In our fast-paced, hyperconnected world, senior living communities are confronted with an intimidating challenge: How do you cut through the overload and noise of competing marketing content to truly engage with seniors and their families to ensure your message not only captures but also retains their interest?
The answer lies in understanding your audience’s needs and tailoring content that speaks directly to their desires, concerns and aspirations. Picture this future: Every piece of content your retirement community creates isn’t merely glanced at but instead commands attention, ignites action and fosters genuine connections.
That’s your goal, but amidst today’s seniors and their families are inundated with information from all sides. To truly stand out with content marketing for senior living, you need more than just sheer volume—substance is essential.
The Purpose of Content Marketing
Content marketing for senior living is crucial in today’s digital landscape, and failing to leverage it means missing out on a significant opportunity. Think of it like this: If you don’t hop on the content marketing train now, you risk being left behind while your competitors zoom ahead.
Additionally, content marketing serves as a pivotal component in guiding prospects throughout their customer journey. By delivering valuable and pertinent content, you’re not only promoting your senior living community, but also you’re extending a supportive hand along their path.
You’re offering solutions, addressing concerns and building trust—integral factors in the decision-making process. Content marketing works in tandem with paid advertising to:
Humanize Your Brand: Content delivers your brand message in a more profound, educational and informative manner.
Drive Engagement: Advertising attracts new audiences, and content marketing sustains their engagement, fostering trust in you over time.
Generate Leads and Sales: While advertising focuses on immediate leads, content marketing nurtures those leads by providing valuable information. The combination can lead to higher sales conversion rates.
Establish Authority: Content marketing showcases expertise and thought leadership, enhancing your brand’s authority. Advertising can amplify this authority by reaching a broader audience.
The synergy between branding, advertising and content marketing creates a powerful strategy that builds brand recognition, trust and engagement, all leading to more move ins.
Striking the Balance between Quality and Quantity
In the ever-expanding digital realm, the sheer volume of content can indeed amplify your reach and visibility. However, the age-old adage rings true: More isn’t always better if the content lacks substance. As AI technology ushers in a torrent of more senior-focused content by marketers in and outside the senior housing field, one undeniable reality persists—quality and value are paramount in standing out. To captivate audiences today, it’s imperative to elevate our content creation efforts to meet the following standards.
Deliver Value for Value
To create valuable content, you must have a deep understanding of your target prospects—what questions they have, what they want for their future, what worries them. By addressing their concerns, offering solutions and providing guidance, your content transforms into a valuable resource creating a strong connection and instilling trust. Demonstrating genuine interest in helping rather than just selling lays the foundation for reciprocal value exchange, compelling prospects to share their valuable resources, including time, name, email, preferences, etc.
Create the Right Message, in the Right Context, at the Right Time
The senior living customer journey is intricate and spans over months, even years. Content marketing serves a crucial role in connecting with seniors at various stages of their journey, nurturing relationships and guiding them toward ultimately choosing your community. It’s vital to tailor content to be relevant at each stage:
Awareness stage—informative, educational and captivating videos, engaging social media posts and insightful blog articles introduce and connect new seniors to your community and start to establish trust.
Evaluation stage—highlight unique features and benefits and showcase the living experience through comprehensive white papers, staff interviews and immersive virtual tours.
Conversion stage—offering transition tips for moving into the community, interactive calculators to estimate costs and relatable resident stories sharing positive experiences will help solidify the decision to choose your community.
Authentic and credible
Your content serves as a place to delineate your community’s identity—what sets your community apart in the market? How does your brand and your senior living experience allow you to answer prospects’ questions in a distinct, compelling way? Is your content honest, reliable and believable?
You can see an example of this authenticity in this story of How One Life Plan Community Is Boosting Occupancy by Telling Its True Story.
Achieving maximum impact
Implementing key SEO strategies and continually optimizing your content are pivotal to improve your search engine rankings, increase organic traffic and enhance the overall effectiveness of your content marketing endeavors. Thoroughly research and integrate keywords recognized by algorithms. Google continually changes its search methods—your most valuable content must be genuinely authoritative to remain highly valued by each new search algorithm.
Improve Efficiency, Enhance Productivity
Navigating content marketing for senior living may initially seem daunting, but with a strategic approach, it can help save time, improve efficiency and significantly enhance your success.
