Senior Living Marketing

We don’t have to tell you that the senior living industry is experiencing exponential growth—and will continue to do so this decade and well beyond.

Here are a few interesting nuggets that recently caught our attention:

• By 2050, it’s estimated that over a fifth of the population in the United States will be 65 years or older. (Source: Statista)
• The United States home care market is expected to grow to $225 billion by 2024 (Source: Business Insider)
• Over 6000 searches related to senior living communities are made each hour (Source: Senior Housing News)
• Only 50% of senior care marketers view their websites as an effective way to generate leads (Source: McKnight’s Senior Living)
• Tech behemoths are entering the market and promising to disrupt senior living (Source: Senior Housing News)
• The senior living industry is—and will continue—to undergo a “sea change” as the very definition of senior living evolves (Source: Senior Housing News)

Of course, as the senior living market grows, so will competition . . .

Consumers will have more choices than ever before about where they or their loved ones reside in their sixties, seventies, eighties, and beyond. (That’s another thing: don’t expect what someone chooses at sixty-five to be the place they stay forever.)

While all of this is great for consumers, it brings many challenges to senior living marketers.

• How do you differentiate your senior living community from the competition?
• What can you do to align your senior living marketing and sales teams so they work in harmony?
• How can you build a website that serves prospects?
• What can you do to help educate consumers on the many different flavors of “senior living”— and get them to choose your flavor?
• If you’re currently with an established long-term brand, how do you get it to evolve into something more modern so that it can compete with newer, nimbler brands?
• And let’s not forget COVID—what can we learn from marketing during a pandemic?

The list of issues is seemingly endless, especially when it comes to keeping up with senior living marketing trends.

That’s the bad news.

The good news?

Plenty of resources exist that can help, which brings us to the purpose of this website page. We’re filling it with targeted information to help senior living marketers navigate theses choppy waters.

Whether you like it or not, senior living marketing and sales teams are no longer in control of the buyer’s journey.

Twenty years ago, it was a different story. People called the community for a tour or to request having info mailed to them. You controlled what you delivered to prospects. You controlled the conversation.

Today, people can read reviews about your senior living community on places like Google. They can post a question to their friends and family on Facebook asking about people’s experiences with senior living. From there, they can conduct more research online. They can gather a ton of info before ever setting foot in your community or interacting with a sales rep.

In other words, your prospects are the ones in charge of their buying journey now.

Overall, we believe this is a welcome change. Why? Because we can finally lose all the things that we hate about marketing (and that gives marketing a bad name), like the jargon and the slick ad copy. Instead, we can focus on having real conversations and satisfying people’s very real needs.

If you work with an agency partner, make sure they truly understand the seismic shifts happening in the senior living industry.

In addition, make sure your agency partner provides:

• A deep understanding of your goals and objectives—and strategies for obtaining them
• Clear and transparent processes for working together (and that these processes actually work for you and your team)
• Effective methods for gauging success and measuring results
• A way to produce custom senior living branding (just say NO if they attempt to simply repurpose other clients’ materials!)

The things your community focused on in its marketing materials from two decades ago probably won’t pass muster today. Why? Because those marketing materials were likely still focusing on features, like room layout and the fact the community had its own hair salon, rather than real benefits.

Even now, the benefits so many senior living communities lead with aren’t the benefits that prospects want or need to hear.

And here’s the quandary: senior living communities, for the most part, are selling the same thing. The layouts, the lifestyle, and the amenities are likely similar.

The experience in your community is what makes your community unique. It’s unique because your residents aren’t the same people as the residents in the community three towns over. Neither is your staff.

And your residents and staff reflect the experiences that someone else will have when they choose your community, right?

The marketing tactics you use to tell this story—blog posts, brochures, Instagram pictures, videos, and so forth—will be the same tactics every other senior living community uses. But the content of those messages will be unique to your senior living community.

So, for example, maybe you share your chef’s background, because your chef is unique to your senior living community. Get into their story, where they’re from, why they’re passionate about cuisine, where they’ve worked in the past, their favorite recipes, and why they love their job in your community.

That’s a true difference. Prospects won’t find that person who offers that particular experience anywhere else they’re looking. It’s authentic. It’s true. And it provides people with an accurate reflection of your community.

You’ll have more than one special sauce, or at least you should. What makes your community special is the accumulation of a bunch of little things. For example, consider who you employ as chef, the architect’s vision for resident suites, the group that plans activities, and the residents who are most involved and act as unofficial community ambassadors.

Find ways to highlight these little differences throughout your senior living marketing and suddenly you truly have a senior living community that doesn’t sound like all the rest.

In fact, we’d argue that successful senior living marketing always begins with strategy. You can’t move forward in a sustainable way without a sound senior living marketing plan.

Marketers need to work closely with sales when creating this plan because the campaigns should support and help achieve the sales team’s goals. The ultimate goal, of course, is increasing occupancy, which isn’t an easy feat.

When thinking about your strategic plan, have a long-term vision for, say, 12 months. But create a detailed 90-day plan that covers the big areas, such as the following:

• Blogging
• Premium content creation
• Email marketing
• Paid advertising
• Direct mail campaigns
• Senior living marketing events
• Senior living website updates
• Video marketing (yes, you should be doing more of it!)

The majority of people begin their searches online, and this most certainly includes senior living. As such, everything begins with the strength of your senior living website. Sadly, as we mentioned earlier, only 50% of senior care marketers view their websites as an effective way to generate leads.

If that describes you, let’s change the situation. And even if you think your senior living website is in good shape, it can’t hurt to invest in a thorough website audit to make sure your assumptions are correct.

Bottom line: your senior living website should . . .

• Be optimized for keyword phrases that your ideal buyers are already searching on
• Include clear, compelling content that immediately communicates how your community is different and better than your competitors’ communities (again, focus on your special sauce)
• Offer multiple points of conversions
• Provide a personalized experience
• Have a way to keep people engaged once they convert
• Always consider your buyers’ needs and pain points first

While your website serves as the cornerstone of your digital marketing efforts, other foundational elements are also important, like senior living social media marketing.

While the ultimate measurement is increased occupancy, there are many paths to achieving that objective. Some are more costly than others, and some are more effective than others.

<a href=”https://seniorlivingsmart.com/blog/effective-senior-living-marketing-metrics-everyone-in-the-c-suite-should-know/”>Make sure you understand important metrics</a>, including customer lifetime value, cost of acquisition, and cost per lead, just to name a few. (And cost per lead will vary depending on the source. How much a lead costs through paid advertising will be different from how much a lead costs through organic search.)

Not every marketing firm is positioned to help senior living communities thrive in such a competitive landscape. But we’re a marketing agency that focuses only on the senior living industry. We live it, breathe it, and have decades of experience in it to boot.