Standing out in today’s assisted living market requires more than just generating leads — it demands a deep understanding of your prospective residents and their families. With over 800,000 older adults living in assisted living facilities in the U.S., and half of them age 85 or older, the decision-making process is often shared between aging parents and their adult children. These joint decisions have become even more complex since COVID-19, which accelerated digital adoption and reshaped expectations around care, communication, and safety.
Online marketing is one of the most effective ways to meet families where they are and learn from them in the process. It helps you engage with people already searching for care options, while also capturing insights into their questions, concerns, and behaviors. Done well, your marketing becomes a two-way tool: attracting leads while giving you a clearer picture of what your prospective residents and their families truly want. That’s how you build trust, deliver value, and grow a thriving community aligned with your business goals.
1. Make a good first impression on the website
Your website is one of your best assets for your assisted living marketing. It lets you showcase what care, comfort, and lifestyle look like at your assisted living home. Think of it as the front door to your business. What residents see and read on your site determines if they’ll call or continue looking.
Organize your website with clear, simple design
The smoother your website guides residents to the information they need, the more you position yourself as a resource that they can trust instead of a business trying to sell them something. Brookdale Senior Living offers a good example to follow.
A good main navigation guides the customer journey with pertinent information, like:
- Where to Begin: Covers process and logistics, from how to start searching for a facility to planning a move-in
- Our Services: Breaks down Brookdale’s level of care so residents can see how it matches their needs
- Brookdale Life: Details what it’s like to live at Brookdale, from dining to resident events
By anticipating what residents want to know and making it easily accessible, Brookdale positions itself as a facility that prioritizes residents and their family members.
Optimize your site for mobile
Would you believe only 13% of websites retain the same search position across devices? This change in ranking — you might rank on page one of Google on a computer, but not on a smartphone — happens because a business’s website loads great on a desktop, but not on mobile. That’s a big deal considering more searches happen on smartphones and tablets than desktop computers.
Start by improving your site speed since search engines see fast mobile page speed as an indicator of good user experience. Google’s guide on optimizing your site for mobile includes a speed test that recommends improvements. From there, use a resource like SEO company Moz’s mobile optimization guide to explore more advanced techniques, such as enabling and disabling certain plugins or using a more mobile-friendly site structure.
Create resident-centric content
Clear design and mobile optimization ensure a good user experience and help with search rankings. Entice families and their loved ones to click and engage with your website by producing content that helps them quickly make informed decisions. The best way to do that is with content that answers their most pressing questions. For example, according to the 2024 consumer trends survey focused on the assisted living sector, cost and location remain the top factors influencing community selection. A site that outlines cost clearly, as well as the location and amenities of a specific community, is far more likely to engage a prospective resident and their family.
Brookdale, again, offers a great example to follow. It presents a financial planning section that walks prospective residents through how assisted living pricing works, from average costs to what Medicare can cover.
As a first impression, your website will also be the key way you communicate that you share the values and priorities of your potential residents and their families. A 2024 consumer trends study by A Closer Look found that services like care management and memory care are among the most valued offerings in senior living communities.
The consumer trends study also highlighted that staff behavior and engagement heavily influence a community’s overall impression. That’s why it's essential that your website be more than just informative and easy to navigate. It should also clearly reflect your philosophy of care and the experience families and their loved ones can expect.
2. Drive people to your site by investing in local SEO
Like restaurants, dentists' offices, and other local businesses, assisted living facilities depend on drawing residents from the surrounding community. Investing in local search engine optimization (SEO) improves the chance of your ads, videos, and blogs surfacing in nearby prospect searches.
A simple but important distinction assisted living marketers should know here is SEO versus local SEO. SEO refers to the practice of reaching more and better-quality prospects by creating blogs, videos, and other content optimized to appear in online searches.
Local SEO refers to the same concept, except optimizing to compete in a certain geographical location. It’s an especially important tactic for brick-and-mortar businesses.
Local SEO is the practice of optimizing your online presence to attract more business from relevant local searches, especially on Google. It helps your business appear in local map packs, organic results, and directories when people search for services near them.
Of course, focusing on SEO is not the only way to bring local residents to your center. A recent analysis of 1.1 million leads across seven key industries conducted by CallRail helps shine light on which channels produced the most conversations from potential residents. When looking at the healthcare sector specifically, Google Ads leads the way, producing 34% of inbound conversations.
As the second and third ranked for inbound conversations, Organic Search (25%) and Google My Business (25%) also played significant roles. This means a well-rounded approach for assisted living centers, including paid ads, SEO, strong search presence, and local search optimization, is essential for maximizing inbound inquiries.
In the competitive landscape of assisted living, attracting local families is paramount. Local Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ensures your facility appears prominently when potential residents or their families search for nearby care options.
Local SEO is a powerful tool for businesses, including assisted living facilities looking to attract nearby residents. A recent Google insight report showed that 76% of people who perform a local search using “near me” on their smartphone visit a related business within a day, and 88% of local searches on mobile lead to a call or visit within 24 hours, so it’s clear that visibility in local search results directly impacts customer engagement.