Do your due diligence. Research your audience and develop accurate customer profiles to ensure you understand demographics, preferences, pain points and behaviors. What is your typical resident interested in? What questions do prospects have? What are the common challenges or concerns? Knowing who you’re talking to should guide your content creation process.
Create the plan. Utilize a content calendar to outline topics, formats and platforms to ensure consistent and relevant content.
Expand reach and credibility. Collaborate with field experts or complementary brands to guest post on each other’s platforms. Repurpose blogs and other long form content into other formats, like a video or an infographic. Create bite-sized snippets for ads, social media post or specific landing pages. Take quotes from your white paper and use them as headlines or on-site testimonials. Collaborating and recycling content enable you to maximize the amount you can post, in turn expanding reach, engagement and impact across various platforms.
Choose platforms that make the most sense. Having a presence on all channels is difficult to maintain. Begin by prioritizing the ones that make the most sense and align with your audience’s preference and behavior. Use a balanced mix of owned (your website, blog), earned (PR, media coverage) and paid (social ads, sponsored content) channels. Leverage social media platforms by using a mix of curated, user-generated and your original content. Deploy targeted and personalized email campaigns to nurture leads, share updates and promote your content directly to your subscribers.
Commit to being consistent and persistent. Building a strong content presence demands dedication and time. Being consistent and persistent will establish enduring connections and drive sustained impact.
Create, Measure, Adjust, Repeat
Measuring performance is critical to determine what content marketing is and isn’t working. Regularly assess performance and adjust your strategy based on data-driven insights. Keeping an eye on the numbers helps you hone and optimize your content.
Make sure you know what you’re going to measure when creating your content, and always include a call to action (CTA). Here are a few key metrics to track.
- Website:
- Traffic
- Keyword Rankings
- Average Page views per Session
- Lead Generation
- Social Media:
- Engagement Rate
- Reach
- Following
- Blogs:
- Time Spent on Page
- Traffic Breakdown
- Blog Views
- Emails:
- A/B Testing
- Open Rate
- Click-through Rate
Stand Out and Connect in a Sustainable Way
Content marketing can seem like an unwieldy beast, but it is manageable! Here are the ways you can manage it.
Involve your staff.
Engage your staff in crafting content that resonates with your target audience. As the frontline, your team holds invaluable insights into the interests, concerns and curiosities of your residents, and thus your ideal prospects. They have firsthand access to the residents’ personal narratives, experiences and compelling human-interest stories that forge emotional bonds. By engaging your staff in content creation, you can harness their distinctive viewpoints to produce engaging and relatable material that authentically connects with prospects that will feel at home in your community.
Lean on the experts.
Utilizing an external senior living marketing agency can help you develop strategies that work, monitor and measure efforts and streamline workload with marketing automation. But to be truly effective, content marketing needs to be a team approach, where you find a partner—not a vendor—so that responsibilities are shared and everyone works together.
Maximize your time with AI.
Whether through your partnership with an external partner or your own research, lean into AI tools to complement your content generation efforts. AI tools and features can balance speed, efficiency and creativity. AI will be integrated into nearly every aspect of business in the future, and content marketing is a natural place to begin letting AI enhance your marketing program. Begin by using it as a brainstorming tool to help spark ideas.
To sum up and simplify, content marketing boils down to three key performance indicators (KPIs): Keep people interested. Keep people involved. Keep people inspired.
[Call-out quote/graphic]
“The world doesn’t need more content; it needs better content.”
— Ann Handley , Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs and author of Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content
New Trends That Will Shape Your Success
Senior living content marketing relies on developing a relationship with your prospect. Forward-thinking sales teams are leveraging these emerging trends.
Hyper-Personalization and Customization: Going beyond generic communications sent to everyone in your lead base to provide tailored messaging based on specific information prospects have shared about themselves or demonstrated through online behavior.
Experience-based: Whether real-world or digital, creating activities, events and moments that spark joy.
Voice Search Optimization: Making information about your community more accessible and searchable for Alexa and Siri.
Get Help with Content Marketing for Senior Living
If you are an organization that values relationship building with your future residents, but you have done very little in terms of content marketing, one place to start is bringing in an experienced set of fresh eyes to look at your situation.
Nonprofit-focused firms like Love & Company have an in-depth understanding of how to maximize the benefits of senior living content marketing within the context of a broader Life Plan Community marketing program. Want to explore this topic more? Call Tim Bracken at 301-663-1239 or email at Tbracken@lovenandcompany.com.
