Senior Living Marketing Agency

Senior living marketing is the process of promoting your senior living community to your potential residents and their loved ones. Effective senior living marketing follows many of the same principles that guide any industry. However given the sensitive and personal nature of this decision process, there are specific considerations that must be included in your senior living marketing strategy to ensure that you properly engage with, rather than alienate, your target audience.

Your senior living marketing plan begins by identifying your target audiences and thinking about what is most relevant to each of them. For example, you are likely not only speaking directly to potential residents but also to their adult children who are involved in their healthcare and in many cases will be the final decision-makers when it comes to senior living care. Spend some time determining what types of questions and concerns each audience is likely to have, as well as anticipating any common objections they might have. Then, once you have identified each target audience and have a strong understanding of the motivations of each, you’ll want to begin creating content specifically geared toward addressing their needs. This process, which sounds rather straightforward, can actually be quite complex and frustrating. For this reason, you should consider partnering with a marketing agency that specializes in senior living marketing.

Your content marketing efforts will begin with building an industry-leading website. Most people, including a solid majority of seniors, have access to the internet and spend a significant amount of time online. Additionally, the internet is where most people begin their buying journey and decision-making process, going online to gather information and research potential solutions for their needs, including for senior living options. Because of the sensitive nature of senior living decisions, your website needs to be not only informative but also poignant and impassioned. You want your site to both educate and connect with users, and to demonstrate both credibility and empathy. This can be a difficult balancing act, another good reason to work with a trusted digital marketing partner.

Your senior living marketing plan should extend beyond your website to include things like blog posts, email newsletters, and social media marketing to help amplify your marketing message and to further establish thought leadership within the senior living industry. This demonstration of expertise leads to both brand equity and consumer trust, increasing the likelihood of converting visitors into qualified leads for your senior living community. These types of digital marketing tactics are also a great way to engage with users who are in the awareness stage of the decision-making journey and may not even be aware of your brand. By offering them compelling, relevant content that does not include a hard sales message you build positive brand awareness so that, later when these users are further along in their journey and ready to make a decision, they turn to you first.

Your senior living marketing plan can and should be targeted based on demographic, lifestyle, and geographic factors. Whether you are utilizing search engine marketing (pay per click), social media advertising, or retargeting visitors to your company website, you can target specific audiences with specific messages based on their most important and relevant characteristics. You should also strategically employ custom landing pages with your online marketing efforts so that when users click on an ad, they are taken to a web page that includes very specific content that is geared toward both engaging with the user and getting them to take a particular action–usually to provide their email address or other information to create leads for your sales team to follow up with. These landing pages might offer an e-book or white paper with detailed information about selecting a senior living community, or a video that offers a virtual tour of your facility so that users can get a feel for what life is like there. The goal is to provide something of value to the user in exchange for their contact information so that you can nurture this lead by providing them with additional pieces of valuable content in the future, with the ultimate goal of converting them into a new resident.

Senior living marketing is important because the senior living industry is both a rapidly growing and an increasingly competitive industry. As such, it is crucial that your business is appropriately promoting its facilities and the quality of life that you provide. Your marketing messaging must address users at all levels of the decision making process, from awareness to deliberation to decision, and meaningfully engage with each of your target audiences. Properly conceived and executed, your senior living marketing program should help your business increase brand awareness, consumer trust, and leads. To achieve these important goals, your senior living marketing program needs to include outstanding pieces of content that inform and educate, as well as inspire and connect with users.

Because it is such a competitive industry, your senior living marketing campaign also needs to focus on making sure that your business can be found when users conduct an online search. Be sure to incorporate tactics such as search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (pay per click) and local search optimization (LSO) so that your business is best positioned to be in the right place at the right time, and that your digital marketing assets are satisfying the searcher’s intent. No matter how nice your senior living facility is, your marketing efforts will fail to generate leads if no one is able to find you.

A tremendous advantage that digital marketing has over traditional marketing methods is its ability to track and measure important data points, and to convert those data points into meaningful marketing insights. Your senior living marketing agency partner can help you set up analytics reporting based on your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) so that your team has visibility to which marketing efforts are performing well, and which need to be improved upon. This allows for ongoing improvements and optimizations to your senior living marketing plan so that your organization is able to maximize efficiency and profitability, and to generate a strong return on your marketing investment dollars.