After taking a tremendous hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, senior living occupancy rates are finally back on the rise. As the youngest Baby Boomers approach their 65th birthdays in 2025, demand on the market will only continue to grow. However, with more than 30,000 assisted living communities across the country, competition is fierce. How can you set your senior living residence apart from the rest?
The answer is content marketing.
Content marketing is a highly effective method for finding, attracting, and retaining members of an audience you would like to turn into customers. There are different types of content marketing formats, which can include:
- Blogs
- Videos
- Infographics
- Social media posts
- White papers and ebooks
- Case studies
- Webinars
- Podcasts
… and much more. Here, we’ll take a look at how content marketing can be a powerful tool to attract and engage with your audience, increase your occupancy rates, and retain satisfied residents.
The First Step: Understanding the Target Audience
Before you start marketing, you have to know who you’re marketing to. Senior living is a bit different than some other markets because the audience is often twofold: older adults and their loved ones. It’s likely you’ll have to navigate the generational divide between these two demographics. You may think that focusing on the adult children of older adults is the easier way to go, and in many ways, you’d be right. But don’t undervalue the power of marketing to your potential residents as aggressively as their caregivers.
To understand the target audience of older adults, let’s first take a look at some intriguing and enlightening statistics:
- 60% of adults 55+ do not believe they get adequate representation in advertising.
- Baby Boomers dramatically outspend Gen-Z, in spite of being significantly underestimated in industry forecasts.
- 70% of older adults research senior living communities online.
- A study found that close to 80% of senior living marketing teams are too broad in choosing a target audience.
So how do you accurately and effectively define your target audience? By creating a buyer persona.
A buyer persona is a detailed profile that sets parameters for each segment of your target audience and includes demographic, psychographic, and behavioral attributes. You’ll want to create at least two buyer personas — one for prospective residents and one for loved ones/caregivers. By creating strong buyer personas, you can map out the buyer’s journey and build content that addresses their needs at every stage.
Once you know who you want to hear your message, it’s time to figure out exactly what that message should be. That’s where content marketing really takes off.
Key Content Marketing Tactics
Producing volumes of marketing content can be a big ask for any organization, especially when budgets and resources are stretched thin. However, there are many ways to create and leverage content over time that will deliver invaluable ROI. Here are some content types that work well in the senior living setting:
Educational Content
Educational content is most often leveraged in the early stages of the buyer’s journey when your audience is seeking broad information rather than specifics. At this stage, they have a problem to solve, but they may not even realize that yet. This might include adult children who know they’ll need to start considering where their parents will live post-retirement, or it may be an older adult wondering how to stay active and healthy as they age. They may have some brand awareness of your community, but they aren’t anywhere near the decision-making stage at this point. For now, you want your content to be informative, helpful, and low-pressure. Infographics can be a great visual way to convey quick statistics and data. A senior living podcast that focuses on common challenges of aging is another example of early-stage content marketing.
Virtual Tours and Video Content
Once your audience is aware of your brand, they may want to get to know you a little better. Video content is one of the most effective and engaging forms of content marketing, and it’s also preferred by seniors. Videos that showcase the types of senior housing you offer, your amenities, and your staff can be very appealing for reaching your audience. Virtual tours also give potential residents and loved ones a chance to experience your community without navigating transportation. Just remember to make video content as accessible as possible for your audience — don’t make 3D tours too complicated, and always include captions on videos.
Testimonials and Success Stories
As your ideal buyer approaches the decision-making stage, they’ll want to understand what their experience will actually be like if they choose your community. Word-of-mouth is still one of the most effective forms of marketing. By showcasing testimonials from actual residents and their loved ones, your audience will get an authentic glimpse into your community. This type of content marketing builds your brand’s reputation and helps your audience see that your community is trustworthy.
