing or whatever it is is relational and not transactional. And so, of course, at some point there will be a transaction but only if you are seen as a trusted resource that has a genuine interest in helping the people who need your help.

 Our marketing then can be what they call age adaptive, which is you know, aging does bring challenges. But we can address them. And I think care managers are in a great space to do that because the services they provide. can be non intrusive and supportive and meet the needs of people as they're aging.

So it's not an age denial issue. We're not saying, you know, buy my product and you will never grow old, you know, or you, you never have to be older. We're all growing older and that's okay. So with a lot of the age affirmative platforms that are out there you're looking at more hope than fear.

There are also other things about being older that we want to acknowledge. And so safety appeals to adult children. Necessarily the older person isn't as concerned about their own safety as we all know, as even maybe they should be. They want to be in their home. They want to be surrounded by what they know. We want to be surrounded by what we know.

And so all of those things are sort of an underpinning of how do I develop content in social media spaces or on my website? And so once you have kind of a basic sense of how you view aging, how you view older people who your customers are, what kind of persona you develop for them whether it's the, the client themselves or their older adult child then you can start looking at how do I develop content. So when you're a life care manager your clients are probably living within a reasonable distance from you, from where you are and their children may be anywhere in the country or beyond. But your actual client is probably going to be close by. And would you agree with that? Let me ask you.

[00:12:48] Ariadne: Yeah, that's generally what I've seen in the individuals and the businesses that we've talked to.

[00:12:55] Josephine: So you want to be able to share your knowledge and expertise about what it means to grow older and how your services can address the needs that emerge as we age without being intrusive or condescending in any way.

And so what you're looking for is is solid material either of your own creation or of other organizations that are putting out quality information. And so if you are going to have a website that has a blog on it. It's important for a couple of reasons. One, it can emphasize and feature your services and it can share your philosophy and your ideas about aging and how you can help people. It also can help with the search engine optimization.

[00:13:50] Ariadne: That's something we hear a lot actually from care managers where their clients will tell them, or usually it's the you know, the adult children will say something along the lines of, I didn't know you existed as a profession.

That does make your marketing message. A little bit more tricky, right? Because it's very much having to educate people that you exist and, and, you know, like the value of your services and exactly what those services are.

And so that's, you know, maybe more on you as a small business owner than in some other industry where it's just more well known that the service exists.

[00:14:28] Josephine: Yeah. And the good part of that is that if people don't know you exist, do you have that opportunity to shape your the, the position?

So that gives you the opportunity to say, all right, if people don't know who we are and what we do that's a year's worth of blog posts and Facebook posts and and all of that. It's both a problem and an opportunity.

You could do frequently asked questions about your business and you can repurpose this content. So you can have a blog post, for example, about three things about aging in place. to be aware of. And that can be a blog post. It can also be one or more social media posts. If you have a LinkedIn business page, which, which I recommend it can be a LinkedIn business post as well to try to connect with other professionals in the business to business space and to set yourself up as.

someone who has something to offer people. And so you can do a personal bucket where you can get to know me get to know staff if you have staff. And then thinking always about, can you frame this information in a narrative? Because people remember things through story.

You can turn your information into stories, especially if you have examples of the services that you offer. So maybe focusing less on the features of your service and more on the benefits. So instead of saying, Oh, I can, I can do this for you. I can think what's one of the services that we offer.

[00:16:12] Ariadne: Like an initial assessment is a big one, right?

[00:16:15] Josephine: Yes. So instead of me telling you, I can assess you. Boy, that, that doesn't, that sounds fun. But how about if I help you get a clear picture of what your needs and wants might be right now?

Maybe it feels overwhelming. Maybe we can put something on paper that gives us a clear direction and that allows you as the older person to be a part of that direction. And so for many people, the fear is losing independence and control. How can I help you maintain your independence?

And so what are the benefits to them? What are the benefits to the adult children who may be worried about their, their parent or their parents who they don't get to see as often as they might like? So mostly offering value. To people whether it's the adult child or whether it's the, the client themselves.

[00:17:16] Ariadne: That reframing of it to be something that, you know, the client themselves would want to really engage in as opposed to something that's just happening to the client.

We basically have talked about defining the audience, like knowing who you're talking to and framing it for them creating that content right that they can engage with, whether it's a blog post or a newsletter or something like that. Just some tactical advice, you know, for someone who's maybe a newer in the business and just getting started. What, what do you advise? Is it picking one channel, whether that's your blog or newsletter or just one thing in the beginning and building out the content there?

[00:17:59] Josephine: Well, I think, I think your website is primary. And I think that you can if, if you have a blog and you have content that it becomes easier to repurpose that for, say, your Facebook account or for an Instagram account I would look at those two platforms initially. From the website and because of course you can link to those from your website so that you can show and you can use the same the same content that you've got in a blog post to show that you are connected to your community, whether it's your actual smaller geographic community, or whether it's the larger community of aging industries and how you can relate to those, how you connect to the life plan communities or how you connect to nonprofit organizations that are serving older people.

[00:18:59] Ariadne: If an organization is at the stage where they are considering bringing on some more help, whether that's, you know, like, outsourcing on a contract basis or a consultant or something like that in this area. What do you recommend they ask to make sure that, you know, whoever they're considering bringing on board really understands their organization and and the space and can provide the results they want.

[00:19:25] Josephine: Well, I think if you were hiring out, you would want to look at who you're hiring. I would want to know that they have an understanding of what it means to be an older person. And the aspects of that that are too often diminished or overlooked you know not acknowledging the autonomy of individuals, even if they're 100 years old, if they're 100 years old, they've earned the right to be respected and honored.

 I'd want to look at a budget. I'd want to look at other clients that, that business supports and what they, what they can offer. And so I I'd really want someone to understand the services that I provide and the people that I'm trying to reach in my community.

[00:20:18] Ariadne: That makes perfect sense. And if there are people listening that do wanna reach out to you specifically, what do you recommend?

[00:20:24] Josephine: Well, they can find my website. I am at mixedcandymedia.com and I'd be glad to, to talk to folks.

[00:20:34] Ariadne: Awesome. Well thank you so much. It's been a pleasure having you on and really appreciate everything you were able to share with us today.

[00:20:41]Josephine: Thank you very much. I sure appreciate it.