PEAK17: Senior Living Marketing Ideas for a Growing Industry

This past month we had the honor of getting to speak at the Leadingage #PEAK17 Conference in Washington, D.C. We decided to put together a presentation about the competitive landscape of the assisted living industry and how it affects marketing for assisted living. Below are some of the major takeaway points from our talk on senior living marketing ideas for the growing assisted living industry. 

1. The Assisted Living Industry is Growing FAST 

While senior living in general is growing quickly the assisted living subsector of the industry is growing just as rapidly if not quicker. Total resident capacity has increase about 54% in the past 5 years alone. There's approximately 1.1 million residents in assisted living communities and this number is expected to almost double by 2030. With the growth in capacity comes major growth revenue. In 2014 the assisted living industries revenue was 56 billion however is expected to increase 43% by 2025 to 80 billion. 

2. 10 Companies Make Up approx. 1/3rd of The Industry

While the assisted living industy is comprised of hundreds (if not thousands) of different companies ONLY TEN companies make up approximately 1/3rd of the entire industry as of 2015. These 10 companies own approximately 316,000 units which is almost 1/3rd of the 1.1M total capacity. 

*The chart shows the top 10 companies in the assisted living industry as of 2015. 

3. It's Only Getting More Competitive

While these industry is growing rapidly and dominated by only 10 companies it's also only getting more and more competitive. Factors such as aquisition growth, new developments, and new startup communities are making the industry extremely competitive, especially for the smaller companies that make up the bottom 2/3rds of the industry.

This graph shows the the increase in senior housing acquisitions over the past 10 years. An example of one of these major acquisitions is Brookdale's aquisition of Emeritus Corp for 1.4 billion in stock in 2014. 

4.) Traditional Methods of Marketing

All this competition begs the question: how will the other 2/3rds of the industry compete with the big guys in the top 10? We took a step back in our talk and discussed what companies traditionally did to get new residents. The traditional "outbound" methods of marketing assisted living include things like print ads, radio ads, singnage, community outreach, direct mail, and professional referrals. While these methods have worked in the past and will continue to work in the future there are some problems with this type of marketing: 

1.  It's tough to measure their effectiveness.
2. These methods aren't very scalabe meaning you have to pay the same for each direct mail campaign each time. They don't build on themselves over time.
3. They're relative to the size of your marketing budget. Because they're not scalable and you need to "pay to play it's always going to be impossible to beat out the top 10 companies with bigger budgets. 

*Miked up and ready to drop some inbound knowledge in the startup zone at #PEAK17

5.) Inbound Marketing 

Inbound marketing is a strategy that attract potential residents to you vs you reaching out to them – Tactics include content marketing, blogging, SEO, and marketing automation. All these enable your community to get found online by potential residents and convert them into leads without you sending expensive mailers or interrupting them with cold calls. In our talk we explained how the inbound methods are both extremely measurable and also "relative to the size of your brain and not your wallet," a quote from Brian Halligan the CEO of Hubspot.  

6.) Combining Both Inbound AND Outbound will Allow the Bottom 2/3rds to Compete Going Forward. 

The point of our talk and our recommendation to the audience was to say that successful assisted living companies are doing a combination of both traditional outbound marketing as well as inbound marketing. While we don't think that any company should cut out their traditional methods completely (because they do still work) we suggest that companies just take some of their budget from the old methods and invest more in inbound. There are a huge number of benefits to doing this but our point was driven home by the image below. This graph shows that the cost of a lead using traditional marketing methods is 3X more expensive than an inbound lead for small-mid sized companies (those with 51-200 emmployees). This means that the bottom 2/3rd of the industy have hope! They can use inbound tactics to practice more effective marketing and generate more leads with less money. 

*Outbound leads are 3X as expensive as inbound leads for companies in the 51-200 employee range. This means that the smaller guys have hope!

In conclusion we had a great time at LeadingAge's PEAK17 conference. We met a ton of great people and new companies in the startup zone. Our takehome point was that in order to compete in the fast and competitive  landscape of assisted living you'll need to do things differently than you've done them before. Don't change completely but slowly allocate more of your marketing budget from slower, less effective methods towards inbound marketing. If you're not a member of the top 10 this is becoming a neccessity!

Not sure how to get started with inbound marketing? Try our starter pack and we'll get you started in your path to generating inbound leads for 3x less than your traditional methods.