Senior living marketing
measured in move-ins.
Occupancy is the only number that matters, and it sits four to nine months downstream of the click. We build the connective tissue: per-community campaigns, an inquiry-to-tour-to-move-in funnel instrumented end to end, and reporting that ties each move-in back to the source that produced it — including the referral aggregators taking a cut.
The lead report and the census never agree.
Senior living has the longest, most emotionally loaded consideration cycle in local services. An adult daughter starts researching in March and a parent moves in November. In between there are three community tours, a hospital event that resets the timeline, and a referral service that inserts itself and invoices a placement fee. By the time the move-in happens, no ad platform remembers the campaign that started it, so paid media gets judged on inquiry volume — the one metric that is easy to inflate and nearly meaningless.
Meanwhile the portfolio average lies about the communities. One is at ninety-six percent occupancy with a waitlist and is still being advertised. One has twelve units open and a sales counselor who takes six hours to return an inquiry. Marketing at the portfolio level cannot see either, so budget keeps flowing where it is least needed.
Per community, against census.
Budget that follows open units
A campaign footprint per community with spend indexed to current and projected vacancy rather than split evenly. Communities near capacity throttle down automatically; a community with a wing opening gets weighted up months before move-in day. Search, Performance Max, and Meta, with the mix set by the trade area.
Community pages families actually read
A real page per community: floor plans, current starting pricing, care levels, photos, and schema, driven from one master source so a pricing or availability change updates everywhere at once. Google Business Profiles synchronized centrally, with review generation run per community.
Inquiry to tour to move-in
Response time is the single largest controllable variable in this category. We instrument every step — form, call, tour booked, tour attended, deposit, move-in — report the drop-off by community, and route inquiries so a human reaches the family the same hour, not the next business day.
Convert visitors →Move-ins traced back to source
Pipelines from the sales CRM into a warehouse, with long-window attribution built to survive a nine-month cycle. The output is cost per move-in per community by channel, including what the referral aggregators actually cost once placement fees are counted against them.
Measure what matters →Nurture built for a long decision
Most inquiries are not ready, and dropping them is the most expensive mistake in the category. Segmented email and SMS sequences by care level and readiness stage, event invitations, and re-engagement timed to the moments when families actually reopen the search.
Nurture and retain →Weekly, per community, to ownership
Agents read every community every week across every platform, flag anomalies inside the week, and assemble one report for ownership and one view per executive director. No coordinator building slides, no month-old numbers driving decisions.
Automate operations →Built for portfolios, not for one building.
The hard parts of senior living marketing are the parts we already run at national scale: campaign structure at the location level, a source of truth for pricing and availability that keeps hundreds of pages accurate, transaction-grade attribution pulled from an operational system into a warehouse, and weekly agentic reporting so every location gets attention rather than the loudest one.
Our reference portfolio for that machinery is a national multi-location retail and membership operation measured in thousands of locations. Different customer, identical mechanics. Read the case study and judge the transfer for yourself. We would rather you evaluate the system than a logo wall.
Audit the portfolio, then run it.
- 01Weeks 1-2 — portfolio auditOccupancy and inquiry volume by community, response-time measurement against live inquiries, tracking integrity, page and profile accuracy, and a real accounting of what referral aggregators cost per move-in.
- 02Weeks 3-6 — build the systemPer-community campaigns weighted to vacancy, CRM data flowing into the warehouse with long-window attribution, community pages driven from one source, and lead routing rebuilt around same-hour response.
- 03Ongoing — operateWeekly per-community review, budget reallocated as census moves, nurture running against the not-yet-ready majority, and a launch playbook for new communities and expansions.
What senior living operators ask first.
Can you actually attribute a move-in to a campaign nine months later?+
With CRM integration, yes, within the limits of the data. We stamp the inquiry with its source, carry that through tour and deposit stages in the CRM, and report move-ins against the originating source in the warehouse. Where a family called instead of filling a form, call tracking closes the gap. Where the record simply is not there, we say so rather than modeling a number we cannot defend.
How do you treat referral aggregators?+
As a channel with a cost, and we measure them like one. Placement fees are real acquisition cost, so the comparison that matters is cost per move-in from owned demand versus cost per move-in through an aggregator. In most portfolios that comparison changes the budget conversation immediately.
Do you handle compliance and sensitive-category advertising rules?+
Yes. Housing and health-adjacent advertising carries real platform restrictions on targeting and creative, and we build campaigns inside them rather than discovering them at disapproval. Nothing we deploy depends on targeting that a platform can withdraw.
Our communities have different brands and different care levels. Does that break the model?+
No. The per-location structure is designed for exactly that: one campaign footprint per community, brand and care-level messaging held at the portfolio layer, and reporting that rolls up by brand, by region, or by care type as needed.
What is the fastest thing you would fix?+
Almost always lead response time and the routing behind it. Speed to first human contact moves tour rate more than any bid strategy, and it costs nothing to fix but attention.
Put budget where
the units are open.
Ten-minute intro call, then a portfolio audit. We will show you cost per move-in by community and by channel, aggregator fees included, and tell you honestly where the occupancy problem actually is.
Talk to a strategist