As the number of people who reach age 65 increases, so does the number of retirement communities.
More than 30,000 (30,400) residential care communities were serving those in the U.S. who need a bit more help in their day-to-day lives in 2014, and as the younger members of the baby boom generation enter their 60s, followed by older members of Generation X, several thousand more communities are bound to open.
So in a sea of thousands of these communities – that look very much alike to potential residents and/or their adult children – how are you going to ensure yours stands out?
The Power of Branding Your Retirement Community
If you’re located in a state with a lot of seniors (Florida, California, Arizona, etc.), and you live in a city with 10 or more retirement communities, you no doubt understand the competition to differentiate your community from the one down the street, the one half a mile away and the several others dotting the landscape. In some locations, residents of your town probably drive by one or more communities several times a day!
Most assisted living communities, for example, provide memory care for adults with cognition decline, help with bathing and taking medicine, provide meals in a common dining room, activities of interest to seniors, exercise facilities, and nurses and/or LPNs/LVNs to help residents when medically necessary.
Branding your retirement community means that you showcase its distinct culture and personality. And you work to create its brand via consistent messaging and brand coherence.
Discovering Your Brand
Creating your brand will take some time and considerable thought. Ask yourself how your community is different. Are you a bit less expensive than other communities, yet you provide the same services and amenities? Do your care partners tend to stay longer than in other communities? Is your food known as the best in the area? Have you been in business for years and enjoy a stellar reputation among your local medical community? Are you family owned and operated?
One way to discover what your residents and prospects think of you is to survey them. Ask them to answer a few questions about what makes you different in their eyes and why they chose you. Reach out to former residents or their adult children for their input: Make sure the survey is anonymous and encourage candor.
Building a Brand Strategy
Once you ascertain what differentiates you from your competition, it’s time to start building a branding strategy around it. Your first step is to create a positioning statement. Sometimes known as a brand promise, it must be unique to your community, meaningful, and easy to remember.
As you create your brand, remember to keep a consistent tone in all messaging, including:
- All Social Media Channels
- Emails
- Advertising
- Brochures
- Website
- Testimonials.
You also will want to showcase your brand in your in-person sales materials, even in the décor in your community’s public spaces.
Make sure you let your employees know of the image/brand you wish to exude. Your care partners and reception staff are the face of your retirement community. They are your ambassadors, and it’s critical that they know of and understand the message and feeling you want visitors and residents to have when they interact with them.
Let’s Talk About Marketing Your Brand
Once you know how you want prospects and the community at large to think of you, the next part is the fun stuff: actually getting your branding out there to your target market.
Because moving to a retirement community is such an important decision in a person’s life, it’s not one any prospect should make quickly. And most don’t: your target market of seniors and/or their adult children are “considering” this purchase, which means they are crunching numbers, taking a seriously close look at the pros and cons, reading about moving to/living in retirement communities, possibly talking to financial planners and/or their attorney, and on and on and on.
They are doing a ton of reading and researching. They have dozens – if not hundreds – of questions and concerns.
Bottom line? They want information. Your job as it pertains to marketing your retirement community is to provide it to them. Doing so means you’ll be engaging in a form of digital marketing known as inbound marketing.
Marketing Your Retirement Community via Inbound Marketing
Here’s a step-by-step description of it of how inbound marketing works:
As you market your community, you will create personas for your main prospects, such as an adult child worried about her mother living alone; a married couple with one partner showing signs of dementia; a newly-retired single, 65-year-old thinking ahead and wondering who will care for her as she ages.
Then you start creating blog posts, ebooks, infographics, videos, etc., that answer the questions and concerns your personas have, making sure that all reflect your branding messages.
You publish this content on your website, most often in the form of a blog post. You place appropriate keywords in the blog post, and someone using those keywords finds your post in her search results, reads the post and because you placed an offer of a free ebook on a topic of interest to her at the end of the blog, she provides you with her email address in exchange for the ebook.
Now that you have her email address, you continue to send her blog posts on topics that answer her questions/concerns, invite her for a tour, show her a video testimonial of one of your current residents and/or one of your care partners talking about how much she cares for your residents, and so on.
All that information you send her helps her realize several things:
- You’re an expert when it comes to retirement/assisted living communities.
- You know exactly what her concerns are: you care about her.
Eventually, if she’s serious about moving herself or a parent to a retirement community, she’ll make an appointment to visit. She may attend a free estate planning seminar you hold at your community (you’re sending her such invitations every now and then).
Finally, because you’ve been so diligent in sending her the information she needs and wants, if/when she decides to move to a retirement community, chances are good she will move to yours!
The Incredible Power of Inbound Marketing Paired with a Consistent Brand Message
Discovering what it is that makes your community different/why and how it stands out is extremely powerful. Consistently communicating with your prospects by giving them the information they crave is a way to deliver on your brand promise/position statement: no doubt part of your brand is that your community is a caring one, and providing useful information as prospects work their way to moving to a retirement community is proof that you walk your talk.
Branding your community and engaging in inbound marketing is time intensive. We can help: ClearPivot is an inbound marketing agency with considerable expertise in marketing retirement communities. Learn more about how we can help your community by contacting us.
In the meantime, learn all the ins and outs of effective retirement community marketing with our A-Z guide that we've written up based on our experience marketing communities over the years. You can download the guide here:
