25 Marketing Ideas for Senior Living Communities To Try in 2025

Attracting prospective residents and keeping occupancy rates high requires a thoughtful, personalized approach to your senior living community marketing plan and digital marketing strategies. To thrive in this competitive industry, you need to highlight what makes your community unique, understand prospective residents’ needs, and build trust with prospects and their families — all cornerstones of effective marketing.

Let’s review some of our favorite marketing ideas for senior living to give you some creative inspiration and help bring those ideas to life. 

1. Define Your Marketing Goals and Objectives

Determining your goals and objectives is the first step in devising a marketing plan for your community. Are you trying to attract new residents or increase brand awareness? Do you want to increase leads or referrals? Are your occupancy rates up to the industry standard? Once you can answer these questions, you can build a marketing plan that resonates with your target audience.

2. Get To Know Your Audience

You need to understand your target residents and determine who would get the most out of your senior living community. Your message to seniors looking for an active lifestyle will completely differ from ads targeting seniors needing daily assistance.

Once you determine your ideal client, you can create buyer personas that detail personal demographics, such as age, gender, hobbies, interests, location, and income. These buyer personas help you better understand the challenges prospects face and how your community can help meet those needs.

3. Analyze Your Competitors

You can’t beat what you don’t know. This is where a SWOT analysis comes in handy for more effective senior living marketing. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Take the time to document both your strengths and weaknesses and those of your competitors and define any threats or untapped opportunities in the market.

With this competitive analysis, you can better hone your messaging and offerings.

4. Highlight the Voices of Your Community

No one can market your senior living community better than your own residents. Developing case studies based on the real-life experiences of current residents is one of the best, most authentic ways to market your community. Prospective residents love to know why others chose your community. They want to hear stories that mirror their own lived experiences.

You can highlight these stories on your social media profiles and your community website — your home page, blog, or dedicated web page are all great spots. To ensure you speak to your different personas, feature a diverse range of resident voices.

While your residents share similarities, they also have distinct living experiences, and some stories may resonate more strongly with certain personas.

5. Sponsor Local Events

Sponsoring local events is a great way to build brand awareness. Choose events attracting your senior living community’s prime demographic, such as flu shot clinics, health fairs, or fun runs or walks that benefit cancer or Alzheimer’s research. Events are a perfect place to pass out information and promotional items and start a face-to-face conversation.

6. Build a Community-Focused Social Media Presence

Encourage engagement with your online communities by posting relevant blogs, questions, and even informal polls, but don’t forget your real social media stars — your seniors. Share snapshots and short videos of your residents thriving in your community. Those chair volleyball games, bingo tournaments, and holiday parties are heart-warming social media gold.

To grow your social media accounts, invite current customers to like or follow them and answer any questions or comments promptly. Today’s social media algorithms like to see engagement on both sides. Remember, consistency is key to a good social media presence — and posting regularly helps build a loyal following.

7. Create a Referral Network

To build a referral network, determine who is most beneficial to your residents and how their work aligns with your services. Reach out to organizations and professionals in your area, such as:

• Churches
• Local nonprofits
• Rec centers catering to seniors
• Attorneys
• Medical care professionals
• Insurance companies
• Financial advisors

And don’t discount your competitors. Every community offers its own unique services and lifestyles, and not every senior is a fit for every community. Take the time to get to know your competitors and better understand how you can help each other with a mutually beneficial partnership referral program.

8. Use Marketing Automation Tools

A good customer relationship management tool — also known as a CRM — helps you create targeted, thoughtful, effective outreach that meets your prospects where they are. 

Senior living marketing technology can help your community unlock the full potential of your outreach and increase speed-to-occupancy by giving you one place to log new prospects and follow up with them from that first meeting to when they sign on the dotted line to become a resident of your community.

To make your job easier, look for a system that offers:

• Email marketing automation
• Customized and automated workflows
• Landing pages
• Lead processing

Any CRM you choose should feature reporting transparency and offer real-time, shareable dashboards to prevent missed opportunities.

9. Stay in Close Contact With Your Sales Team

As marketing gathers leads, the sales team must respond quickly to qualified prospects. Many prospective residents don’t have time to wait on slow sales responses, and if the sales team can’t react promptly, your sales team will lose out on the sale and the opportunity to support seniors with the care they need.

With a CRM, the sales team has real-time access to new leads as they enter the system. The team can monitor upcoming move-ins and move-outs to stay on top of their occupancy goals, use lead scoring to see where they should prioritize their outreach efforts, and manage all their sales activities.

10. Leverage a Unified Contact Center and Live Chat Functionality

Implementing an integrated senior living contact center and live chat is a proven way to increase leads, tours, and conversions. In fact, we’ve seen our clients increase leads by 35%, tours by 20%, and web lead conversions by 21% simply by relying on a dedicated contact center.

Senior living marketers and sales reps often work on understaffed teams. They’re not available to take every call or inquiry and often miss messages. As we discussed, prospects look elsewhere when they receive this kind of slow — or nonexistent — response.

With a top-notch outsourced contact center, real people can:

• Promptly answer incoming calls for a highly personal touch.
• Make outbound calls for web forms.
• Provide immediate support with live chat.

These contact centers become immersed in your business and act as an extension of your community by sharing your specific messaging and value propositions. They can perform detailed discovery, book tours for qualified leads, and push that information to your CRM.

Related: See how Heritage Senior Living increased its leads, inquiries, tours, and move-ins by leveraging Aline’s Contact Center and CRM.

11. Automate Lead Scoring

Not every lead is the same. One prospective resident may feel excited to learn more about your community and ready to embrace this life change. That prospect — or their family — has engaged with inbound communications, enjoyed multiple face-to-face conversations with leasing consultants, and toured your community. 

However, another prospect may still feel hesitant about leaving their home and has only opened an email and talked to the leasing consultant on the phone rather than in person.

Lead scoring accounts for these specific interactions and assigns a dynamic score to the prospect. This score predicts the likelihood of move-in. 

As the prospect further engages — or even disengages — with the marketing and sales cycles, the score automatically adjusts to help your marketing and sales team better prioritize their efforts and ultimately support your goal of improving conversions and increasing occupancy.

12. Invest in Senior Living-Specific Sales Training

Guiding prospects through the sales funnel during such an emotional life change takes a special approach that centers on empathy and building trust. This sales strategy is known as prospect-centered selling. It teaches you how to untangle any emotional resistance and advance prospects toward a position of readiness.

High-performing sales and marketing teams work best when they align their strategies and messaging. Understanding your sales team’s strategy can help you develop more detailed personas, provide more targeted marketing enablement support, and deliver consistent messaging.

13. Emphasize Digital Presence and SEO

Your website is your senior living community’s business card on the web, showcasing your community’s features and helping prospects find your location.

To help your website stand out from others and enhance your digital presence, you should:

• Optimize your site for local SEO by targeting keywords your ideal customer is searching for online.
• Create a blog offering valuable content to educate and inform readers about important topics related to senior living.
• Make sure your website is easy to navigate and is beautiful to view on both computers and mobile devices.
• Use online reviews to your advantage by addressing problems and concerns mentioned in those reviews and responding to individuals who had a less-than-stellar experience in your community.

These simple tactics can help you make your business more visible online and help seniors and their families more easily learn about your community. 

14. Leverage Video Marketing

Video marketing is one of the more creative marketing ideas for spotlighting your community’s best features in a more engaging and accessible way than print and written materials alone. Unlike other marketing forms, video offers:

• Easily digestible content: Video is easier for people to interpret and understand than in-depth written content.
• Community feature highlight reels: You’ll be able to show viewers the features and aspects of your community that make it unique.
• Better recognition: By showing viewers your community, its staff members, and other aspects, you’ll make it feel more familiar immediately. This could help residents feel more comfortable during tours and may make them more likely to choose your community over others.

Start by creating video tours of your community. Record residents sharing their experiences and consider conducting interviews with staff as part of your strategy. 

15. Implement Email Marking Campaigns

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to connect with prospective residents and their families. With targeted campaigns, you can deliver personalized messages that build trust, nurture interest, and ultimately boost occupancy.

From event invitations to tailored follow-ups, email sequences let you speak to each person’s needs at every stage of their journey. It’s a simple, scalable way to stay in touch with families, prospects, and even current residents — keeping your community top of mind while sharing the information that matters most.

16. Offer Virtual and In-Person Events

Building an engaged community is one of the most effective ways to attract new residents and build confidence in your community. As part of your senior living community marketing efforts, host virtual and in-person events to get people excited and involved more often.

Host events like:

• Online and in-person open houses.
• Webinars covering important senior living topics.
• Community events, like health fairs and social gatherings.
• In-community health care visits. 
• Excursions to museums and local attractions. 

These events help foster a more vibrant lifestyle and give your team the chance to get more people involved.

17. Use Paid Advertising

Paid advertising can help supplement your website’s performance and generate leads while building your online presence. Some methods you might want to try include:

• Google ads: These paid ads let you appear higher on the first page of search results for keywords and phrases you choose. You pay each time someone clicks on your ad.
• Social media ads: These ads let you get your information in front of people on different social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. 
• Geotargeted ads: These ads let you reach potential residents and their families within your target geographical area. 

