- Senior Living SMART

Let’s talk awesome marketing strategies for senior living. To start, who remembers that great jingle from the 1970’s: “Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun”?

For all of us who grew up with that catchy song, we knew it was about the McDonald’s Big Mac. The special sauce was the magic. It was the distinction between a plain old hamburger and a Big Mac.

OK, so what’s this got to do with your senior living community?

Keep reading…

When it comes to marketing strategies for senior living, you must know your community’s special sauce.

Special sauce is a good way to explain how you’re different from your competitors. In other words, your special sauce is what sets you apart.

For example, consider Walmart. Its special sauce is simple: pricing. Everything that Walmart does is specifically about keeping their prices low. Apple’s special sauce is innovation. Nike focuses on their product line. They are the gold standard in athletic wear.

What’s the special sauce in your senior living community? Do you have something that makes your community stand out?

Not sure? Not to worry. The following marketing strategies for senior living will help you create the perfect special sauce recipe for your community.

1. Operational Excellence

Offering quality services at an affordable price—that’s what everyone wants, right? A great example is our friend McDonald’s. It offers a simple, budget-friendly menu. It also maintains consistency in taste, swift service, and efficiency.

2. Product Leadership

This competitive strategy focuses on bringing superior products to the market. Also, the products should ultimately create great experiences for customers. Consider this from a senior living marketing perspective. For example, is your wellness program outstanding? Do you offer a unique dining experience? Talk about them!

3. Service Quality

Delivering consistently superior customer service is the recipe for this special sauce. The secret ingredient? Service resolution. After all, nobody’s perfect. But being able to listen to the customers’ problems so you can work toward a positive resolution is key. Virgin Airlines is a great example of a company that offers full service flights and outstanding customer service.

4. Relationship Differentiation

This special sauce is all about your associates and team members. Their interactions with the customer demonstrate competence, courtesy, credibility, reliability, and responsiveness. This avenue is closely related to service quality. But where service quality mostly focuses on processes and systems, relationship differentiation is all about the people.

The hiring process at Zappos is a great example of how they maintain their relationship differentiation. The recruitment process is like a courtship. They woo people who fit into their culture and who are good people.

5. Reputation Differentiation

Some companies set themselves apart by their reputation. This can be difficult for newer senior living communities, but even they can succeed in establishing a quality reputation through strategic partnerships. In other words, alliances with hospitals, medical staff, and industry thought leaders can establish a company as an expert.

DuPont, for example, has a strong reputation, employing engineers, scientists, and sales reps with solid technical or educational backgrounds.

To help you define your special sauce, ask yourself the following questions:

Why do your customers choose you rather than your competitors?
What emotional need does your service fulfill?
What aspects of your business can your competitors not imitate?

Once you’ve determined your special sauce, make sure that you do the following.

First, your special sauce isn’t something you simply throw around in senior living marketing copy. Your company should be walking the talk when it comes to fulfillment.
Second, employees should be able to articulate your special sauce.
Third, make sure your special sauce is part of your culture at all levels.
Finally, make sure you promote how great your special sauce is across all marketing channels!

Need help defining your community’s special sauce! Our senior living marketing agency can help!

We have decades of industry experience, so we know how to create a special sauce that will be unique to your community. Let us help!

Align marketing with senior living sales.

The senior living sales and marketing teams need to collaborate. Together, they will create and execute a marketing plan that will result in more move-ins. A good plan will include things like website optimization, paid advertising, direct mail, social media, and marketing events. The plan should also include specific sales activities, such as nurturing leads, generating tours, doing site visits, networking, and conducting scheduled sales calls.

But even if your sales and marketing teams work swimmingly together and bring in quality leads that convert to move-ins, that might not be enough. Bad services, such as med errors, yucky food, and boring activities, will turn those move-ins into move-outs. Obviously, move-outs erode occupancy and revenue.

Bottom line: Before bugging the senior living sales director for more move-ins, evaluate move-outs. Are they unusually high? If yes, assess your services and retention efforts across all areas of operations. (Keep reading for details.)

Improve your service delivery.

Are you delivering the services promised in your collaterals? Many “silent” move-outs happen due to issues no one wants to talk about. Sure, some folks will move to a competitor. But what about people who move out for the following reasons:

Respites that don’t convert – they “tried out” the community but didn’t have a good enough experience to become a permanent resident

Moved home with family (thought the family would do a better job)

Financial move-out – they may be able to afford it but no longer see the value

Residents who move out into their own condo or apartment and bring in-home care

Even worse: Many dissatisfied residents simply stay, but they tell everyone that the community is not what they expected. They share their disillusionment with their physicians, family, and friends. No, they may not erode occupancy, but they won’t help increase occupancy with referrals. Remember, resident and family referrals have one of the highest conversion rates of any source (30 – 35%).

Boost retention efforts.

If senior living operators spent as much time managing the back door as they do driving move-ins through the front door, occupancy and revenue would be far greater. Some ideas to proactively retain residents longer include:

Invest in updated technology and software that monitors resident patterns and health trends with predictive functions to detect changes before an incident or decline occurs.

Hold weekly resident tracking meetings to pro-actively manage resident care collaboratively. These meetings should include representatives from every department and always include input from caregiving staff.

Establish protocols for visiting residents when they are out of the community in an acute setting and managing their care by participating in care planning/ discharge planning meetings.

Set retention goals for your nurses to mirror the move-in goals for your sales team.

If you only focus on the sales portion of the occupancy equation, you will miss 2/3 of your opportunity to grow your market share & profitability.

Need help with any of the above? Before we created our agency, we spent decades working in the industry (sales, marketing, and operations). We know how to increase sales in senior living. Let us help!

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Marketing Strategies for Senior Living: What’s Your Special Sauce?