Blogs and Articles
Blogs and other long-form content are great at any stage of the buyer’s journey and can be customized for any buyer persona. Whenever possible, you should create blogs that answer your personas’ most pressing questions and guide them toward taking a specific action (e.g., signing up for your newsletter, following you on social media, or downloading an in-depth piece of content in exchange for their contact information). The ideal blog length is now longer than ever, ranging from 1,500 to 2,500 words. Meeting this target significantly increases the likelihood of your blogs being discovered and attracting more visitors to your website. The real benefit of this type of content is that once it’s created, it will continue to work for your marketing team. You can repurpose a blog into other content types (e.g., an infographic or social post) or update old blogs with new information to improve their visibility.
SEO Best Practices
Part of updating old content, as mentioned above, is to increase your ranking in search engine results. SEO (search engine optimization) is the practice dedicated to getting brands ranked higher in results on search engines like Google. There are SEO best practices that can help you move up the ranks and get more traffic, including:
- Conducting keyword research and ensuring your target keywords feature prominently in your content
- Adding metadata (title tags, alt text, meta description) to all content pieces and images
- Linking to relevant pages on your own website (interlinking) to help search engines crawl and organize your site
- Understanding search intent and creating content that your target audience will want to see
- Improving user experience by auditing your site for errors, clunky navigation, broken links, and sluggish load times
Best Practices for Implementing Content Marketing at Your Senior Living Community
Now that you understand your audience and the different types of content that might appeal to them, it’s time to get started. But where do you begin when implementing content marketing in your senior living community?
Create a Robust Content Marketing Strategy
By “robust,” we don’t mean “overwhelming.” Your content marketing strategy has to be manageable if you want it to succeed. Consistency is key. It isn’t always about how frequently you’re distributing content — just that you’re doing it on a regular basis. If you can’t swing a blog post every week, maybe twice a month is doable. Or, if you won’t be able to post on your social platforms every day, you can aim for posting a couple of times a week. Create a schedule and editorial calendar that you can stick to. Consider which content types will effectively reach each of your buyer personas, and build your strategy from there.
Leverage Social Media in Your Marketing Efforts
Older adults are very active on social media platforms, and so are their grown children and caregivers, so make sure you aren’t missing a chance to reach them. Facebook is typically the most popular platform for older users, but consider exploring other platforms like Instagram or TikTok to reach a younger audience. You can certainly reuse the same posts across platforms, but it can be even more effective to tweak them to fit each audience.
Boost Both Offline and Digital Marketing Strategies
Seniors are online these days more than ever before, and that isn’t likely to change. You’ll find that senior living digital marketing is your primary focus, but it can be worthwhile to create some offline content as well. Any marketing materials you create — including brochures, guides, handbooks, etc. — are part of your content marketing strategy, so be sure every piece gets the same level of attention and planning.
Consider a Marketing Agency
You may already have an internal marketing team, or you may feel you’re stretched too thin to ask anyone to take on content creation. Whatever your circumstances, you might find valuable help and support from external partners. The right agency can act as an extension of your internal team, or they can be a partner who handles your content marketing strategy for you. When vetting agencies, look for those that are transparent and communicative about their processes, their cost, and their expected results.
Choose the Right Senior Living Software
Finding affordable solutions can be challenging for senior living communities, but help is readily available. The key is to select the best senior living software to meet your needs. Look for software that offers a comprehensive suite of marketing features, empowering you to streamline your efforts and launch an effective content marketing strategy right away.
Leveraging Eldermark CRM and Marketing Automation
Our proprietary CRM and marketing solution is designed exclusively for senior living communities. This powerful CRM is for much more than collecting leads or contacting prospects — you’ll also gain access to our robust analytics and metrics tracking capabilities so you can manage campaigns and monitor how every piece of content is performing in one place. Centralizing your marketing strategy in this way allows you to leverage predictive analytics to know what’s coming and make informed decisions about your content. You’ll also get round-the-clock support and access to 800+ training modules and online lessons.
How to Get Started With Eldermark NEXT
Getting started with Eldermark NEXT is easier than you think, and you can start seeing the benefits right away. It goes far beyond marketing — Eldermark NEXT users have been shown to increase revenue, streamline operations, and improve outcomes for their residents. We’d like to show you how. Get in touch and schedule an introductory meeting today!