Paid ads can be expensive, but they can be a great way to supplement organic marketing efforts, such as email campaigns or websites.

18. Create an Education Hub

Seniors and their families want to feel like the senior living community they choose is a leading expert in its field. One of the easiest ways to position your community as a knowledgeable expert is to create an educational hub about senior living through your website.

This hub can be separate from your blog and can answer common questions your sales team receives. You may also want to partner with local health care providers to answer medical and aging-related topics with greater authority.

Prospective residents and their families can use this hub to help them make informed decisions, and when they feel that your community goes above and beyond to address their concerns, they may be more likely to choose your community over others. 

19. Focus on the Family Decision-Making Process

Remember, you’re not just marketing to the seniors who will call your community home. You’re also marketing to their adult children. Be sure to tailor some of your marketing materials, blogs, and ads to people involved in decision-making. 

Create content that directly addresses adult children’s concerns when moving their parents into a senior living community. Be ready to answer their questions during in-person consultations and tours. Offer additional resources to support family members and build their confidence in your community.

20. Personalize the Digital Experience

No two seniors are alike, meaning you’ll want to tailor your digital experience to their concerns and needs. Doing so can help you make the marketing experience feel more personalized and may build more confidence in your community over others in the area. 

Use the data collected in your CRM to tailor email campaigns and website content to address individual interests and needs. Interpret that data to help you see people’s top interests and create personalized virtual tours highlighting amenities and services aligning with specific resident profiles. 

21. Emphasize Transparency

When seniors and their families are looking for a community, they want information to be clear and easy to access. Prioritize transparency whenever possible online, in print materials, and during in-person communications. Here are a few tips to help: 

• Make pricing info easy to find: Keep your pricing information up to date and easily available on your website.
• Outline community policies: Post your community guidelines online, so prospective residents can easily review them.
• Provide honest answers to questions: Encourage your sales team to answer questions as honestly as possible during tours, even if those answers highlight possible shortcomings at your facility.

Create a culture of open and honest communication, and you’ll inspire confidence in prospective tenants immediately.

22. Explore the Use of Mico-Influencers

Micro-influencers are local individuals who are respected by seniors and their families for their expertise and understanding of certain topics. Reach out to these people in your area and partner with them to promote your community. 

They can create sponsored content that showcases your community, the amenities offered, and other features that other senior living communities may not offer.

When they share their opinion of your community and back those opinions with video tours, personal experiences, and photos, they not only build trust but can also potentially drive leads to schedule tours or request more information about your location.

23. Highlight Intergenerational Programs and Activities

In some senior living communities, seniors can feel isolated from the community at large, which can lead to depression and discontent. Offering intergenerational programs and activities that bring the greater community to them can help seniors feel more connected. 

Even better, it gets your community’s name out there and may inspire other families to explore your community when the time comes.

Consider using the following methods to improve intergenerational interaction:

• Partner with local schools or daycare centers and bring children into your community to interact with seniors who may not be able to travel.
• Organize intergenerational events, such as art shows, musical performances, theatre, or storytelling sessions.
• Schedule community barbecues or carnivals during the warmer months.

Use your imagination and consider asking your residents about the types of activities they’d like to participate in.

24. Utilize Data Analytics

Your marketing efforts can generate a lot of data, but if you don’t analyze that data, you won’t be able to access the information you need to develop new marketing ideas for senior living communities. Instead, take the time to analyze the data you collect. Look at information such as:

• Website traffic and conversion rates
• Social media engagement
• Customer feedback and reviews

This information can tell you what’s working and what isn’t, and it can guide your marketing efforts in the future. You may even be able to use AI to analyze that data and turn it into clear and actionable information that shows you exactly what you need to change.

25. Track Your Results

A good CRM program tracks how well your different marketing strategies have worked. What mediums prompted leads, and how many of those leads turned into new residents?

Once you track the results of your marketing strategies, you can set up benchmarks for future performance. Talk to your sales team, executive director, and other stakeholders to identify different performance indicators to show how effectively you achieved these objectives.

By setting benchmarks, you can flag areas that need improvement and better track your progress. 

Related: To get the latest data on senior living sales and marketing performance, download the Aline Benchmark Report for all the insights you need to accelerate your growth.

Kick-Start Your Marketing Plan With Aline

Now it’s time to create a marketing plan that will help you determine your community’s objectives and address them in ways that will attract new residents and boost your return on investment.

Download our customizable senior living marketing plan template, designed to help you set clear goals, map out your strategy, and turn insights into move-ins. This template is your step-by-step guide to more focused, effective marketing.