How To Increase Occupancy at Senior Living Communities
With the demand for senior housing rising 177% by 2050, the question is not how to motivate a generation of residents to move into new homes, but how to convince individuals that your specific community is best.
Regardless of your facility’s focus — memory care, assisted living, independent living, etc. — you’ll need to reach prospective residents and their influential loved ones alike. By taking advantage of the following marketing practices, you can grow your presence by reaching the right audiences and shorten the time it takes to fill your occupancy.
How To Reach Senior Citizens?
In order to tell senior citizens about the benefits of your community, you first need to find them. There is a time and place for using both mailers and digital marketing within your new resident campaigns. The trick is to understand the benefits and limitations of each before allocating your budgets.
Direct Mail vs. New Age Digital Media
Direct mail can still be seen as more personal outreach by recipients if they are in the market for your services. Remember, ads only become junk mail if it’s not pertinent to their needs and interests. If you are choosing to send mail, make sure that your calls to action are strong and that you state a specific landing page audiences should visit. This URL should not be your homepage, but a custom page that continues the conversation you’re having with the mailer recipient. It can host additional information about local events, tours and meet-ups, helpful answers to common questions or even move-in specials. Sending new audiences to your homepage isn’t as precise and personal, and you risk visitors clicking away because they’re unclear of the action they should take next.
The downside of direct mail is it's one and done in terms of outreach. This style of ad won’t follow your audience and it won’t necessarily be in their inbox at the exact moment they’re looking for a senior living community. Therefore, it’s critical to invest in your digital marketing. These efforts can include SEO and Google Ads to secure page one rankings on Google at the minimum. All generations now use the internet to research, make comparisons, find phone numbers, locations and more.
How Can I Promote My Assisted Living Facility?
1. Create Shareable Content
Have a plan for how and where your content could be shared before creating it. Often, marketing teams are juggling several campaigns and goals at a time. If you create content that can be repurposed for different channels, it can save you time and energy as you try and show up in various places across the web.
For example, if you produce a video interviewing current residents, splice the same footage to create a shorter, themed social media video for Facebook or Instagram. You can use this same video to compliment an on-site article about a related topic. Or share it via email with families that have recently taken a tour of your facility. Just be sure to include unique calls-to-action and social buttons to make reposting the article easier.
With the rise of YouTube and TikTok, we’ve seen how effective video can be in telling stories and evoking emotion. It is an easily shareable content format that should be prioritized in most marketing strategies going forward.
2. Pay To Show Up and Compete
Senior housing is a competitive market with sizable numbers of individuals needing care each year. Running an assisted living community can be just as much about growing the business and scaling as it is taking care of loved ones. The top facilities are paying to show up in front of the right audiences, at the right time, with the right content to convert the most tours. The most common areas of online advertising you can use include Google, social media, programmatic channels and affiliate marketing.
If you’ve been running ads across multiple channels for a few months and are questioning what is bringing in the most move-in’s, it might be time to perform a regression analysis. This is a mathematical way of determining which variables are having a positive impact on your marketing efforts. Define if you want to measure using first-click (first channel a consumer engages on) or last-click attribution (last channel a consumer engages on before converting) and sort your success by number of leads, tours and move-ins. This can help your team make insightful decisions on where to adjust Ad spend moving forward.
3. Build High Quality Links To Your Content
Backlinks are the backbone of the internet. Simply explained, backlinks are when one website links to another. This provides an opportunity for readers to click through to the third-party site to read more. More importantly, these backlinks can help you show up higher in the search engines. By growing the amount of high-quality publications and domains that link to your site, you grow your own website’s authority. The greater your authority, the higher your probability of outranking competitors and showing up on page one of Google. It all starts by having high-quality, resource-driven content. To make sure you’re developing the right content and methods for obtaining long-term links, check out our Link Building 101 Guide.
How Do You Optimize Your Senior Living Website to Rank in Search Engines?
