This article is sponsored by Fountain Digital. As senior living operators work to turn digital visibility into real move-ins, marketing and sales teams are under growing pressure to close the gap between lead volume and actual performance. Fountain Digital is helping providers rethink that challenge through stronger websites, smarter strategy and a clearer understanding of how buyers search and engage online. In this Voices interview, Marissa Burkhardt, Chief Strategy Officer at Fountain Digital, shares what sets top-performing teams apart, why so many websites fall short as marketing tools, and what senior living organizations will need to get right in 2026.
Senior Housing News: What core insight or career experience gave you the lens you have today on senior living marketing?
Marissa Burkhardt: I’ve been in the senior living marketing space for over a decade, working in a variety of roles on the agency side. That’s included everything from leading enterprise paid media teams to running full-scale website redesigns, SEO, content marketing and email marketing programs.
So I’ve really worked across the full digital funnel for senior living with hundreds of organizations, both large and small. That experience has given me a pretty broad view of what actually moves the needle, what tends to break down and how different providers approach marketing depending on their size, market and internal resources.
I think that’s what has shaped my perspective most. I’ve seen senior living marketing from a lot of different angles, and that has helped me understand not just the tactics, but how all of those pieces need to work together.
What do the most successful marketing and sales teams have in common?
The most successful teams I’ve worked with are ultimately sharing a common goal and have a really strong understanding of each other’s roles. They understand what success looks like, and there’s a level of respect there.
A couple of things make that work really well. One is having clear structure and SLAs, so there are set expectations around what counts as a qualified lead, follow-up speed and what the feedback loop looks like. That removes ambiguity and keeps teams from relying too much on anecdotal evidence. Instead, they’re working from a clear structure and shared data.
A consistent communication cadence also helps. We’ve found that regularly scheduled touchpoints keep the feedback loop open and make it easier to set expectations clearly. That way, marketing and sales are not operating in silos or only coming together when something isn’t working.
Data fluency is also really important. Marketing needs to understand sales KPIs and what the sales team is working toward. Sales needs to understand what marketing is doing and how those efforts are intended to support the funnel. Ultimately, the best teams let the data tell the story. They look objectively at what’s working, what’s not and where they need to pivot, while staying focused on shared goals.
How can community websites improve their visibility and performance in AI-powered search and large language models?
We call it AIO, artificial intelligence optimization, and I see it as the next evolution of where SEO has been going for the last 20 years. Large language models have raised the bar for quality and trust, but in my opinion, the fundamentals still win.
That means quality over quantity, strong digital authority and trustworthy content that answers real questions people are searching for. If you’re just getting started with optimizing for large language models, the first step is to get the foundation right. Your site needs to be fast, crawlable and technically sound.
From there, you can start going deeper on content creation. Is your site answering the common questions people are searching for around care, pricing, lifestyle options and other high-intent topics? The priority should be creating heavy-hitter content that supports the user journey, not just creating content for the sake of content.
Building authority is also a big piece of this. That means earning mentions from relevant sites outside your own, whether that’s being featured in the news or another trusted source. It also means showcasing credibility on your own website through reviews, trust badges (and content to support them) or other signals that show you’re a legitimate, trustworthy source for users and machines alike.
The next layer is optimizing for machine readability. We go heavy on structured data and schema markup because it gives large language models something like an instruction manual for the content. When you define things like pricing, floor plans or FAQs, you’re giving LLMs a way to more easily parse the website and provide those things as answers.
For measurement, there are a lot of tools out there, but you can also prompt tools like ChatGPT or Gemini yourself and see who’s showing up for what. Then you can work backward to understand which competitors might be outperforming you and why.
Ultimately, you’re looking for visibility in AI-generated results. Is your domain cited? Is your brand mentioned? Are you seeing growth in branded or direct traffic, or incremental lift in referral traffic from AI tools? Are your highest-intent pages getting more engagement? From the SEO side, I’d also look at quality backlinks and mentions because those third-party trust signals do seem to matter.
At the end of the day, we’re not just trying to rank anymore. You’re trying to be referenced in a zero-click environment.
What are the most common reasons a website underperforms as a marketing tool?
I’d say most websites are not failing because they lack sophistication or good design. Usually, it’s because the fundamentals are missing.
Sometimes there’s an overemphasis on design or fancy content when, in reality, the technical foundation isn’t strong. There may not be a clear structure. The content may not be focused on the right areas or speaking to the user clearly enough. The user experience may not be seamless enough to move someone toward action.
