Show, Don’t Tell: Operators Embracing Authenticity To Break Through The Noise

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In 2026, senior living operators are using a variety of tech and tools to improve sales and marketing. At the roots of these efforts is authenticity.

Senior living prospects and their families are awash in a sea of options and choices for their next chapter. For some, it’s too much of a good thing. Senior living operators have an opportunity to stand out, but only if they “show” them life in their community rather than simply “telling” them.

The bad news is that the industry’s efforts to educate prospects about senior living seems to have hit a snag. Senior living sales teams at operators including Jaybird Senior Living and Heritage Communities report that many prospects still think of senior living as akin to nursing homes and other high-acuity settings. That is a problem for an industry that is struggling to grow market penetration rates beyond the current average of about 10% to 11%.

“If we still have people out there who are calling us for nursing home services and thinking that’s what we are, then maybe we all need to do something different,” said Jaybird Senior Living SVP of Sales and Marketing Christy Van Der Westhuizen during the recent Senior Housing News Sales & Marketing conference in Orlando. “I do think that it involves showing and not telling.”

Senior living operators have spent years simply telling prospects that they are different from skilled nursing. Now, Van Der Westhuizen and other sales leaders believe it is the time to throw open the community doors and let residents peer within so they see the difference for themselves.

If all of this sounds familiar, it is. Senior living operators have embraced transparency and authenticity as core tenets of marketing for about as long as I have covered the industry. What’s new is that operators are now grappling with AI-powered search tools and “answer engines” like Google’s overviews, which represent a change for sales and marketing teams that spent decades honing SEO practices.

At the same time, senior living operators are fighting to redefine the story it tells prospects, shifting from telling a story of “cruise ships on land” to one more akin to country clubs.

The theme of showing rather than telling permeated multiple panel discussions during the conference. From videos and blog posts to more transparency online and even self-guided tours, senior living operators are going all-in on showcasing the life that future residents could live within their four walls..

The bottom line is that senior living sales and marketing is rapidly changing. No matter what they do now, operators must find ways to break through the noise and reach their new customers as they arrive in droves in the years to come.

In this members-only SHN+ Update, I analyze panel discussions held during the 2026 Senior Housing News Sales and Marketing Conference and offer the following takeaways:

How operators are showing rather than telling in marketing
The tools and touchpoints operators use to showcase their services
Changing digital search trends

Attendees talk during the Sales and Marketing conference. Photo for WTWH Media by Merz Photography Attendees talk during the Sales and Marketing conference. Photo for WTWH Media by Merz Photography
Vendors speak with event attendees. Photo for WTWH Media by Merz Photography Attendees talk during the Sales and Marketing conference. Photo for WTWH Media by Merz Photography
Attendees listen to a panel discussion at Sales and Marketing. Photo for WTWH Media by Merz Photography Attendees talk during the Sales and Marketing conference. Photo for WTWH Media by Merz Photography
Two Sales and Marketing attendees meet during the conference. Photo for WTWH Media by Merz Photography Attendees talk during the Sales and Marketing conference. Photo for WTWH Media by Merz Photography

Show, don’t tell

If there was one overarching theme at this year’s Sales & Marketing Conference, it was that operators must show prospective residents what senior living is all about. Looming large over that is the fact that many senior living prospects still don’t know the difference between independent and assisted living and skilled nursing. Many still see senior living services as prohibitively expensive.

Even when they do understand senior living, many prospects are still stuck on the basics. The first question that many prospects ask at Jaybird Senior Living is “how much does it cost?” said Van Der Westhuizen.

“In addition to giving them the answer, there is so much more education and understanding that goes behind that four-digit number,” she said.

Van Der Westhuizen, along with her co-panelist, Heritage Communities Chief Marketing Officer Lacy Jungman, polled their internal sales teams before attending the event. Jungman came away with the notion that “we have a lot of work to do” to change perceptions, especially among adult children.

“We don’t have great influence over the decisionmaker,” Jungman said. “How do we hit those people who don’t even have the awareness, but they actually need to have the awareness … that there’s an option for them?”

She added that she believes the answer lies in better storytelling, not in the stories of residents themselves, but of the people shopping for senior living. To that end, she thinks sales and marketing leaders have an opportunity to get in front of the “influencers” that prospects and their families look to before they even start doing their research.

“We have a lot of different stories running around our prospects and their influencers based on culture, based on their past experiences, based on what their friends are saying,” she said. “So, we have to be armed and prepared to have multiple points of conversation that hit on everybody else’s experience.”

Jungman envisions a new story for the senior living industry, one that is based on choices and pre-planning, not crises.

“Where I would want our storytelling to really begin is that this is not the last chapter,” she said.

Van Der Westhuizen’s advice to other operators is: “Show them.”

