Senior living sales and marketing have taken on renewed importance as operators look to grow occupancy. But in 2023 with the looming arrival of the baby boomers, landing on a message that resonates with prospective residents and their loved ones isn’t easy.
As they have done in past years, senior living operators are turning to creative messaging to drive occupancy growth and improve their messaging, including through podcasts and traditional strategies altered for a new generation of older adults.
Those efforts were on display in the entries of this year’s Senior Housing News Aspect Awards. Winning entries from operators including Priority Life Care, Christian Living Communities and Arrow Senior Living show how the effort those companies are putting in to attracting new residents this year and beyond, and demonstrate how more operators can wield innovative, honest and positive storytelling to stand out from the crowd.
Priority Life Care’s ‘Her Stories’
Priority Life Care CEO Sevy Petras ends every interview with the same question: What’s your superpower?
“They know the question’s coming,” Petras told Senior Housing News. “It’s always so surprising to me – it becomes very humbling for the guests.”
Petras is referring to her podcast, Her Stories, which earned the Fort Wayne, Indiana-based operator the top spot in the Audio/Radio/Podcast Campaign category in this year’s Aspect Awards.
As the name implies, the guests of the podcast all have something in common – they are all women.
Petras launched the podcast with the intention of interviewing other women in senior living, and her goal is to uplift them and share their stories of career success far and wide.
“For whatever reason, women aren’t always as bold in going after careers, especially if they don’t think that they’ve done things the right way,” Petras said.
In the podcast, now on its 36th episode, Petras interviews women from all across the industry.
“We’ve interviewed people not just at the community level, but in tech, banking and capital or private equity. And we’ve interviewed people that are in associations that support senior housing” Petras said.
Recent Guests include Catie Ramp, President & CEO of the Georgia Senior Living Association and Amy Sweet, Founder and CEO of Halcyon Home, a home health and hospice company based in Austin, Texas.
The ‘E’ in Her Stories is shaped like a ladder to symbolize the journey of career growth while the color scheme includes various shades of pink and purple “which always represents women empowerment,” Petras said.
To date the podcast has generated more than 1,000 downloads on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and its website has surpassed 15,000 unique visitors. But for Petras, the impact outweighs the data.
“I have had so many different women reach out and say ‘oh my gosh, I hear the story and it’s really opened my eyes to another option for me,” Petras said.
Arrow Senior Living Promotes Positivity
For Arrow Senior Living, the negative stigma surrounding senior living communities inspired a social media campaign and the desire to disrupt what it saw as “negative news” and lead to a TV/video project aimed at sharing stories of positivity.
Arrow won first place in both the TV/video category and the social media category by emphasizing positivity and fighting negative stigmas. Arrow also came out on top in the “New Brand Launch” and “Social Media Campaign” categories.
Arrow Senior Living’s Nicely News “was initially started in response to all of the negative news of the world during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic,” Arrow Senior Living Managing Director of Marketing Shannon Novak told SHN.
“This started even before [TV and film star] John Krasinski’s SomeGoodNews, so at the time, there was nothing else like it.”
The Nicely News is a video broadcast of positive news that started on March 26, 2020 and is hosted by an actor and performer. It lives on Arrow’s YouTube channel as a playlist. And while it started as a daily publication, it became weekly as it matured and as Arrow learned how to improve production and content.
And the show is growing. With an average length of around 10 minutes, the show’s views have spiked from a few dozen in the early days to between 100-300 per episode.
While the Nicely News has created a number of memorable moments over the years, the most impact may have been when “Lenny had a resident recognize him and proceed to share her love of the show and how she never misses it,” Novak said.
Disrupting the stereotypes attached to senior living runs deeper in Arrow’s past than the Covid-19 pandemic, though.
“From the earliest days of Turnaround Solutions, before Arrow Senior Living even existed, the goal of the company was to defy the stereotypes of what senior living was and what it looked like,” Novak said.
To do that, the company started a hashtag and encouraged those in the senior living industry and those living in senior living to post content on Facebook depicting what living in a senior living community actually looks like using the hashtag.
The campaign using the hashtag #whatseniorlivinglookslike, earned Arrow first place in the SHN Aspect Awards in the Social Media Campaign category.
“The biggest challenges were deciding exactly what we wanted to add under the hashtag,” Novak said. “That and remembering to use it in the early days.”
Now, the hashtag has been used more than 12,000 times on Facebook and more than 4,000 times on Instagram. The result has been an increased social media reach of 121.3% along with an improved message of what it actually means to live in an Arrow community.
And the Arrow team isn’t done. Both the Nicely News and the new hashtag have led to other programs including Arrow’s Diversity and Inclusion Speaker Series, a previous Aspect Award Winner.
Christian Living Communities brings honesty
Christian Living Communities (CLC) wanted to break through the way that senior living residents are typically depicted. The creative team started by brainstorming adjectives that are tossed toward seniors in communities like “cute” and “sweetheart” according to Robin Visser.
“We took that and responded with ‘I’m not cute, I’m fierce’” Visser said.
This led to a campaign that showed senior living residents in their actual mindset and state with attributes that haven’t changed due to age. And that they would proudly bring those qualities to Christian Living
Visser is director of marketing and digital strategies with Denver-based Christian Living which earned the Aspect Award in the Print, Direct Mail, & Billboard Campaign category for its “I’ll Bring It” campaign.
In addition to addressing the cute and fluffy stereotypes senior living residents are saddled with, CLC’s creative team also attacked what it considered soft imagery.
“It just seems to be a theme in senior living that we have soft pastels and soft images and soft focus,” Visser said. “We see images of seniors or older adults who are being cared for by a caretaker. You’ll notice in our images, there’s not a single caretaker in them.”
But with 12 communities spread throughout Colorado, including areas with vastly different cultures, like the ski resort town of Steamboat Springs and Grand Junction, Colorado, on the other side of the front range of the Rocky Mountains.
CLC needed to be able to change and tweak parts of the campaign to be more effective.
For example, CLC made edits to the campaign for its Colorado Springs-based Sunny Vista campus that includes IL, AL, memory care, long-term care and rehabilitation.
Since Colorado Springs is home to a number of U.S. Air Force bases and the U.S. Air Force Academy, the team added a military spin by instead using words like “honorable.”
Overall, the campaign, which was launched in February of 2022, earned more than the SHN Aspect Awards. CLC experienced about a 23% increase in engagement such as impressions and click-through rate as a result of its “I’ll Bring It” campaign.
“In this case, what sets us apart is the fact that we see seniors as they are – we don’t see them as a stereotype of an older adult and we don’t see them as people who need to always be cared for and can no longer contribute or have a purpose,” Visser said.
Companies featured in this article:
Arrow Senior Living, Christian Living Communities, Priority Life Care
