When planning a marketing budget for your senior living community, you’ve undoubtedly asked yourself what to expect when working with a full-service senior living marketing agency like Craft & Communicate — and whether or not you really need one.
Let’s break down what these services involve, the associated costs, and why choosing the right agency will make all the difference.
The Comprehensive Approach to Senior Living Marketing
A high-quality, full-service senior living marketing agency provides a suite of services designed to optimize every touchpoint future residents and their families might encounter, also known as a 360-degree or full-funnel approach.
At C&C, we take the time to understand the unique qualities of each 55-plus, independent living, assisted living, and memory care community, then adjust our strategies accordingly. Here’s what they include.
Digital Marketing & SEO
These varied strategies combined build trust, and building trust is at the heart of everything we do.
- Custom Website Design and Development: Craft & Communicate writes, optimizes, and produces multiple in-depth pages for each website, showing the benefits of your amenities, the dedication of your team, resident stories, and care options.
- Search Engine Optimization: We conduct extensive SEO research into the most relevant and effective keywords for your community, ensuring your site ranks well and reaches local audiences looking for senior living options.
- Blog Content Development: Our team publishes regular, high-quality content that positions your community as a trusted expert in the senior living space. This content serves both SEO and engagement purposes.
- Targeted Ad Campaigns: We create and manage highly strategic paid search and social media ads to reach adult children of seniors and seniors themselves with messaging that speaks directly to them.
Branding & Print Marketing
Your logo and other printed marketing materials offer some of your first changes to begin telling the story of how you help seniors live their most fulfilling lives.
- Logo and Brand Identity Design: For either initial branding or a rebrand, you can receive a custom logo that captures your senior living community’s unique personality and values. We also send cohesive color schemes, typography, and visual guidelines to ensure consistency across all marketing materials.
- 3D Floor Plans: Our three-dimensional floor plans provide an immersive view of your community’s layout, allowing potential residents to visualize room sizes and arrangements. They help families make informed decisions and prompt excitement about your living spaces and amenities even before they schedule tours.
- Stationery and Collateral: From letterheads and business cards to brochures, we put together branded stationery and marketing collateral that conveys professionalism.
- Signage: Expect exterior and interior additions, such as bus wraps and monument signage, that complement your community’s environment.
Public Relations & Crisis Management
People want to be heard and understood, and people see how companies respond to the good and the bad that goes on every day. In senior living, we sell love and companionship first and foremost. It’s up to you and your agency to manage that reputation.
- Press Releases: The types of news we pitch to local and national outlets include community acquisitions, new leadership members, employee milestones, resident milestones or birthdays, and fun activity or lifestyle stories such as intergenerational visits and animal therapy.
- Review and Comment Monitoring: You’ll see quick responses to and notifications about senior living reviews across the web.
- Managing Community Crises: No one likes to think about these, but they can happen. We’re available 24/7 to help you prepare for the unexpected by developing comprehensive crisis communications plans that outline strategies, messaging, and protocols to follow each crisis.
- Thorough Marketing Integration: Our PR team constantly partners with SEO, digital content writing, client relations, social media, email, and analytics teams to carefully combine PR with marketing.
Email & Managed Marketing Automation
We’re devoted to delivering cutting-edge solutions that make the most of your email lists.
- Email Campaigns: Through strategic email marketing, we nurture leads over time with consistent, valuable information, keeping your community top-of-mind as prospects move through the decision-making process.
- Automated Lead Nurturing: We implement and manage sophisticated marketing automation tools to simplify communication. From automated follow-up emails to targeted drip campaigns and retargeting, you can be sure that every lead receives timely, personalized content that moves them further along the decision-making process, freeing up your team to focus on other important tasks.
Understanding the Costs of a Full-Service Senior Living Marketing Agency
For a competitive retainer fee of a few thousand dollars per month, a full-service agency like Craft & Communicate can help generate 10 to 15 qualified leads monthly.
In the senior living industry, where the average fee per resident is already close to that retainer fee, converting just 15% of those leads into move-ins results in dependable ROI.
This is a substantial return for an investment that builds brand awareness, improves community engagement, and differentiates you from other communities trying to take shortcuts!
Low-Cost Agencies Aren’t the Best Choice for Senior Living Communities
Some marketing agencies offer relatively inexpensive services upfront but rely heavily on templates or one-size-fits-all approaches that don’t convert as often. Here are a few ways those companies may fall short:
- One-Page Senior Living Website Templates: Many template-based agencies provide simplistic, one-page websites that lack depth. These sites often fail to effectively show the unique services and atmosphere of your community, limiting their ability to engage visitors or rank well in search engines.
- Limited Customization: Template-based services rarely offer the flexibility to reflect your brand’s unique identity. They might miss opportunities to share resident testimonials, personalized care options, or local outreach.
- Delayed Responses: Some agencies will leave you hanging for weeks before addressing your requests or making necessary updates. This lack of responsiveness can cost you potential leads, particularly during critical periods of high inquiry.
- Limited Analytics & Reporting: You may find that these providers don’t offer detailed performance reports, which makes it difficult to track which marketing strategies are driving results and which need adjustment.
By contrast, a full-service agency like C&C delivers personalized strategies, real-time communication, and regular performance updates. We ensure you know exactly where your marketing budget is going and how it’s performing.
Steps to Breaking Down the Budget
Forming a senior living marketing budget requires more than just setting a dollar amount; it’s about understanding how to distribute your funds for the greatest results. Here’s a simplified way to approach it:
- Set a Move-In Goal: Determine how many move-ins you want to achieve in a year.
- Calculate Leads Needed: Based on past performance, assess how many inquiries you’ll need to generate to meet that goal.
- Determine Your Marketing Budget: With optimized strategies like those offered by a full-service agency, your cost per lead may decrease as conversion rates improve even further than you expect.
- Track and Refine: Regularly review your budget and campaign performance, adjusting as needed to improve your lead generation efficiency. We provide comprehensive reporting to demonstrate how each part of the marketing plan is working — whether it’s SEO, paid ads, or email campaigns — and make adjustments to optimize results.
The Value of Investing in Full-Service Marketing
When it comes to senior living marketing, the phrase “you get what you pay for” rings true. While cheaper, template-based solutions may offer short-term savings, they often deliver lower-quality leads, slower service, and missed opportunities.
Investing in a full-service marketing agency gives you the advantages of a plan designed specifically for your community’s goals and market conditions, information potential residents and families really need, fast updates with continuous collaboration to keep your marketing efforts nimble, and measurable ROI to ensure you’re investing in what works and improving what doesn’t.
For a reasonable monthly investment, your community could see a significant increase in occupancy and revenue, with a clear path toward sustained growth. Rather than cutting costs with short-term solutions, a full-service approach guarantees that every marketing dollar contributes to the success of your community for years to come.
Final Thoughts About Independent Living, Assisted Living, and Memory Care Marketing Costs
Templates for senior living websites are far from enough for any community in the current year. Developing a marketing budget for your senior living community should be seen as an investment in its future growth, not just an expense.
A full-service marketing agency like C&C provides the expertise, tools, and personalized attention that can lead to more meaningful results than a cookie-cutter solution. We take a white-glove approach to every aspect of senior living marketing. Each campaign, each ad, and each piece of content is thoughtfully crafted to reflect the unique strengths of your community and generate the best move-ins from satisfied seniors. That’s why we go above and beyond!
Get a Custom Quote for Your Own Senior Living Marketing Budget
If you’re ready to explore how a fine-tuned marketing plan will efficiently increase your senior living community’s occupancy, contact us today for a free consultation. We’ll help your community build trust with more residents and their families than you had ever thought possible.