“Show with pictures, show with video, show with experiences and really talk about how we are extremely different than potentially the perception out there,” she said. “The more we tell stories and allow residents to shout out their stories to a much larger public, the better.”

Heritage and Jaybird are by far not the only operators showing that life in senior living is different from prospects’ perceptions.

Show, Don’t Tell: Operators Embracing Authenticity to Break Through the Noise

Bethesda Senior Living localizes its marketing to tie into its 23 communities and five regions. According to Bethany DeBerard, vice president of sales and marketing at Bethesda, that helps marketers make messaging less generic, an important task in a world fraught with advertisements and noise.

Likewise, every photo and video on display on the websites of Optima Living features real residents and employees. Doing so allows the Canadian operator to “curate the process” for visitors, whether that is a prospect, future employee or family member, said Karim Kassam, co-founder and principal of Optima Living.

All of this has me pondering the different ways that operators can actually showcase their communities in a way that engages prospects. One answer could lie in more curated Facebook pages, as LCS is doing. The company is hiring two full-time social media staffers to grow its presence on sites like Facebook.

“It’s a great channel for us where it wasn’t 10 years ago,” Chief Marketing Officer Rick Westermann said during the conference.

One LCS community, Cypress of Hilton Head in Hilton Head, South Carolina, has amassed 14,000 followers on the social media site. With hundreds of photos and a user base that likes, shares and comments on posts, the Facebook page has become a true social hub for connection.

The internet is awash in influencers and short-form content – and “we should catch on to that same trend and try to bring our communities to life in a very similar way,” Westermann said.

Giving prospects the keys to the tour

In 2026, senior living residents are doing their research online, even before they contact a community for a tour. Senior living marketers are building in more touchpoints and ways to give prospects something to latch onto during that period.

Storytelling is an important aspect of the sales and marketing story of Portland, Oregon-based RoseVilla.

“I want to live in a place that tells a really good story, that has authentic experiences going on, and I can really understand what’s happening there,” said RoseVilla CEO Glen Lewis.

But as other panelists during the event alluded, actually reaching residents to tell that story is easier said than done. When a resident does want to learn about a community, oftentimes they must drive to it and spend hours touring it. It’s a familiar process that favors senior living operators, but it doesn’t always suit prospects or their wants.

That’s why RoseVilla flipped its sales journey on its head by giving prospects multiple touchpoints that specifically don’t require the help of a salesperson. The organization also has a virtual self-guided tour that users can access.

Although Lewis admitted he thought the idea was “crazy” at first, doing so has led to a positive response from prospects who value that the operator cut through the noise and let them do research at their own pace.

“That has become really positive for us, and the boomers that are looking at our community have said that’s exactly what we’re looking for. We want that level of freedom, and we don’t want to feel like we have to engage with you for every single question we have along the way,” Lewis said. “That was counterintuitive to everything I thought as a CEO.”

Senior living operators also should take note that who they are selling to has shifted with the times. In 2026, members of Generation X are increasingly shopping for their parents, and they are used to a world that is more convenient than what senior living operators usually offer.

“Many of us have gone through the apartment–buying and renting process, and it’s very transparent. You’ve got all the pricing on there, you’ve got the availability on there. So that’s what the consumers are used to,” said Jamison Gosselin, vice president of marketing and communications at Watermark Retirement Communities. “Then they get to senior living and it’s like, where’s your pricing? It’s buried over here. Or, you might get a starting-at rate.

But Gosselin believes “it’s our responsibility to communicate how pricing works in senior living.” By that token, there is more operators can do and provide to prospects before they set foot in a community, from pricing to a window into community life.

AI accelerates change and personalization

Making all of this tougher is the fact that prospects have new tools to do their research, such as AI chatbots and search engines, that are changing what they see and how they access it.

Jenn Hastings, vice president of marketing at Northbridge Communities, says families are coming in “completely armed” with everything they find through their own research coupled with AI overviews. Some of that information comes directly from the operators and their systems, but also adds yet another wrinkle for sales teams to keep in mind.

Hastings goes on to highlight the importance of personalizing the experience for prospects so they “feel special and feel like they’re going to belong and put down roots in one of our communities, and feel like they’re a part of something special.”

Sales teams are shifting their approaches and using these tools to their advantage too. During the same panel, it was noted that following tours, sales team representatives are able to take their notes, add them to a customer relationship management system, then use their own AI summaries to create additional touchpoints afterward.

Senior living operators can affect what AI chatbots put into the world by the content of their websites – but not if it’s “fluff,” according to Robin Visser, director of marketing and digital strategies at Christian Living Communities.

“Stay away from fluff,” she said on stage. “You need to have real answers to real questions.”

The post Show, Don’t Tell: Operators Embracing Authenticity to Break Through the Noise appeared first on Senior Housing News.

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