I’d start by going to your website and looking at it objectively. Navigate through it and ask yourself: Can you find and understand what you offer? Can you easily locate things like care levels, pricing or next steps? Did going through the website build trust? Do you want to take action? And does the site actually allow you to take action easily?
The most common gaps I see start with structure. Navigation can be confusing, or important information may be buried too deeply. That is one of the most common issues we see. Content that is important to the user journey can be hard to find, or it may be thin, generic or outdated.
Then there is the user experience side, especially with an older audience in mind. If a senior or family member is searching for your site, friction around conversion points matters. Maybe the call to action is hard to find. Maybe the site has accessibility issues, like very small text or difficult color contrast, making it harder to read and navigate. That creates unnecessary friction, especially when that person has hundreds of other websites they can visit that may be easier to use.
Finally, I think a lot of organizations lack a real growth plan for the website. They treat it as static, almost like “this is what it is,” instead of continuing to evolve it. Even if your infrastructure is a little outdated, there are still ways to make your current website work harder for you. Having a long-term plan turns the site into more of a conversion engine instead of just a brochure.
Why are senior living operators generating more leads but seeing less impact on move-ins, and how should marketing teams respond?
I think leads as a KPI can be pretty misleading on its own. It’s very easy to generate volume. It’s easy to set up a campaign and drive more calls and forms, but it’s much harder to generate qualified calls, qualified forms and real demand.
We’ve seen clients come in with high lead volume but really low conversion-to-tour or move-in ratios. A couple things tend to happen there. The most common one I see is a lack of a sophisticated data strategy. Maybe they’re not tracking at an accurate enough level, or they’re not feeding offline conversion data back into their campaigns and decisions.
I also think it goes back to the feedback loop between marketing and sales and really using data to guide decisions. It can be dangerous to rely on leads as the end-all, be-all metric. You need to take it a step further down the funnel to tours and move-ins and understand how qualified those leads actually are. Are they being lost early on? Are they actually care inquiries? Are they financially unqualified? Feeding that information back into campaigns is critical.
That also means tightening alignment across teams and moving beyond cost per lead to a more qualified lead metric. We’ve started using the term “quality leads,” and we have a formula that helps us understand whether those leads are likely to end up with a tour or a move-in.
The last piece is clean CRM data and accurate call tracking. You can’t just rely on calls and forms. Taking measurement fully down the funnel to tours and move-ins is going to be critical.
What sets Fountain Digital apart from other marketing partners in the senior living space?
When we started Fountain a couple years ago, we were very intentional about not just creating another digital agency. Our founding team had all worked at different agencies across the space throughout our careers, and we wanted to handpick the things we loved most, the things that worked best and the lessons learned along the way to create something that felt special and refreshing.
I’d say what sets us apart starts with our client relationships and customer service. We really want to be a partner and an extension of our clients’ teams.
Our data, analytics and tech savvy are also a major part of it. It all goes into our obsession with data and results. Our team has the chops not only to understand the data, but to measure the full funnel and close the loop. I think we’re pretty unrivaled there.
I’d also point to our attention to detail, our strategy and our level of activity. We’re here to meet and beat our clients’ goals, and we’ll do what it takes to get there.
Zooming out, what will distinguish senior living organizations that turn digital visibility into real business results in 2026 from those that continue to struggle?
The organizations that are going to win are the ones that understand digital visibility is no longer just about showing up in search results. It’s about being trusted, referenced and easy to find wherever people are looking for answers.
The organizations that rise above it are going to get the brand mentions. They’re going to see the benefits of AI search because they’ve built the right foundation, created the right content and made it easy for both users and machines to understand who they are and what they offer.
Others are going to be struggling to climb and catch up because this is not something you can flip on overnight. It takes technical strength, authority, strong content, clean data and alignment between marketing and sales. You have to build toward it intentionally.
That’s where the business impact comes in. Visibility by itself is not enough. The organizations that succeed will be the ones that can connect digital visibility to qualified demand, tours, move-ins and measurable growth. That is where senior living marketing is heading, and it’s where organizations need to be if they want to compete in a fully digital world.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Fountain Digital was founded in 2023 with a mission to refresh the agency standard. We’re a digital marketing agency fueled by data and technology — driving results through advanced strategies in SEO, paid media, web design, marketing automation, CRM integration, and analytics. We’re data-obsessed and committed to bringing expertise and value to every client engagement.
Discover what you’re missing and why the nation’s top operators rely on Fountain Digital to drive results. Contact the Fountain team today, and visit https://www.fountaindigital.com/senior-living-agency/ to learn more.
The Voices Series is a sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends, topics and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For more information on Voices, please contact [email protected].