Why Senior Living Marketing Needs Cross-Industry Insights

A look at how inspiration from other industries is key to delivering breakthrough senior living marketing.

by Donna Wardell, Director of Client Services

Marketing a senior living community—especially a Continuing Care Retirement Community or CCRC—is unlike virtually anything else you’ll encounter in the world of marketing. Entry fees can stretch well beyond $1 million with complicated contract and refund rules, plus fees for monthly services, dining, and future healthcare needs. Targeting advertising is complicated by rules related to housing and healthcare. As marketers, we have to communicate the ethereal idea of the feel of a community (a topic we’ve explored recently in another article). And don’t forget that this is a decision that is literally going to shape the rest of the prospect’s life.  

What this means is that for most older adults and their families, choosing a senior living community is a long and complicated process. There’s a lot of education that happens along the way and a lot of very emotional decisions that have to be made. And it has to be the right choice financially, logistically, and emotionally.  

Avoiding the echo chamber 

There is a danger that quietly faces marketers who specialize in any specific industry vertical: groupthink. If everyone attends the same conferences, benchmarks against the same competitors, views the same campaigns, uses the same specialized tools, and works to tackle the same challenges, it’s all too easy to end up with marketing that is targeted properly, relevant to the audience, and smartly crafted, but wholly unremarkable. You’ll have marketing that just fades into the background with everything else.  

The danger for marketers specializing in a specific vertical: groupthink.

The key to avoiding this trap is to actively embrace inspiration and learning from industries outside of senior living. For designers, attending a conference like Adobe MAX is about more than just learning tools, it’s seeing what the smartest people in other marketing verticals are doing with them. Digital advertising planners should be keeping an eye on news and trends in search, e-commerce, hospitality, and more. Website developers, writers, photographers, videographers, account service teams—we should all be looking outside of senior living to see what’s new and what’s effective. Our audience exists in and is seeing the broader world, and we have to do the same if we want to be relevant.  

Translating inspiration to senior living 

So if specialization can lead to groupthink, and being inspired by what’s going on in other industries is critically important, wouldn’t it be an advantage to be a generalist agency working across multiple verticals?  

It takes experience in senior living to identify ideas worth borrowing.

Not necessarily, and the reason is simple. You can’t just take ideas that work to market consumer goods, sports and entertainment, automobiles, the fashion industry, tourism, or technology and apply them directly to a senior living community and expect success. An award-winning broadcast campaign that sells millions of burgers or iPhones wouldn’t make a blip in the sales for a senior living community. The buying process is simply too different. The emotions involved are not the same. Buying a product is not the same as making a lifetime decision on where you want to live.  

It takes an expert in senior living marketing to identify ideas from other industries that are worth analyzing and translating to the world of senior living. It might be borrowing a production technique, a messaging strategy, or an innovative targeting method, but it’s never about taking a campaign as a whole and just repurposing it to sell a senior living community. Beyond being unethical, it would be unsuccessful.  

Fresh thinking with deep industry experience wins 

The idea of inspiration from outside sources isn’t new. Hospitals have studied Formula 1 pit crews to explore ways to make operating room teams more efficient. But operations don’t happen in 8 seconds, like a pit stop. Rather, by studying the team roles and how people move around a tight space, you can identify ideas that make operations safer.  

The goal is to draw inspiration, not answers. Ideas, not campaigns.

Aircraft designers are experimenting with wings that can change shape much like a bird’s wing. But the physical aerodynamics vary wildly because of the scale change between a bird and an aircraft. Designers have to take the core idea and see if it can be applied to the world of commercial aircraft design in a way that makes sense.  

The goal is to draw inspiration, not answers. Ideas, not campaigns.  

An idea isn’t valuable because it’s new. It’s valuable because it works—when applied, it achieves a specific goal. The value in fresh ideas is that they allow us to find new ways to meet the goals our communities have set out—occupancy growth, launching an expansion, marketing a new service line, etc. Fresh targeting or media ideas may reach audience members we would have missed before. Fresh messaging and design ideas stand out from the sea of lookalike ads, brochures, and websites.  

With the complex nature of senior living marketing, it makes sense that the most successful agencies are specialists. We have to be, frankly. We have to have an intimate knowledge of every nook and cranny of the decision-making process to deliver the right message, to the right people, at the right time. But among this group, the best of the best always keep an eye on what’s going on in other industries. We find inspiration in the ideas that fuel great marketing, and we understand how to translate those ideas to the senior living space in a way that gets results.