4 Assisted Living Marketing Ideas to Drive Sales Growth

Are you having trouble generating leads for your assisted care community? If you answered yes, you’re not alone. Many of the marketing and sales professionals we’ve met in the senior care  industry are finding it difficult to generate and close their leads. In fact, those issues are common across all the industries we’ve worked with. Thankfully our agency has experience in solving these problems, and we have compiled our best tips for our friends in senior care marketing.

Here are four simple and easy assisted living marketing ideas you can use to amp up your marketing strategy.

1. Consider SEO, and Ask for Help If You Need It

Using your website to generate awareness and demand is perhaps the most underutilized tactic for senior care communities. Are you using your own website to generate leads?

SEO is a must in your senior care marketing strategy in order to get more decision makers and influencers to your website. Making your website appear for relevant searches will get more people to your website, and a percentage of those will eventually decide to call or tour your community.

One of the first things you’ll want to do before developing your assisted living SEO strategy is to put yourself in the place of your potential resident and the people that will be helping make the decision. Start by brainstorming phrases or questions someone might search for when looking for information about assisted living communities. You’ll want to consider using city and state locations in some of the terms you’re targeting. Think along the lines of "senior living communities in Richmond VA" or “best assisted living in Richmond, VA.”

Create a list of these keywords and make a plan on where you’ll put them on the website. You’ll find that some terms make more sense in a blog post, while others might be great to target on pages that describe services or your community.

Get started by brushing up on on-page SEO best practices and learn simple changes you can make to get more easily discovered in search engine searches.

2. Update Your Assisted Living Blog Regularly

If you or I were tasked with finding a nursing home or assisted living community for one of our aging parents, make no mistake that there would be a lot of thought and care put into that decision. Senior care marketers understand this and know that their prospects are likely to turn to the internet for research.

Creating a blog rich in resources and information is a great way to help someone through this tough decision making process. You may want to consider creating articles answering common questions you hear from potential residents or the family members visiting your community. If you find that people are asking the same questions over and over again, it’s likely that there are many people researching those same questions online. Creating content that answers these questions before they’re asked will help people discover your facility more easily than non-blogging competing communities.

While being helpful to your prospective residents and their families should be of utmost importance in your marketing, we can’t deny how rich in SEO benefits a blog is. Eventually, once you’ve developed a considerable amount of assisted living content, you may find that your website and pages are ranking higher in search engines results pages. Over time, this translates to more sales activity.

3. Encourage Google and Facebook Reviews

People that are searching for a senior care community like having their decisions validated. What others think about your community matters. Choosing the right assisted living community for an aging parent is a serious decision, so Google and Facebook reviews should not be neglected.

Pro Tip: Looking to get more reviews of your assisted living community? Consider sending out an email survey to the families of your residents. After sending out your initial email survey, consider segmenting your email list by those who gave positive reviews and send them a follow-up email encouraging them to publicly post their thoughts online.

4. Follow Up on Your Assisted Living Marketing Leads

Like most of us following the inbound marketing methodology, you’ve probably focused on attracting more qualified visitors to your website. However, what many small businesses fail to do after they generate leads is to actually follow up on them. Don’t neglect your assisted living leads and lose them to a competitor.

Instead, consider launching an email lead nurturing campaign that keeps you top of mind during the decision process. If you’ve developed some great content (see tip number 2), you may want to consider sending more information about your assisted living community to your leads. Your potential customers are deliberating one of the most important decisions about their parents they may ever have to make and helpful communication can go a long way.  

Generate more conversations from your emails by gently encouraging your leads to reach out to you with questions. Doing so can help put any worries they have about your community to rest.

Need more assisted living marketing ideas? We’re happy to answer your questions and chat about how to bring more business to your community. Ask your question here.