Seven out of 10 people require assisted living in their lifetime. By far, the most enduring challenge isn’t building awareness; it’s standing out as the best option. To acquire new potential residents, your assisted living facility needs a senior living marketing plan that identifies your objectives and addresses each of them in strategic ways to deliver outstanding ROI.
Fully integrated assisted living marketing campaigns increase brand awareness, drive qualified leads to your website, and engage those visitors further down the marketing funnel. They appeal to your target audience and its influencers. Don’t forget that family members, predominantly adult children, are heavily involved when it comes to choosing an assisted living home for their aging parents and loved ones. So, here’s how to improve your marketing efforts to yield the best results in 2025.
How to Market an Assisted Living Community
1. Know Your Senior Living Communities
Baby boomers nearing retirement will naturally research options for retirement communities. For many, the quest begins a few years before to ensure they meet eligibility requirements, or to place their name on a waiting list. In your senior living marketing efforts, you need to consider who is looking for assisted living communities and where they go to find information. Bear in mind; this process often entails the children of parents or next of kin, who inevitably help them decide.
As such, it’s essential to define your audience before developing an assisted living marketing plan. With assisted living, leads come from multiple “personas” i.e., sources, such as physicians, hospitals, sons, and daughters, and even your current residents.
While we know that each of these leads is searching for the same thing, understanding their subtle differences is important to refine ad campaigns and retirement communities marketing plans.
Establishing different buyer personas reminds you to put your audience’s wants and needs ahead of your own and helps you create a marketing strategy that better targets your ideal customer.
Ideally, your target market will be segmented into different demographics, each with its habits, online idiosyncrasies, and pain points. Establishing different buyer personas reminds you to put your audience’s wants and needs ahead of your own and helps you create a marketing strategy that better targets your ideal customer. While you can’t get to know every customer personally, you can create personas to represent different segments of your customer base.
2. Inbound Marketing
Marketing software developer HubSpot defines inbound marketing as “a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them…it forms connections they are looking for and solves problems they already have.” In essence, it allows you to find potential clients already interested in an assisted living facility in your area.
Some advantages of this type of assisted living digital marketing include:
- Reduced costs
- Qualified leads
- Improved brand trust
- Educating prospects
- Driving leads toward purchasing a product or services
One of the greatest advantages of an inbound senior living marketing strategy is how measurable it is. When your marketing for senior living is digital, it’s easier to track every component of your marketing campaigns. Most marketing teams will use customer relationship management (CRM) software to monitor emails, where website traffic comes from, and from what point along the marketing funnel conversions are occurring. It enables assisted living facilities to set goals for their assisted living marketing strategies and track their progress.
3. Optimize Your Website for Mobile
Because adult children are likely the ones doing the research, your senior living digital marketing strategy and website should be designed to capture their attention first. Google found that 80% of people use a smartphone to do research, which means that if your website doesn’t work on mobile, you could lose up to 80% of your target market. But what does it mean to be mobile-friendly?
Mobile-friendly doesn’t necessarily mean an assisted living facility’s website is visible on mobile phones; it actually refers to a website offering a good user experience on a small screen like a smartphone or tablet. Therefore, your website design should be clean and simple, supplying important information in an easily digestible manner.
It must serve as a virtual guide to your senior living community, the services it offers, and its unique selling proposition. Prospective residents should be able to find contact information without fuss. It’s helpful to have FAQ sections and a downloadable brochure (in exchange for a lead’s email address #inboundmarketing). Your website should be attractive and informative in the same way that a great storefront entices people to enter, or in your case, learn more.
4. Invest in Local SEO
One of the best marketing strategies for assisted living facilities is local SEO. This marketing practice optimizes an assisted living website for a specific geographic area. Search engines like Google will automatically prioritize a website to rank for searches specific to a user’s location. A typical senior living SEO search term would be service + location. For example, “assisted living communities near me” or “assisted living communities in Chicago.”
Over 90% of consumers use the internet to find a business in their local area, and optimizing your website for local SEO ensures a prospective resident can find you on and offline. You’ll need to create a free Google My Business account, and fill in all details as accurately as possible. And if you truly want to drive traffic to your assisted living facility website, you should also include resident reviews.
Google trusts word-of-mouth marketing and factors in the quality and quantity of reviews when evaluating an assisted living website. Relevance, distance, and prominence affect the ranking of each site displayed. The first two factors are easy to understand; Google will present a retirement community within a user’s immediate vicinity. When it comes to prominence, the search engine will evaluate reviews and the effectiveness of a website’s general search engine optimization strategy.
5. Follow Back on Calls about Assisted Living Facilities
While most people have a general disdain towards phone calls, they are still one of the primary ways to get the sales cycle rolling, which is why it’s vital not to drop the ball on warm leads. Senior care target audiences are usually older and still deem a follow-up call part of good customer service. Thus, one of the most important assisted living marketing ideas is to implement a lead responses management strategy considering most consumers expect a sales team to get back to them within 12-24 hours.
Nurturing leads is about following up in a way that creates value rather than annoyance. Various software on the market allows businesses to provide an automated callback option to request a call straightaway or arrange to be contacted at another more suitable time. A timely follow-up call is still one of the best ways to convert leads into qualified sales opportunities.
Remember, you don’t just want to provide a future resident with relevant information; you also want to move them further down the marketing funnel. If they express continued interest during the call, you should follow up with a content marketing email, for example. A clear recap keeps communication channels open for future reference; just be sure to ask permission before sending additional marketing material.
How This Assisted Living Facility Increased Its Submission Rate by 60%!
Senior Living Experts is a free, Chicago-based referral agency that provides senior citizens and their families with essential resources and helps them with finding suitable living solutions.
When the agency came to us, we quickly realized the full scope of its work was not adequately communicated on its website, nor did it convey the geographic areas it served.
Moreover, potential clients also found it difficult to locate crucial information, resulting in reduced traffic and low conversion rates. We had a lot of work to do but were determined to create a website that improved user experience and promoted Senior Living Experts in the best light.
We started by designing and developing a top-notch website befitting of a top-rated senior living referral service. The homepage now has a fantastic hero video and a crystal clear call-to-action that prompts visitors to connect to a local advisor.
Our team also implemented a chatbot, so visitors can find the information they need right away. Next, we rolled out a strategic digital marketing plan for senior living, including advertising and senior living search engine optimization (SEO) solutions, which saw an increased submission rate of 60%!
This impressive volume of qualified traffic can be attributed to a fresh website design and content marketing that communicates what the company is about and makes it easy for potential clients to take the next step.
Work With Senior Living Digital Marketing Experts
When you know your ideal audience and their internet habits, you can take the appropriate steps to improve your online presence and develop a stellar senior living marketing strategy. Truly great marketing initiatives bring prospects who you can sell to today, who become brand ambassadors to a network of potential residents. And it’s no secret that sometimes achieving this requires expert help.
Comrade is a senior living marketing agency has managed thousands of incredible marketing campaigns resulting in qualified leads, website traffic increases, and phone calls. From designing attractive, user-friendly websites to finessing your assisted living marketing ideas and starting campaigns from scratch, we do it all. To find out how we can elevate your assisted living marketing in 2025, click here.