Additionally, the study showed that nearly half (46%) of all Google searches have local intent, emphasizing how crucial it is for businesses to optimize their online presence to ensure they appear in relevant searches.
Insight: A recent Google insight report showed that nearly half (46%) of all Google searches have local intent, emphasizing how crucial it is for businesses to optimize their online presence to ensure they appear in relevant searches.
To strengthen local search visibility, assisted living facilities should focus on key SEO strategies. Optimizing a Google Business Profile (GBP) with accurate contact details, services, and photos ensures potential clients find trustworthy information. Keeping NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) information consistent across all platforms boosts credibility and search rankings.
Managing reviews proactively helps build trust and improve rankings, while having a mobile-friendly website ensures accessibility for the growing number of mobile searchers. Lastly, creating local content, such as blogs or updates about community events, enhances engagement and relevance. By incorporating these strategies, assisted living facilities can improve their online presence and connect with families searching for care solutions.
3. Use call tracking to find out which ads drive the most calls
As you begin to diversify the tactics and campaigns you are using, it’s important to begin gathering data on what is working and what is not. Call tracking software helps you assign unique phone numbers to your online and offline ads, from billboards to your Google My Business profile. When prospective residents call these ad-specific numbers, the calls route to your main business line. That way, you can see which ads generate the most calls.
Seeing your assisted living marketing results at a glance helps you understand where you might be underspending or overspending. For instance, CallRail’s Call Tracking lets you sort based on criteria such as first-time calls and qualified calls. Data like that helps you understand which ads are best for starting buying journeys, and which channels your ideal residents frequent.
You can further optimize your assisted living marketing ad budget with CallRail’s optional Conversation Intelligence®. With it, you can drill down into the dollar value of your marketing campaigns and ad channels by:
- Automatically qualifying and scoring calls with AI so you can compile data on lead quality.
- Assigning values to those leads, then tagging them as closed-won or closed-lost.
- Running a report to cross-reference your data and see which channels bring in your best leads.
You can further optimize your assisted living marketing ad budget with CallRail’s Conversation Intelligence®. With it, you can drill down into the dollar value of your marketing campaigns and ad channels by:
- Automatically qualifying and scoring calls with AI so you can compile data on lead quality.
- Assigning values to those leads, then tagging them as closed-won or closed-lost.
- Running a report to cross-reference your data and see which channels bring in your best leads.
This gives you the data to inform how you spend your ad budget so you can shift your ad spend toward the highest-performing ad channels. It also allows you to experiment on underperforming channels until you find what works and then scale from there. If text and image ads on social aren’t driving calls, you can try video.
That kind of call tracking data helps Sagora Senior Living determine which of its marketing campaigns create the highest call volume.
“It’s nice to just look in one place and see – based on the campaign, ad group, and actual keyword phrase – which ads are driving the raw leads in the form of calls,” Bret Forster, digital marketing manager at Sagora, said.
4. Analyze call transcripts to write high-performing digital ads
CallRail’s Conversation Intelligence feature goes beyond qualifying and scoring calls. It also bolsters your assisted living marketing by scanning transcripts to highlight important words and phrases your ideal residents use.
Those words and phrases show you what prospective residents and their families care about and the precise language that resonates with them. The more calls you analyze, the more data you have to create relevant ads, landing pages, and blogs.
5. Take prospective residents on virtual tours
Your assisted living marketing should give potential residents and their loved ones a glimpse of what life will be like at your facility. The more you can demonstrate the safety and security of the community, the more likely you’ll stand out as the best option.
Insight: Nearly 90% of Americans aged 50 and older strongly prefer aging in place. So, if adult children have to put family members in assisted living, and their family members will be happy to join a community, both parties will want it to feel as much like home as possible.
Virtual tours give you an advantage over your competition in a few ways. First, virtual tours help prospective residents warm up to the idea and see the process as more approachable before committing to an in-person visit. Second, an in-person tour isn’t always practical. Families and prospective patients may live far from one another and may be far away from your community, even if it is the ideal location for a long-term living arrangement.
St. Paul’s Senior Services attracts prospective residents with creative virtual tours. For example, St.Paul’s turned its annual Mingle Jingle into a Motor Mingle. Instead of touring the holiday lights on foot, guests drive the grounds and enjoy stops for cocoa and treats. Likewise, St. Paul’s shifted to themed virtual open houses.
Another idea could be to shoot 360-degree videos or post interactive tours like these Rockwood Retirement Communities that let future residents take on-demand tours of your rooms, grounds, and care facilities.
Drive better results from your assisted living marketing
By using these tips, you’ll do more than build strong assisted living marketing campaigns. You’ll also continually learn about your ideal residents as you compile more data from your SEO campaigns, call tracking, and online form submissions.
Get started with Call Tracking today
Call Tracking provides the insights you need to make smarter decisions for your senior living center. Increase appointments, attract new prospective residents and their families, and stop wasting time and money on ineffective marketing efforts.