Use Content Marketing
IDX defines content marketing as “the art of providing relevant, useful content to your customers without selling or interrupting them. Instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your customers more informed before they buy.” When writing for your blog or resource section, are you only talking about your brand and services? Or are you stating the most frequently asked questions as headlines and answering them in text? We recommend that 80% of your organic search traffic be from non-brand search terms, meaning you’re not just talking about yourself, but topics related to your audience's problems. Audiences turn to Google to ask questions. Be sure you’re answering them.
If you’re struggling with new topic ideation, IDX’s Content Manager Tim Mechling suggests covering questions around health and wellness: "Seniors are looking for more than a place to live. They're looking for a space to thrive during their next chapters. Wellness, nutrition, recreation and any other healthy changes are huge priorities for older adults."
By covering frequently searched topics, you are becoming the authority in the senior care space. With the right CTA’s, you can engage readers to click on more and build an online relationship with you.
Follow Technical SEO Best Practices
When was the last time you performed an SEO audit of your website? If the answer is never, now is the time to commit. There are fundamentals like page speed, title tags, H1 tags, H2 tags, site maps and schema markup that are crucial to your website’s visibility. This is not an exhaustive list. To learn more about how to better optimize your future content check out our Best Practices For Creating High Quality Content That Performs In Google. If you haven’t audited your entire site’s SEO in the past two years or more, we recommend you perform an assessment with a comprehensive tool like Screaming Frog or contact us for a free assessment and custom scope to fix what could be hindering your site.
Prioritize Local Content
Most seniors choose a community that is close to their current home or near family. Local search is an important element to have within your digital marketing to show up when people are searching within specific regions. Apart from managing your map listings, we recommend developing local pages on your website dedicated to the city and surrounding neighborhood of each of your establishments. Having a dedicated page that references the unique local surroundings, things to do, amenities and reviews will help your authority and rankings when optimized correctly.
How To Be Open And Transparent With Your Senior Living Community
Take control of how you communicate with your local neighborhood, prospective residents and current residents. We call this reputation management. “Reputation management creates tremendous opportunities for a brand. It’s not just about responding to a crisis: it’s also about the opportunity to create a stronger connection with your audience by telling your story,” states IDX’s Strategic Director Lianna Kissinger Virizlay.
Content marketing can help with an element of this, as you remain helpful and honest with your audiences upfront as they research online. However, senior leadership should also play a vital part by being a spokesperson to the public. More generations care about organizations having full-transparency and responsibility, as we discuss further in our guide How To Build A Trusted Brand.
Visuals can also help break down barriers you may have with the outside world. Swap stock photography with real images of residents, on-site events and interiors. As previously mentioned, video can help add emotion to your messaging and overall brand appearance. Therefore, stakeholders should be open to addressing audiences regularly on camera, not just through written press releases. Instead of waiting for a potential crisis to strike, be proactive about holding Q&A’s for residents and their families and responding to their feedback. In the long-term this will help with your positive reviews and referrals.
Should Your Senior Living Marketing Team Use a CRM?
The short answer is absolutely yes. Every organization should invest in a strong CRM and train staff to run an efficient business operation. Such a system will also help you better measure your tour-to-move-in conversion rates, leading you to train your team where there may be areas of weakness.
Most importantly, a CRM is the foundation for automating most of your lead nurture efforts. Make sure your CRM is synced with an email automation tool to create personalized email workflows for different audiences you’re speaking to. For example, if a family member has signed up for a tour or filled out a form for more information, are they only speaking with a salesperson? Or are you also dripping them helpful resources via email that further your relationship and authority? Staying top of mind and effectively keeping all potential residents and families engaged requires tools that help you scale. You gain that capability when you put a proper CRM and email tool in place alongside your sales representatives.
Altogether, there are many factors to assess when looking to drive higher occupancy. Regardless of the channel or effort you’re focusing on, be sure to baseline your current activities and performance to better gauge what improvements are increasing your results down the road. If you need assistance in driving conversion to your senior living community, reach out to IDX here.