Senior living operators have for decades extolled their communities as “cruise ships on land.” That story has not always been in touch with what new residents want.
As the baby boomers enter the senior living industry, they are bringing with them wants and needs for not only leisure and lifestyle, but also health, wellness and a sense of community. Senior living operators are responding to this by shifting their sales and marketing strategies from showing senior living as a “cruise ship” model, where residents buy bundled packages for short-term leisure and entertainment; toward a “country club” model focusing on long-term membership, personalized experiences and pairing residents with the community that will suit their needs.
“I think we’re overdue for a new story,” said Heritage Communities Chief Marketing Officer Lacy Jungman during a Senior Housing News webinar earlier this week. “You’re selecting your community just like you’re selecting your country club: what is the atmosphere? What are the vibes? Am I going to fit in? What do we have in common? What is my life going to be?”
Cruises are short-term, while country clubs are something you might belong to for years, she added.
Christy Van Der Westhuizen, who is senior vice president of sales at Jaybird Senior Living, worked as an assistant cruise director for Holland America Line before she joined the senior living industry. While she does think the senior living industry can offer “bits and pieces” of the cruise ship experience, such as choice or entertainment, operators should understand that senior living is at heart a “subscription-based model” that requires them to routinely show the value they provide to residents.
“Once we get people in the door, every month, they get the bill and have to decide, am I going to happily pay this invoice, or am I going to look for an alternative and happily write my 30 day notice to leave?” she said. “Gone is that leisure lifestyle. If you want it, great, but there are other opportunities for you to find purpose without that cruise-ship mentality.”
Making all of this harder is the fact that senior living operators also are grappling with changing digital search preferences among their prospective residents and their families.
Senior living’s changing value proposition
In order to present the true value of senior living to prospects today, sales and marketing teams must adapt narratives to be more authentic to build trust, along with providing greater pricing transparency.
By using “social storytelling” with short narratives through Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, Jungman said senior living providers are able to create a more authentic representation of community life to show prospects what they can expect when they move in.
In the last two decades, senior living sales pitches have changed from this “cruise ship” mentality that has evolved into a “country club” model focused on improving lifestyle for older adults, not providing bundled services or rates. Other changes include operators shifting lifestyle services and amenities toward a subscription-based model, where residents can elect for additional costs to have access to various community features.
The next era of senior living sales and marketing will center on creating an experience that is “more unbundled,” that offers customization and options for residents—as a key theme of the boomer demographic is demanding independence and choice. Van Der Westhuizen recently took a cue from another operator, which coined the term “living forward” as a way to depict what residents would get within their walls.
“Senior living is not the end, it’s living forward,” Van Der Westhuizen said. ”That is a message that we all need to take into consideration.”
To evolve messaging, sales and marketing teams should focus on content and information that “can be purposeful” while also showcasing entertainment and amenity offerings.
Operators must also consider the “vibes” factor of a community, with both Van Der Westhuizen and Jungman breaking down the senior living experience to an 80-20 ratio, 80% of resident satisfaction is based on meal services, care delivery and the other 20% is more emotive and based on a resident’s lived experience or emotions.
Capitalizing on data in sales and marketing
Senior living providers have joined up with new technology partners learning new systems in recent years, and as a result, they are sitting on tons of customer data that they did not possess just a short while ago. But that data is not useful by itself.
In an effort to improve sales, senior living providers must deliver “clarity to our audience,” Van Der Westhuizen said. Sales teams should be able to articulate a company’s mission, values and services to prospects in a way that is reflective of daily community life.
It’s easy for operators to waver between two extremes, staying dialed in on execution and not reviewing data or focusing too much on data without a clear plan in place, Jungman said.
This has led to Heritage community leaders asking more of its vendors to provide data and flow information into the operating platform. For example, by using a fall detection device, Heritage communities are able to “quantify the qualitative,” having more insight into aspects of resident life that wasn’t possible in the past.
“That helps us, not only from the forefront, from the prospect, but also retention of that resident and the satisfaction of the family overall,” Jungman said.
AI changing search behaviors
The boomer-era buying journey for senior living is also being influenced by online research and AI-supported tools like answer engines that are changing the ways prospects search for senior living information online.
This is forcing senior living operators to become “the expert” in providing factual information online to get used in AI queries, according to Jungman.
“AI is an opportunity and it is also on the horizon as a potential threat or challenge for us if we don’t stay ahead of the game,” Jungman said during a recent SHN webinar. “These AI overviews are looking for the expert in whatever that question is.”
At Heritage properties, Jungman said sales and marketing teams are “capitalizing on the opportunity” for answer engine optimization (AEO) by optimizing online testimonials or fact sheets for clarity, user intent and providing trustworthy information for large language models (LLMs) like Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini. This is to ensure that prospects “actually have the correct information” and safeguards against spreading misinformation or perpetuating ageist stereotypes of senior living.
This must force providers to create “consistent content” on certain areas of operations that a company excels in to stand out for a higher chance of being included in AI-provided responses to prospects, Jungman said.
A Pew Research Center report published last year found that people clicked result links less often on pages with an AI summary than on pages without one, and when an AI summary appeared, online users almost never clicked on the cited sources. Users who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional search result link in 8% of visits, the report found.
This is why senior living sales and marketing teams should expect fewer clicks and track “impressions-without-visits,” Jungman said.
To improve AEO, Van Der Westhuizen said sales and marketing teams for the Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based operator are focusing on “fresh, relevant content” on Jaybird community websites to be the “content that shows up” when prospects search in their market areas.
Awards and “best of” distinctions can significantly improve a community’s chances of being used in AI-powered search results and answer engines, with third-party endorsements serving as a strong signal to AI algorithms that in turn boost consumer trust and raise visibility, Jungman added.
