2021 Senior Living Marketing Strategies and Plans

Build a Successful Senior Living Marketing Plan to Fill Your Communities

Baby boomers are the fastest-growing age group and one of the largest demographics in the United States. By 2029, 20% of the U.S. population will be 65 years or older, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

With numbers and statistics like these, the senior living community industry should be booming. But if you’re struggling to fill residences in your senior living community, it may be time to rethink your current marketing strategy.

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Why Senior Living Communities Need Digital Marketing

Reach More Seniors

Digital marketing can reach more seniors than you may think. According to the Pew Research Center, 85% of baby boomers use the internet and 68% own a smartphone.

As baby boomers continue to age, they become more likely to start looking to move into senior-friendly housing or assisted living facilities. By leveraging our pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign services, we can target local tech-savvy seniors.

But don’t forget that family members are also searching for senior living communities, and younger generations are even more in-tune with technology and digital channels.

Increase Online Visibility

As the senior living industry becomes increasingly competitive, it’s important to stay a few steps ahead of the competition. Digital marketing can help you get ahead and stay ahead of the competition and fill your move-in ready residences.

More and more prospects are going to Google and/or Bing to find the best communities and facilities for themselves or their loved ones. We’ll boost your senior living community or assisted living facility’s website to the top of the results page, where more people are likely to visit your website and learn more about your community’s offerings.

Don’t discount social media, either: Pew Research Center found that 59% of boomers use social media and 60% say they use Facebook. If your senior living community isn’t being advertised on Facebook, you may be missing out on a solid section of your target audience.

Expand Your Senior Living Community & Services

As your senior living community’s once-vacant residences become occupied due to the efforts of a digital marketing campaign, it may be time to expand your community. Maybe you’ll add more homes to your current location, create new amenities and programs, or start planning to build a new senior living community somewhere else entirely.

Digital marketing can help open up doors to new opportunities as well as spread the word about them. Working with a digital marketing agency is a small investment that can lead to bigger and better opportunities.

Ways to Increase Senior & Assisted Living Lead Generation

Retarget Senior Living Residents

The decision to move to a senior living community is a big one that may involve multiple family members and will take quite a bit of time.

Retargeting online ads to those who have visited your website but either bounced or failed to convert is a simple way to keep your senior living community at the forefront of prospects’ minds. Visitors who are retargeted are 70% more likely to convert.

Retargeting family members that are searching for an assisted living facility or senior living community for their loved ones may also prove to be effective.

Follow Up with Future Residents

Once the leads start coming in, it’s up to you and our team to handle follow-up calls. Following up is critical to your senior living marketing campaign’s success. Consider hiring or selecting a designated team member whose only responsibility is to follow up with leads. This will help generate high-quality leads but also help you create a path to nurture and convert these leads into becoming your newest residents.

Multi-Channel Approach

Stop selling your senior living communities short by only using one channel to reach your audience. The more channels, the more people you can reach, and the more people you can reach, the better.

We create a holistic plan that includes the following marketing channels:

PPC

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can increase the visibility of your senior living community on search engines. PPC ads appear when a search engine shows results for a keyword or long-tail strings of keywords (i.e., “senior living near me”). These ads are highly targeted and are shown only to prospects in certain locations, making it easy to target local prospects.

We exhaustively research relevant keywords that prospective senior residents and their family members might include in their search.

Display Ads

Unlike PPC ads, display ads can be placed on websites outside of search engines. Though the text-based PPC ads are effective, display ads are better at catching people’s attention.

Display ads are one of the most effective methods for remarketing (also known as retargeting) prospects. Remarketing refers to advertising to prospects who visited your website and left. Think of display ads as reminders that drive prospects back to your website to take action.

Paid Social

Social media has evolved far beyond a place where people share photos of their kids and accomplishments; it’s a powerful tool for influencing users and their perceptions.

Paid social media ads can be adjusted so they are only seen by certain demographics, such as age, sex, net worth, marital status, and others, in certain locations and during certain times of the day and week. They’re also more cost-effective than PPC ads due to their lower cost per click and impressions, meaning they can reach more people at a lower price.

SEO

PPC and paid social ads can boost your visibility quickly, but it’s always a good idea to have a long-term strategy in place. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a strategy that can help your website rank higher on search engines organically (that is, without paying a cent to Google or Bing). The higher the rank, the better your visibility — and the better your chances of a prospect seeing your senior living community.

We take a local approach to SEO because many of those seeking senior or assisted living communities search based on geographic location. Search engines are “smart” enough to recognize a searcher’s location, so when they search using long-tail keyword searches like “senior living communities near me” or “assisted living communities near me,” results within a certain radius will appear.

