Extending the Life of a Speaking Panel

“How do we keep people talking about us?”

It’s a simple problem faced by millions of entrepreneurs and marketers every single day across senior living and just about every other industry. With people getting bombarded by thousands of messages every single day whether it’s in person or on the internet, it’s easy for even the greatest ideas to get lost in the shuffle.

Memory care consultancy Dementia By Day founder Rachael Wonderlin and her Operations and Marketing Director, Natalie De Paz knew they had a great story, and they were determined to extend the life of it.

An Innovative Idea

Wonderlin spoke at this year’s Senior Housing News BRAIN Memory Care Conference in mid-May with her client, not-for-profit senior living community ThriveMore.

Their panel, titled “Facing an Unmet Need in Memory Care: Keeping Couples Together,” explored an innovative program that Dementia By Day worked on with ThriveMore aimed at keeping couples together when one of them is living with a cognitive impairment.

“With the couples’ memory care panel, we’re actually talking about what we’re implementing and how it’s going to work,” Wonderlin said. “We’re talking about the tangible plan and implementation: the amount of rooms, what they’ll do all day, who we’re catering towards—spousal pairs where one partner is living with dementia.”

The Challenge

The couples’ memory care model is an innovative concept, and the panel presentation at BRAIN was well received.

Wonderlin had two things that just about every entrepreneur dreams about: an innovative idea and a happy client that was willing to talk about the fact that the program that she and her team were implementing was working.

What she needed was a way to keep people in the senior living space talking about her idea. While the panel presentation was well received, Wonderlin and her team wanted to come up with a way not just to stay top of mind with those who saw the presentation itself, but also to connect with those who didn’t attend the conference.

“The people who went [to the BRAIN Memory Care Conference], maybe they didn’t go to the panel, or maybe they did and it was worth reminding them,” she explained. “So it was like here’s why you should care, here’s what we do, here’s how we can help.”

The Approach – Turning the Panel Content into a Sponsored Email

Senior Housing News has a number of different solutions aimed at connecting the right message with the right audience, ranging from event sponsorships to sponsored emails to retargeting campaigns. Dementia By Day has been a Senior Housing News client for years.

“Being partnered with Senior Housing News, there’s a reason why you’re the only ones we partner with in this way,” says Dementia By Day Operations and Marketing Director Natalie De Paz. “It lends us that credibility.”

Wonderlin and her team have sent out sponsored emails to Senior Housing News’s dedicated list of thousands of senior living leaders in the past. She’s also spoken at Senior Housing News events in the past and was a gold sponsor for the 2023 BRAIN event.

What she and her team hadn’t done was take the content from one of her presentations and turn it into a sponsored email, thus giving it new life to an even larger audience.

“[Senior Housing News] has the people that we need, the C-suite decision makers, who can make this decision,” she said. “I want to keep top of mind with the Senior Housing News audience. The only way to remain top of mind is to be, like, here’s what I do that’s different, and here’s a client. That’s that proof of concept that people need, and I’m not some random person calling themselves a dementia consultant.”

Paz said the process of taking the panel content and turning it into a sponsored email wasn’t a terribly difficult process.

“Rachael and I built the email together over a Zoom call where we were screensharing,” she explained. “We tried to make it tell a story. We knew all the parts were there. We wanted to tell them a story about couples’ memory care. Did you see this, here’s who we are.”

The Goal: Keep People Talking

Wonderlin and De Paz wanted senior living leaders to continue talking about Dementia By Day and the company’s innovative, bespoke approach to memory care.

“We generated that interest at the conference, let’s keep feeding that momentum,” Wonderlin said. “It just made sense that when we had the chance to send out that follow up email to make it about that panel because that is such a cool concept that stands out from the rest of the market. Keeping us top of mind if someone was looking for a consultant or a fractional operations team. We’re really the focal point of hey, here’s what we do, here’s who we are, and here’s a client we’ve been successfully working with. We’re legit, you should want to learn more.”

The Results

By crafting a compelling story leveraging the success that they had with a client, Dementia By Day was able to more than double the amount of engagement they had seen from their previous sponsored emails while also maintaining consistency with previous open rates.

Wonderlin attributes this to the fact that they focused more on the story rather than straight selling.

“I feel like people get these transactional emails all the time,” she said. “But if there’s something in there for them, like the Couples’ Memory Care, it might actually get them to read it.”

Advice for Others – Keep it Simple

Wonderlin and De Paz attribute Dementia By Day’s brand building success to the fact that they keep their marketing messaging simple.

For others who are thinking about doing something similar, Wonderlin recommends sticking to a couple of key points and telling your story without explicitly selling.

“Have tangible things to talk about,” Wonderlin said. “Everybody gets so many sales emails. It has to be something that makes them want to click on it that isn’t just them being sold on a thing.”

Click here to learn more about how Senior Housing News can help you connect your message with our growing audience of senior housing leaders.