Senior living communities in the United States represent a rapidly growing industry. Despite decreased occupancy rates and increased costs because of the pandemic, the senior care industry is projected to grow from $91.8 billion per year at an annual rate of 5%.¹ As baby boomers age and the share of the population over 65 swells to an estimated 90 million by 2050, the need for senior housing will be greater than ever.² Partnering with a senior living marketing agency ensures your community grows to meet those needs. 

Making the most of this growth opportunity means you have to adapt to the many factors affecting change in the senior living industry. The internet’s ever-increasing ubiquity and ever-deeper penetration into the lives of seniors play a major role. Twenty years ago, only a fifth of seniors reported using the internet.³ Today, that figure has more than tripled while the share of seniors on social media has seen a fourfold increase over the last decade.

The internet is where you can find seniors, and, increasingly, seniors and their families are using this tool to find senior living communities. What families and potential residents see online plays a huge role in their decision to move in. So is your senior living digital marketing up to the task?

How Can Digital Marketing Help Senior Living Communities?

The first job of digital marketing is to increase your senior living community’s visibility. Specifically, you want to boost visibility with your target audience—the seniors in your area who would be interested in moving into your community. 

With more than 28,000 senior living communities in the U.S. vying for attention, standing out from the competition doesn’t happen by accident. 

And once prospective residents have found your website, do they like what they see? Your digital footprint should make gaining a sense of your community’s identity easy.

Prospective residents shouldn’t have to work hard to find reasons to choose your community over your competitors. But with a coordinated effort, you can make a stellar first impression. A senior living marketing agency can help you develop your strategy and reach the most seniors. 

A great senior living digital marketing strategy plays out across several mediums, including:

• Your website
• Landing pages
• Social media feeds
• Email campaigns
• Search engine results pages

Clearly, digital marketing is multi-faceted and complex. This can feel overwhelming, but the rest of this article focuses on the five key strategies you need to gain visibility, generate leads, and grow with new residents. 

Digital Marketing Strategies for Senior Living Communities

What are the strategies a senior living marketing agency uses to help your community? They are:

• Website design
• Branding
• Content marketing
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns

Each of these strategies makes a difference in driving traffic to your senior living community’s website, generating leads, improving conversions, and ultimately raising move-in rates and growing census. The strategies work synergistically, overlapping to complement and reinforce each other. Together, they form a cohesive digital marketing campaign.

1. Website Design for Senior Living Communities

Your website is likely where prospective residents first learn about your senior living community and encounter your brand. Making a good first impression is crucial and a well-designed website can make all the difference in generating and nurturing leads.

Successful senior living community websites should be:

• Visually appealing, with an aesthetic complementing the message
• Easy to navigate, allowing visitors to get the most important information right away and intuitively browse to find out more
• Full of interesting, compelling content discussing your company’s values and what prospective residents need to know about your community
• Equally well-built and responsive for desktops, tablets, and smartphones

Certainly, website design encompasses so many factors. From graphic design to cybersecurity, building a website from scratch is daunting for non-professionals. So too is knowing how to improve the website you already have. A senior living marketing agency supports every aspect of web design and creation, including making sure your website is functional across different types of devices.

This last point is especially important since more than 60% of web traffic comes from mobile devices.⁴ Remember, just because your website works great on a laptop doesn’t mean smartphone users will also have a positive experience. 

2. Branding for Senior Living Communities

Branding is about making a great first impression and connecting with prospective residents. Their initial perception of your community makes all the difference as they proceed through the lengthy customer journey typically associated with choosing a senior living community.

Digital brand management may begin with developing a good-looking logo and website. But branding is all-encompassing and, at its heart, is a strategic effort to communicate your unique identity, values, and services to connect with your target audience. 

A senior living marketing agency fosters your community’s brand identity by focusing on:

• Logo design
• Taglines
• Service naming
• Messaging
• Reputation management

Much like other digital marketing strategies, these areas of branding work together and reinforce each other to distinguish your senior living community from competitors. A great branding strategy creates a positive perception of your community and drives conversions.

One important branding goal is consistency. Standardizing design and messaging across your website, ads, and social media presence builds a sense of confidence for seniors viewing your content. When prospective residents see the professionalism of your branding, they take note. More importantly, they associate your senior living community’s services with positive values.

The Branding Process

When you work with a senior living marketing agency to help your community with branding, the process usually starts with an audit. The agency will use questionnaires and interviews to gain a sense of the:

• Current brand and its reputation
• Branding goals
• Necessary changes to move you from where you are to where you want to be

Digital brand management also ensures your senior living community evokes a sense of trust in your target audience. Trust is a key ingredient in both lead generation and nurturing. Although making sure your audience trusts your brand is important for any business, it’s especially important for a senior living community. Your residents are looking for a place to open the next chapter of their lives and receive care, if and when there’s a need.

With the proliferation of reviews across the internet, and particularly on social media, there’s a lot of content out there that can affect your online reputation. Negative reviews or bad press can alienate prospective residents and damage your brand’s reputation.

On the other hand, good reviews convert leads and create a positive buzz around your community. Digital reputation management experts from a senior living marketing agency ensure your target audience only sees what you want them to see.

3. Content Marketing for Senior Living Communities

So you have a great website to showcase your stellar brand. Now what? Well, your website needs content describing your senior living community, your values, and the services you provide. Your content needs to be clear, compelling, suited to your audience, and SEO-optimized all while being engaging enough to encourage users to click through. 

At the core of content marketing is the ability to produce relatable and professional content that appeals to prospective residents in your area. Content marketing is essential for SEO because Google is more likely to display a website when its content aligns with a user’s query and browsing history. Google evaluates and sorts websites by crawling your content. So, that means producing quality and locally-targeted content can make or break your ranking on the search engine results page (SERP). 

Using Content Effectively

Effective content marketing involves the use of locally-targeted keywords artfully woven into a poignant, digestible, and culturally-relevant narrative. A senior living marketing agency develops strategic content that aligns with your brand and compellingly promotes your senior living community’s marketing message.

The content you use to market your senior living community may appear directly on your website as articles, explanatory pages, or FAQs. Or you could use: 

• Landing pages
• Articles
• Infographics
• Whitepapers
• Press releases

Landing pages support many different marketing goals. They can highlight the specific services your senior living community provides while educating readers about your brand as a whole. Articles provide additional education and topical, longer-form content informing readers while creating valuable SEO opportunities to improve search engine ranking and visibility.

Infographics are a dynamic way to communicate facts, numbers, or statistics your audience might otherwise not read. And whitepapers both demonstrate a high level of expertise in your field and improve SEO value.

A well-developed content marketing strategy makes seniors and adult-child decision makers notice and trust your brand. Over time, this has a snowball effect. When your organic traffic increases, Google knows you have the content searchers are looking for. Establishing credibility with Google increases the likelihood your website will appear in the search results of seniors you’re ready to help.

4. Search Engine Optimization Campaigns for Senior Living Communities

SEO focuses on improving your website’s visibility and ranking on the SERP. As a result, more seniors will find your content. Good SEO is crucial for driving organic traffic to your website, which ultimately increases lead generation and conversions for your senior living community and drives new resident move-ins.

Ranking near the top of the SERP for searches relevant to your senior living community is a crucial asset. Nearly 75% of web users don’t scroll past the first page of search results.⁵ So if your website isn’t ranking well, you’re missing out on a huge audience.

Understanding SEO

To understand SEO, you need to first understand how search engines work, what prospective residents are searching for, and what they connect with. By optimizing your website’s content, structure, metadata, and technical elements, you’ll improve your website’s visibility and effectiveness. 

Good SEO can help your senior living community:

• Reach a wider audience
• Improve your website ranking
• Increase traffic to your website
• Stand out from the competition
• Generate more leads
• Create more conversions

One of the key benefits of senior living SEO is reaching those who are already actively searching for communities. A senior living marketing agency will design the ideal campaign for your community based on your target audience.

Effective SEO Campaigns

Effective SEO campaigns focus on search terms proven to drive traffic and conversions. Use keyword research tools and analyze your competitors’ strategies to identify the most relevant terms and phrases for your business. Then, optimize your website’s content and metadata to target those keywords. This will improve your chances of ranking higher in the search results!

But SEO isn’t just about keywords. You also need high-quality content that provides value to prospective residents of your senior living community. Google and other search engines prioritize websites with fresh, unique, and relevant content. So content marketing is your best friend when your goal is to improve your rank on the SERP.

A senior living marketing agency works with you to identify the most relevant keywords and keyword synonyms for your senior living community. They create high-quality content targeting those keywords and optimize your website’s technical elements. This means evaluating page speed, internal linking, site architecture, and mobile responsiveness so search engines can crawl and index your site effectively.

5. Pay-Per-Click Campaigns for Senior Living Communities

When you Google a phrase or question, have you seen sponsored results at the top of the page? Those are pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Also known as paid search, PPC advertising campaigns are another tool to help your website gain visibility and increase lead generation. 

A well-executed PPC campaign can be truly effective. PPC campaigns can generate up to a 200% ROI while increasing brand awareness by up to 80%. They also yield 50% more conversions than other forms of advertising.⁶

When organic traffic alone isn’t enough, PPC campaigns are a way to cut to the chase and buy your way to the top of the SERP. Rising organically through search results pages using SEO takes dedication and time. PPC, or inorganic SEO, is a shortcut to the top of the SERP because you aren’t depending on the content of your website, search algorithms, or web traffic patterns to be listed first.

So, if PPC and SEO campaigns both move your website up the SERP, do you really need to use both strategies? You very well might!

The Benefits of PPC Campaigns

One special strength of PPC campaigns, unlike SEO, is they can start showing you results quickly. Keep in mind you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, not when they see it. That means you’re paying directly for leads to see your website or landing page. 

However, while PPC campaigns start off cost-effective, the expense grows over time. This is because PPC campaigns work through a bidding system. First, you’ll decide which keywords you want to target. You, or the senior living marketing agency you work with, will then bid on those keywords. When your PPC campaign is active and a user searches for that keyword, your ad will display. Because this is an auction system, the cost of each conversion rises over time. 

Time isn’t the only factor determining whether a PPC campaign is cost-effective. PPC campaigns can target niche markets. You can set your ads to appear only to the leads most likely to convert. You can also target by location (down to the ZIP Code^™), time of day, and device type. The expertise of a senior living marketing agency makes all the difference in ensuring your PPC ads are cost-effective.

SEO vs PPC

Over the course of three to six months, SEO campaigns start outperforming PPC campaigns. So PPC works best as a complementary, shorter-term strategy to drive traffic to your site while nurturing your SEO.  

Your senior living marketing agency will help you create a balanced mix of PPC, SEO, and other digital marketing initiatives. And, they’ll provide customized support for your community’s business goals while maximizing the ROI of your marketing budget.

How a Senior Living Marketing Agency Can Put a Comprehensive Digital Marketing Strategy to Work 

There’s much more to digital marketing than we can cover in one article. So how do all these parts come together into a whole? And how does a comprehensive digital marketing strategy lead to new residents moving into your community?

SEO and PPC campaigns complement each other and together draw potential leads to your website. Great website design and thoughtful branding impresses seniors and adult-child decision makers. And, bonus, makes getting a sense of your senior living community’s values easy. Your content marketing strategy ensures what potential residents find on your site is compelling, easy to read, and persuasive.

Now what? The decision to move into a senior living community, and which one to choose, is impactful. Seniors are looking for a new home, new neighbors, perhaps a new location, and a new way of life. No matter how appealing your branding or how interesting your content is, seniors visiting your website won’t convert with one touch!

Improving Your Conversion Rate

If your website prompts visitors to share their contact information, you can turn those visitors into bona fide leads. With their name, contact information, and perhaps answers to a short survey about what they’re looking for in a senior living community, you can stay in touch and offer potential residents content that matches their interests. Continue to grow your relationships with emails, links to your blog, and phone conversations. Consequently, this begins the process of lead nurturing, in which repeated positive touches with your brand can lead to conversion.

All things considered, digital marketing for senior living communities is a complex process. But “process” is the key word, because the strategies described here do overlap and reinforce each other. Of course, you don’t need to have all of them perfectly deployed to start working toward your digital marketing goals. Working with senior living marketing agency experts can speed up the process.

Dreamscape Marketing can help. Schedule a strategy session with us by calling 888.307.7304.

 

 

For a list of references, please contact us.