Your community’s site should pop up on the first or second page of search results, as relatively few people go past Page 2. If it doesn’t, our SEO strategy can help bump your website up a few positions.

Websites & Landing Pages

Nowadays there’s no excuse for not having a website for your business; same goes for having a website that is not mobile-first. As of 2019, Google evaluates websites based on their mobile load time before the desktop load time for ranking. Your senior living community’s website must be optimized for mobile devices and speed.

Developing websites and landing pages that are proven to generate appointments is a key part of our SEO and paid ad campaign strategies.

Determining Success

Create Customized User Experiences with Landing Pages

Creating separate landing pages for each level of care your community provides (i.e., assisted living, retirement community, Alzheimer’s and memory care, etc.) helps leads find the services and care they (or their loved ones) need. Our landing pages have gone under intensive tests that have proven their effectiveness when increasing senior living communities’ lead conversion rates.

Gather Data from Lead Tracking Process

Every OppGen website and landing page includes a proprietary tracking system that gathers data and feedback on which senior prospects became residents or scheduled a tour and those who did not. Our tracking system properly attributes leads by showing you where these leads came from. That way, you can start shifting more resources to that particular source and away from those that aren’t quite as effective.

A/B Test Ads & Web Pages

We A/B test advertisements and landing pages by changing a small element (text or image) and running the original ad and the tester to see if there’s any difference in prospects’ responses.

A/B tests minimize the risk of alienating prospects who are deeper in the marketing funnel than the ones who are starting to enter it.

Test New Channels

It’s wise to advertise on more than one platform, especially since prospects in this industry can vary (future resident or a family member or friend).

Google & Bing

Search engines are great because they’re geographically targeted and are effective in targeting prospects who are at the bottom of the marketing funnel. Prospects are already looking for what it is they want; it’s simply a matter of finding the best option. And if your senior living PPC ad is on the first page of local search results, prospective residents will probably have your community at the top of their list.

As the world’s most popular search engine, advertising on Google is one of the best places to advertise your senior living community. Not only do its advertising services have enormous reach, Google also has some of the best tools for monitoring your website.

That doesn’t mean you should give up on Bing. Bing reaches up to 49.5 million searchers that Google isn’t able to reach.

Facebook

Remember: 60% of baby boomers say they use Facebook, making it a powerful option to use for advertising your senior living community. Facebook’s ad targeting is incredibly accurate and costs less than PPC with higher impressions. It’s easy to use and allows for plenty of advertisement options.

If your senior living community includes a retirement home, LinkedIn advertisements may prove to be effective for baby boomers who are still working but are considering retirement. LinkedIn ads can even be used to target certain industries and specific companies. If you’re aware of an industry or company with an aging population, LinkedIn is the social media site to advertise on.

YouTube

According to a 2019 Statista survey, 58% of Americans who are 56 years or older watch YouTube, an advertising channel that has 75% of adults watching on their mobile devices. In fact, YouTube mobile ads are 84% more likely to hold a viewer’s attention than TV ads! These stats really show why YouTube ads are worth the investment for your senior living community.

Senior Living Marketing Guide

See how our specialized lead generation program for senior living communities is able to achieve a performance level no individual clinic could reach on its own.

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Why Our Team is Different

We aren’t your average marketing agency, and here’s why: we focus on developing close relationships with our clients. Why? The relationships we’ve formed have helped us create an expansive network in the senior living and assisted living segments, find invaluable market data, and come up with a formula for success.

Dedicated Analysts

In the case of PPC campaigns, it’s fairly common for people to rely on Google’s automated bidding strategy. The problem with that is these automated bidding strategies are not developed to work in your favor and may cost you more money than you needed to spend in the first place.

We believe that a human touch is in our clients’ best interests. Neither humans nor automated services are perfect, but when you have a dedicated analyst running your campaign manually, you have someone who can answer any of your questions, explain their logic behind each decision, and more.

Identify Your Best Senior Living Residents

Our senior living community marketing team conducts a review session with your business to get to know you better and to determine who your most profitable residents are. Through this process, we identify who to target, where your prospects are located, who your competitors are, and more.

Create Personalized Experiences

Once we’ve identified your best prospects, we leverage our experiences with other senior living communities and assisted living facilities to develop a custom landing page. This landing page features highly targeted messaging built to convert new prospects into future senior living residents. If you feel you need to include an SEO element to your marketing plan, we can discuss that with you and work that in.

Get a Free Digital Audit

Let’s work together to fill the vacancies in your senior living community. Start by filling out our free digital audit, or request more information by contacting us.

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