Senior living facilities face a unique challenge in marketing – lives depend on them. Facilities need to gain the trust of prospective residents and their families before earning business. Showcasing trustworthy care, engaging activities, secure living situations, and a meaningful lifestyle is a tall task. It’s more than just a facility, it’s home.
Although the stakes are higher than other industries, senior living marketing and branding strategies aren’t far off from what you’d see in traditional marketing. To stand out as the senior living facility – above all competitors – you need a modern, calculated strategy.
In this post, I’ll provide a comprehensive overview of senior living branding and marketing. Continue reading to learn about:
- Traditional senior living marketing and its flaws
- Strategies for marketing a senior living facility
- Our approach to senior living branding
Traditional Senior Living Marketing
When you picture a typical senior living ad, it probably includes glossy stock photos of folks laughing heartily as they walk on a path with some fall foliage in the background. These aren’t bad, but chances are, those happy folks don’t live there. Use of stock photography in senior living marketing is yet another example of the “stock photo monster” turning away sophisticated consumers that can sniff out inauthenticity faster than you can say “where did grandma go?”
Demeand for authentic marketing photography for senior living communities has grown dramatically over the past several years. The rise in the need for marketing photography for senior communities correlates with the fading stigma of living in a senior community.
Senior Living Marketing Strategy
The senior living world has exploded with more and more people being open to an independent living community that has the option of escalating levels of senior care. Senior living facilities need to develop a modern marketing strategy to capitalize on increased interest.
A full spectrum of marketing tactics for senior living facilities warrants a separate post. I’m going to focus more on digital marketing and branding strategies.
To set a strong foundation for marketing a senior living facility in the modern landscape, you should:
- Know your target audience
- Craft a relatable brand
- Build a visually appealing professional website
- Create relevant marketing content for your audiences
- Be active and engaged on social media
- Gain social proof through testimonials and reviews
- Immerse your brand in the community
Know Your Target Audience
The first step in marketing a senior living facility is knowing your audience. When it comes to any form of senior living – independent living, assisted living, or nursing home/hospice care – there are two primary audiences.
- Prospective residents in charge of decision-making who want to move out of their current residence into some sort of facility. They’re more focused on the living experience, maintaining some degree of independence, and finding the right level of care.
- Adult children and legal guardians who are leading the decision-making process to move a prospective resident out of their current living situation. They’re more focused on identifying a facility they can trust for care and security, feeling that their parent or dependent is in good hands.
Those are the two general target audiences, though you’ll have various subsegments within each general audience. Understanding the painpoints, needs, and perspectives of your target audiences will help you market to them.
Craft A Relatable Brand
In this day and age senior living facilities need to think of themselves as brands. The foundation of all marketing is branding – your mission, values, purpose, brand identity, brand personality, and more.
With an understanding of your target market and target audiences, you can build a brand that they can emotionally connect with. A strong senior living brand centers around the mission to provide high-quality care while giving residents an engaging, fulfilling, and comforting living experience.
Hire A Professional Photographer To Capture Imagery
One picture is worth a thousand words. The saying holds true when it comes to marketing a senior living facility. Visual branding tells the story of your facility through branded imagery. Your senior living facility needs high-quality, professional images of actual residents and amentities to use across various mediums.
From your website to social media and marketing content, pictures are an essential component to promoting your facilities and finding prospective residents. Professional is key. You don’t want to just snap a few pictures on your iPhone camera. Even with a few tips and tricks, you won’t get the same results as hiring a professional.
You don’t want just any photographer. Make sure to take the time to find the right photographer for your facility. An experienced senior living photographer knows how to capture emotion in an image and incorporate your brand.
Build A Visually Appealing Professional Website
To get the most out of your marketing and advertising efforts, you need a user-friendly, informative, and engaging professional website. Your website is often the first touchpoint for prospective residents and guardians.
For a senior living facility, your website should:
- Be easy to navigate
- Inform prospective residents about the living experience, levels of care, application process, and more
- Highlight what separates you from competitors
- Incorporate high-quality visuals and images
- Be opmtimized for search engines using SEO marketing tactics
- Adhere to your brand style guidelines
- Answer most common questions and ease typical concerns
- Provide all methods of contact to communicate with your facility
In general, your website should make it easy for prospective residents to learn about your facility in its entirety and learn more about scheduling a visit. Along with building the site, it’s equally important to regularly update the site’s content so nothing is ever outdated.
Create Relevant Marketing Content For Your Audiences
Every marketing touchpoint should be tailored to a specific audience. Whether it’s general marketing materials about the facility or a specific campaign targeting a specific message, it needs to be modern and relevant.
As I mentioned before, authenticity is essential. Those stock photos and cookie cutter brochures don’t depict an accurate representation of life at your facility. Through your website, online marketing, physical ads, email marketing, and other efforts, highlight messaging and content that resonates with prospective residents and their families.
Be Active And Engaged On Social Media
Older individuals are sometimes stigmatized as technologically deficient, but you can’t ignore the power of social media. Social media enables your brand to directly communicate, interact, and engage with relevant users.
Posting images and interactive content with CTAs on social media opens the opportunity for likes, comments, and sharing. On top of sharing news and taking users into life at your facility, social media offers a direct line of communication to users with needs and pain points that your facility solves.
Gain Social Proof Through Testimonials And Reviews
Consumers are most likely to rely on and trust fellow consumers when searching for a senior living facility. Gaining positive reviews and testimonials builds social proof that you’re a trustful brand that provides compassionate care and secure living arrangements.
There are numerous ways to incorporate testimonials and reviews, including:
- Embedding testimonials on the homepage or creating a separate page dedicated to testimonials and reviews
- Use testimonials for social media and marketing content through posts, blogs, and other materials
- Leverage built-in review or ranking tools on social media platforms
- Encourage existing customers to leave reviews and feedback on Google, Yelp, and other online review platforms
Immerse Your Brand In The Community
While the majority of these tactics apply to digital or print marketing, face-to-face time with members of your community is always a smart approach. Creating events, workshops, seminars, and other activities to engage with seniors in your community expands your brand experience and creates connections that can turn into leads.
More importantly, you interact with your community to showcase your brand as one they can trust and rely on to provide quality care.
Our Approach to Senior Living Branding
While all of these tactics help build a successful senior living marketing strategy, I’m biased to the importance of visuals in marketing. Without high-quality, professionally shot, modern imagery:
- Your website is less appealing
- You have less content for social media
- Users don’t gain a clear view of what it’s like to live at your facility
- You can’t build a strong brand
The best images for branding a senior living facility are modern, natural, and authentic.
My main goal when conducting a photo shootat a senior living community is to make sure my subjects are actually comfortable. Whether in their own home or outside interacting with the people around them, it’s when they’re truly comfortable that I can catch them in real moments of happiness to capture authentic senior citizen portraits.
If I can capture the joy that comes with embracing their senior independence, viewers of the images will feel that emotion too.
Collaborate With Casey Templeton For Senior Living Visual Marketing Success
It can be an emotional decision to transition yourself or a family member into senior living; capturing authentic photography of actual residents at their senior living communities can really serve to tear down those barriers.
If you are in search of genuine senior citizen photography, let’s work together. Contact us at Casey Templeton Photography to start working together to capture authentic images of the senior citizens at your senior living community location.