5 Strategies for Marketing Your Retirement Community on Instagram

blur-display-electronics-174938Are you using Instagram to market your retirement/assisted living community to your potential residents and/or their adult children?

If you’re not, and the reason is that you believe your target market (people ages 45 and up) isn’t using Instagram, we urge you to take a closer look. Half a billion people (500 million) use Instagram every day around the world (with 77.6 million of them in the US),  and 26% of them are over the age of 50.

In short: your retirement community needs to engage in Instagram marketing!

Take a look below for five creative ways you can use to market your retirement community to an older demographic on Instagram.

1. Begin with an End in Mind

As with any marketing campaign, before starting with Instagram, decide what you want to accomplish with it. Increasing brand awareness often is a great goal, particularly if your community has expanded to a new town or region. People love to look at pictures, particularly pictures of people (keep that in mind as you market on the social channel), and Instagram is all about photos, so much so that posts with photos get 36% more engagement than even posts with video, and posts with faces get 38% more likes than posts without.

Because people like to look at people, it’s imperative that you define and use personas in order to create Instagram posts that will appear to your prospects. Personas, in fact, should direct your marketing strategy. Since they represent the different types of people you would like to target, you’ll know their individual challenges, goals, and needs and, therefore will be able to create posts and choose images that are more likely to attract their attention.

2. Create Your Instagram Business Profile (Not a Personal Profile)

Most Instagram users have personal accounts only, but just like Facebook (which owns Instagram), you can now create a business profile on the photo-sharing channel specifically for your business.

If you are already using a personal profile to market your retirement community on Instagram, it’s easy to convert it to a business profile.

You should make sure the look of your business profile has the same colors, fonts, and “feel” as the rest of your marketing components; you want to make sure that anyone who comes into contact with your community’s branding in any form has a similar impression.

Instagram doesn’t allow for live links in your individual posts, so your profile itself should contain a live link to your website (or, when you post a blog, a live link to the blog for a couple of days), as well as your phone number and email, website and physical addresses.

A really nifty benefit of Facebook’s purchase of Instagram: Publish a business profile on Instagram, and you can connect it directly with your Facebook business page, which means your posts, ads, insights, and analytics of both can be used together to maximize your social engagement and increase your ROI. Here’s how to link your Instagram business profile to your Facebook business page.

3. Determine Who Will Post and When

access-app-blur-238480Most Instagram users visit the site every day, so you’re going to need to decide when to post in order to grab their attention. Hootsuite, a social media management platform, reported in March that noon Monday-Friday is the time when a post will receive the most views.

Remember: while it may seem quick and easy to post on a social media channel – it only takes 2-5 minutes, usually – your marketing team isn’t just posting on social media: they have many other social tasks to perform each day.

So it’s a good idea to make a schedule and use a scheduling tool such as HubSpot or HootSuite to schedule posts in advance.

Many people think that posting to a social channel multiple times a day is best for engagement purposes, but the data shows that’s not necessarily the case for most channels (two or so times a day is sufficient for good-enough engagement)…except Instagram. Buffer reports there’s no engagement drop-off if you post more than once a day on Instagram (although Buffer recommends posting there 1.5 times per day). But if you can't manage to post that much, there is no need to panic about getting buried in the feed beneath newer posts - Instagram uses an algorithmically curated feed, so your post might still show up to your followers even several days after you initially post it.

4. Create Engaging Content that Delivers Your Brand Message to Your Ideal Prospects in a Visual and Engaging Way

Photos themselves and by themselves make for terrific Instagram posts (with captions). Take a look at your prospect personas to develop content that will appeal to them. And don’t forget: Facebook owns Instagram, so you can publish and advertise on both at the same time.

Take a look below for the different ways you can create content for Instagram.

  • Promoted posts (ads). Promoted posts are great for CTAs: “Call now to register for our free lunch and tour.” “Call now and receive $500 off your first month’s rent.”
  • Photos. The power of the humble photograph is phenomenal! Grab your prospect’s attention with high-quality images and interesting captions that help maximize engagement. Post shots of current residents (only with their permission!). Here are some tips to maximize the size and look of photos on Instagram.
  • Carousels. These are the types of posts that allow users to swipe a photo, allowing them to see a series of pictures in one post. Carousels are terrific for showcasing related photos: shots of residents at dinner, in the exercise room, walking along your community’s grounds, etc.
  • Video. Short video posts allow you to show off your community’s apartments and grounds as well as community events (lectures, parties, etc.).
  • Hashtags. Adding hashtags to your posts (#BestLife, for example) allow you to be seen by more people because Instagram users browse popular hashtags every day. Hashtags help you find – and get found by – people who have the same interests as your personas.
  • Instagram Stories. This is a tool – similar to Snapchat that allows you to share several photos and videos together in a slideshow format. Your Story, like a Snap, disappears in 24 hours. Stories are popular with Instagram users, with one in five Stories from businesses receiving a direct message from a viewer.

Always keep your Instagram posts’ tone lighthearted and fun. Try different types to see which ones receive the most interest from your followers.

5. Analyze What Works Best and Tweak for Better Results

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Posting on Instagram itself is fun; just make sure it’s also expanding your branding message and bringing you measurable results.

Monitor how many times posts are viewed, liked, and – gulp! – passed over via Instagram Insights. Discern the time of day as well as the day of the week you receive the most engagement with your posts, ads, even your profile. Study insights, and you’ll soon have actionable data that will help you prove your Instagram marketing ROI.

Getting Results

Instagram marketing is a fabulous strategy when it comes to raising awareness…so long as you do it right. And unless you have the skills as well as the experience with Instagram marketing, chances are your results will….be less than stellar.

ClearPivot provides digital and inbound marketing services to retirement communities that deliver a terrific ROI. We help you attract highly targeted prospects to your community and then work diligently and strategically to move them along their decision-making process to becoming a happy resident. And because we do this day in and day out, we can do so in far less time than it would take you to do so yourself.

We are a Hubspot Certified Gold Partner Agency, and we’re experts at helping assisted living/retirement communities grow awareness, produce leads, and quantify results, leading to new residents and referrals.

To learn all the lessons we've learned ourselves through marketing retirement communities over the years, download our free ebook: