5 Marketing Tips for Reaching Active, Healthy Seniors

Marketing in the senior living industry doesn’t have to be tricky or difficult, but there is also not a one size fits all approach. When operators all market the same way, it makes a jumble for your prospective residents to have to sort through to find you. That buyer journey doesn’t give you that perfect match everyone is looking for. These five senior living marketing tips will help you craft a digital marketing strategy to best reach your future residents and their families. 

Know Your Brand & What Makes Your Brand Unique

Let’s face it, everyone is on the internet and getting swarmed with content from cat videos to the news. In a sea of digital waters, standing out is difficult. However, this doesn’t mean you need to have the best amenities, be right on the beach, or have an activities director that would want to make Oscar the Grouch join in. This means you need to identify what makes your brand uniquely your brand. Do you have garden-to-table meals? Is it the location? Is it your move-in and acclimation process? Why do people come to you and why do they love what you have to offer?

If you’re having a hard time with this, just ask. It’s simple to get feedback from your residents to get a solid understanding of what makes living there enjoyable. You may even find trends in their feedback.

Let Your Website Showcase Your Brand

Now you know what makes you stand out. Great! Don’t waste that knowledge. Make sure your website showcases your unique brand. If your brand is a relaxed country home feel, don’t make your website look sterile and bland. It’s okay to show off and flaunt your brand’s best qualities. Your prospective residents want to know the real community.

Prospects are coming to your website to see your brand. Display your brand and visually outline what sets you apart. In an age where everyone goes to the internet to search before making decisions, you want your website to reflect the qualities your brand has to offer.

Know Your Audience

Knowing your audience is the next crucial step. There are huge differences when strategizing to reach seniors who are 65 to 75, seniors who are 75 to 85, and seniors who are 85 to 95. Don’t be afraid to really narrow in on your ideal prospect. Create a list of those personas and make edits with that person in mind.

Larger operators typically use mass marketing strategies, but the budgets for those are to scale with that size company. Target marketing picks out your audience and only markets to them through the appropriate channels such as website, Facebook, print media, radio spots, and even TikTok. Understanding the demographics of your audience is crucial to target marketing. 

Create Content & Use Different Delivery Methods

Knowing how to market your brand and understanding your audience is key for this step: creating content and delivering it to your target audience. Creating content your audience wants may seem like a daunting task. This is where partnering with an industry-specific marketing agency can help. This is a great time to invite your community team to help too. It could be as simple as snapping a few photos or short videos when the cooks prepare a meal that looks too good to eat, when residents are enjoying themselves, or when families are in the community celebrating a birthday, work or marriage anniversary, or a happy resident in the spa or salon. Nothing is too small because the little things are what showcase your brand and what it stands for. 

Now, not everyone has that eye for creating content. If none of your team has that, it’s okay. You all chose to be in the field of caring for others; no one expects your team to be a professional media team as well.  A content strategy is important to map out the next 30 days, 3 months and year as a whole. Content might include email campaigns, press releases, social media plans, community open houses or events, and team member appreciation socials. 

Now that you have a plan for content to reach your target audience, how do you get it to them? You can’t just throw it at the internet and hope you're seen in the sea of content. In 2017, people could be exposed to up to 10,000 ads a day, and that was 2017. Facebook’s monthly active users is quickly approaching 3 billion people (approximately 36% of the world's population) with users spending approximately 34.6 minutes per day on Facebook. 66% of Facebook users visit a local business page at least once a week. 

So how do you get your content to the right viewers and make sure they see it? 

You already know your audience, so finding where they are is easier than you think. Are they on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook? Does your audience just LOVE listening to podcasts or reading magazines or listening to local radio stations? Or, like most, do you have different subgroups that utilize different avenues for content? 

With each avenue to deliver your content to your audience, there are different measures to use to make sure your audience can access your content. For prospective clients starting their search, utilizing items like SEO to show up higher in the list of google searches, can be a game changer. These marketing measurements help you see what’s working for your brand and lets you know what needs to be tweaked or completely changed. 

Again, don’t be scared to ask for help from a marketing agency. You are not alone in this journey. 

Virtual Tours

Virtual tours can be produced during the same time you are creating content through a content shoot, but it’s different and important enough to have its own space. There are very few, if any, people who buy a house, or even take a weekend vacation, without looking at videos or at the very least photos of it first. Why would moving into senior housing be any different? This is a big decision, and sometimes not the most welcomed one.

Creating a way for people to view your brand and community, and what they can gain from being a resident, can give these new leads specific items to look forward to and get excited about. Plus, it helps you know which aspects of your brand your target audience is passionate about when they come for a tour. Who wouldn’t want to then come for an in-person tour? Your website already shows how inviting your community is and the tour lets the family see even more aspects about what you have to offer.

A website, virtual tour, and great content showcasing your brand being directly sent to your target audience will generate leads. Then monitoring these with marketing measures to analyze your strategy. It also helps to reflect and look back again at the cycle, since brands and audiences grow and can change with time.

You don’t have to be an expert, and you don’t have to do it alone. 

To learn more about senior living marketing, visit SolinityMarketing.com.