You have your senior living complexes’ website already and have already done some advertising in senior living complexes around the web, but are these marketing strategies for senior living residences enough? Being online means more than just having a website: you need to actively promote your senior community online through an effective online senior living marketing plan.

Every month, at least 77% of Baby Boomers go online via smartphones or tablets and remain connected through social media, be it Facebook, Twitter or even LinkedIn. One of the major reasons they go online is because they’re researching purchases, and one of the biggest purchases they tend to make is a senior living community to settle in, and that could be yours. Therefore, you need to take the heads up and design an online senior living marketing plan for them – now.

If you don’t know how to market your senior living community, there are plenty of outreach marketing ideas for senior living communities out there you can use, as long as you keep in mind the following rules of thumb: your prospects must be able to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, feel you are a reliable expert, and trust that you’ll take care of the elderly. You can achieve this through 6 simple steps.

Marketing Strategies for Senior Living Communities

Let’s get down to business: you need to attract your demography first in order to put in action a successful senior living leasing action plan later on. Senior living advertising and marketing experts recommend you to do the following:

Website: Optimize Your Community’s Most Valuable Marketing Tool

Your website must be adjusted so that your prospects find all the information they need in a fast, simple way. In fact, one of the ways to increase occupancy rate in senior living communities is by giving them a sneak preview of your community in a visually stunning way. One method to achieve this is through interior, aerial, walkthroughs and floor plan renders of your property.

The #1 Step to the marketing plan (or the first marketing strategy) is to create a custom paragraph talking about the use of 2D and 3D floor plans to market new homes, custom homes or upcoming build homes or properties. Using 3D floor plans for lease-up senior living is always a great step to take your advertising to the next level – something that will place you on a greater advantage over your competitors. You can get some info onF 3D floor plans here, but if you struggle understanding what are 3D architecture renders and the common uses for 3D renders, you can get extra info here.

Custom 3D rendering of senior living communities increase interest among your prospects and make it faster for them to check your property without moving from their seats. With a simple and well-structured content, virtual 3D floor plans and walkthroughs, you’ll make a fantastic first impression in almost of all your prospects and provide them a great online experience.

Other aspects you must take care of is to ensure that your site downloads quickly (there’s nothing nastier than a slow, glitchy site!), a solid, well-coded back-end and site management, easy, simple and intuitive navigation interface and compatibility on all devices.

Landing Pages: Catch Your Prospects’ Attention

Landing pages are all about written and visual/audio content about your services, and a way through which a visitor can contact you or leave contact information (name, email and/or phone number, and so on). This is why it’s important that you develop a senior living marketing template for several platforms, including WordPress blogs, Facebook pages and YouTube channels, all of which can gather a loyal following and serve as middlemen for prospects to contact you.

However, even if you amass thousands of followers, only a handle of them will contact you to get more information, so offer something for free in exchange for their contact information, such as an e-book, a case study, an infographic, the chance to watch a video – something which your visitor feels is valuable enough to exchange for their contact information.

Your landing page is the spot where the visitor knows more about your senior community, but also where you offer something enticing and related to your field (how about an ebook about taking care of your elderly parents, for example?) and unavailable elsewhere – even in your original website – in exchange of their contact information.

Blogging: Your Key for a Successful Marketing

A blog post becomes a standalone web page with unique and valuable info that can stay at the top of Google for some while. Bystanders will notice you and check your posts. The more often they check, the higher your site will rank in search results.

Write about how it is to live in your senior community, the benefits, what makes your community unique, gather some testimonials, speak about their daily life… Make a whole narrative out of your center and make it wholesome and genuine so your readers can relate to it. Also, be careful on your keywords. You’re could be found by prospects through different, yet related, keywords as you blog. Blog at least once a week and you’re keeping fresh and relevant in browser engines.

Email: Marketing Through Strong Relationships

Email marketing is one of the best ways to engage people with your senior community as it focuses on building and developing ongoing relationships with your prospects.

As stated above, some people might send you their contact info after you convince them to do so, so message those people who have given you their permission (this is very important!). Once communication begins, stay consistent (if you say you’re going to send an email every two weeks, do it so), reply immediately to every email you receive, or send your “thank you” message right after someone signs up to, let’s say, your newsletter (it can include the download item you offered).

By the way, if you plan to send newsletters, make sure they provide a good mix of information, news and special offers.

Social Media: Meet and Build Relationships with Your Prospects

Now that you’ve written appealing content, it’s time to share it through your social media.

Social media is where people spend most of their time, so build a strong presence and forge solid bonds with your followers through informative and problem-solving content for them. For example, if you share any senior living grand opening ideas, lease up deals or even a special event in your center, your followers not only are likely to share this information, but to participate on it as well.

In addition to this, you can find like-minded individuals through social media, such as other senior communities or people devoted to taking care of the elderly, create bonds with them and make cross-promotions with them: you promote them, they promote you. Remember: social sharing can lead to inbound links to your site from other websites, which will increase domain authority in Google, a higher search visibility and tons of feedback and traffic to your site.

Advertising: Time to Put Yourself in the Spotlight

Now that your website is populated by appealing visuals and quality content, is time to spread it to the internet.

Although the cheapest way to drive traffic is through “organic search results” (that is, hoping to be found), it will obviously take time to bear its fruits. Advertising on search engines and social media sites, on the other hand, can bring tons of visitors to your site immediately, so long as you come up with appealing marketing ideas for luxury senior living and marketing for senior living lease-ups that will catch your prospects’ eyes as they browse the web.

Mind you: advertising should be used as a tool to accelerate your marketing process, not just as a standalone solution for your marketing strategy (advertising sometimes fail and make you lose money if not done well). That’s why we recommend you the following marketing tools to make it a successful advertising campaign:

• PPC Advertising: Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is all about an advertiser creating a small text ad, selecting keywords he believes his prospects will use on the search engines, and then making the ad appear when someone uses those keywords. The advertiser pays for the ad only if someone clicks on it.
• Social Media Advertising: You can pay a bit to some social media platforms, such as Facebook, to spread some of your ads.
• Laser-Focused Targeting: You can actually target your prospects by checking your site’s analytics, determining their demography (gender, age, and so on), and take this information to create ads that target, for example, married middle-aged women who own homes valued at more than $300,000, who live in Colorado, and who are online between 6-8:30 a.m. on Fridays. Placing ads wherever this demography floods is a good idea.

Summary

How do you market a senior living?

Summarizing our six inbound marketing steps, it’s all about optimizing your website, creating landing pages, blogging constantly, using email advertising strategies, engaging through social media and through well-thought advertising.

How do I market my retirement home?

Follow our six tips above, and place special attention in highlighting what makes your retirement home unique through interesting content, appealing lease up deals and, of course, stunning visuals.

How do you get referrals for assisted living?

You can get them from physician networks, hospitals, respite/rehab centers, in-home care providers and other referring organizations. However, surveys and hiring placement agencies Spotify Promotion provide excellent referrals to assist in locating licensed residential care facilities for the elderly.

If you follow our steps thorough, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the positive results you reap. We assure you, this kind of inbound marketing brings prospects to you because you provide them the information they seek, you forge strong relationships with them and become an ally to them. Give them quality content and top-notch customer attention and we assure you: everything will run smoothly!