Inside Advice on Marketing Senior Housing
By Phyllis M. Thornton
This article is the first in a series of articles derived from Thornton’s new Textbook & CD: Inside Advice on Marketing Senior Housing—The 15 Components of Success.
Long gone are the days when hosting a cheerful open house and producing a pretty brochure passed for a marketing program. Today, maintaining and protecting your market amid fierce competition and rapid-fire industry change requires solving complex issues. It’s a time where no one’s future is assured. If marketing planning falters, an occupancy goal that looked like a sure thing can suddenly become a pipe dream. If marketing execution is incorrect, full occupancy can turn into vacancies before you know it.
While senior housing has never been a simple business, today it’s more complicated than ever before. In fact, you might be tempted to call it something stronger—chaos.
Marketing has suddenly become crucial. To succeed in the face of this daunting reality requires advanced marketing systems and a formula for achieving full occupancy.
One key to successful marketing planning is directing resources to those areas that have the greatest influence on occupancy development and maintenance. However, tracking occupancy as a benchmark for success is misleading in that census is a trailing indicator of a marketing program’s overall effectiveness.
A successful marketing program should…
To read the rest of the article (and parts 2 and 3), click here.