Most senior living marketing plans are channel lists. Facebook, SEO, a newsletter, a line for paid search, and a goal to “increase website traffic.” None of that tells an executive director how many move-ins to expect, what each one should cost, or whether the building can staff the residents it is trying to attract.
A useful plan answers four questions: how many move-ins and hires you need, where they will come from, what they should cost, and how you will know by March whether it is working. Everything else is detail.
This is how to write one, in the order we would write it.
Start with where the building actually is
Before any goal, write down the current position, by care type:
- Occupancy today and twelve months ago
- Move-ins and move-outs over the last year
- The units that sit empty longest, by floor plan
- Open roles, turnover, and agency hours used
Then decide which constraint is binding. There are only three: demand (not enough of the right families are inquiring), rate (they inquire but cannot or will not pay), and staff (you could fill the unit but cannot care for the resident). Each one produces a different plan.
The national picture helps frame this but does not answer it. NIC MAP reported senior housing occupancy at 89.9% in Q2 2026, with independent living at 91.3% and assisted living at 88.4%, and that level changes what a marketing budget is for: mix and rate matter more than raw volume. Your submarket may look nothing like that, so check your own market before borrowing the national story.
Set goals in move-ins, not traffic
Traffic, followers and impressions are inputs. Write the goals as the outputs the business runs on, and work backwards.
| Goal | Example target | Why it is on the plan |
|---|---|---|
| Occupancy by care type | Assisted living from 86% to 92% by December | The number the owner cares about |
| Move-ins needed | Net gain plus expected move-outs | Occupancy alone hides the replacement load |
| Tours completed | Move-ins divided by your tour-to-move-in rate | The first stage that tracks revenue |
| Qualified inquiries | Tours divided by your inquiry-to-tour rate | What marketing directly produces |
| Cost per move-in | Your own prior baseline, then better | The only marketing number that maps to revenue |
| Speed to lead | First contact attempt within an hour, staffed hours | Free to improve, and it moves every stage below it |
The arithmetic is simple, and the rates must be your own. Say a 100-unit assisted living building at 86 residents wants 92 by December, and last year’s records show about 30 move-outs. That is roughly 36 move-ins, not six. If your history says one in four completed tours becomes a move-in, you need about 144 tours. If one in three qualified inquiries tours, you need around 430 qualified inquiries. Now the plan has a number marketing can be held to.
Do this per care type. Memory care and independent living run on very different sales cycles, and a single blended target will fund the wrong one.
Write the recruitment side into the same plan
A plan that fills units it cannot staff has created an operations problem. Hiring belongs in the same document, with the same structure.
Ziegler’s 2026 State of the Senior Living & Care Workforce report put total turnover at 35.4%, and 40.8% for RNs. AHCA/NCAL’s 2026 workforce report found 87% of assisted living communities having difficulty hiring. So a 60-person care team should plan for roughly 21 replacements a year before any growth.
Set the recruitment goals the same way: hires needed by role, qualified applicants per hire, interviews held, cost per hire, and agency hours you intend to remove. Fund the roles that always turn over as an always-on campaign rather than a burst when someone resigns. Our recruitment marketing work is built on that model.
Be specific about who you are reaching
“Seniors” is not an audience. A senior living plan usually has four:
- Adult children, often in their fifties and sixties, researching on a phone after work, frequently under time pressure
- Prospective residents, especially for independent living and life plan communities, who research longer and decide for themselves
- Professional referrers: discharge planners, elder law attorneys, home health teams
- Caregivers and nurses you want to hire
For each, note what triggers the search, what they need to know first, and how urgent it is. A family after a hospital discharge needs a phone answered today. A couple considering independent living may take a year and want to read everything.
Look at competitors the way a family would
Skip the SWOT grid. Search your own care type and town on a phone and note who shows in the ads, the map results and the organic results. Then, for your three nearest competitors, check:
- Do they publish pricing, or a starting range?
- Can a family book a tour online without a phone call?
- How many reviews, how recent, and do they reply?
- How fast do they respond to an inquiry? Submit one and time it.
That last check is usually the most revealing, and it takes ten minutes.
Choose channels by the job they do
Every channel on the plan should have one job and one measure. If you cannot name both, it does not belong.
| Channel | Job | Primary measure |
|---|---|---|
| Paid search (Google Ads) | Capture families already searching | Cost per qualified inquiry and per move-in |
| Google Business Profile and reviews | Win the map results and the first impression | Calls, direction requests, review rating and recency |
| Website and care-type pages | Turn visits into tours | Tour requests and calls per visit |
| Meta (Facebook and Instagram) | Reach adult children in your area before they search | Qualified inquiries, then move-ins |
| Email and automated nurture | Keep long-cycle inquiries warm | Tours booked from nurture |
| Programmatic and CTV | Build familiarity in a defined geography | Branded search and site visits from the area |
| Professional referral outreach | Earn referrals from discharge planners and advisors | Referred inquiries and move-ins |
| Recruitment advertising | Keep the care team staffed | Cost per qualified applicant and per hire |
Two rules shape the Meta line. Senior housing ads generally run in Meta’s Housing special ad category and job ads in the Employment category, and both remove age, gender and ZIP-code targeting. The creative has to find the audience, so write for the adult child in the copy rather than in the targeting.
For specific tactics under each channel, see our list of senior living marketing ideas worth running.
Decide what you are asking people to do
The call to action in senior living is a tour, a call, or a planning resource. It is never “buy now,” and concessions do not belong in the headline. Discounting to fill a building that is near 90% occupied gives away rate you did not need to give.
Write down the primary action for each audience, and what happens after someone takes it: who calls, how fast, and what the family receives in the meantime.
Build the budget from the goals
A budget that starts from last year’s total carries last year’s mistakes forward. Start from move-ins needed by care type, multiply by the cost per move-in you believe is achievable in your market, and add the lines that are easy to forget: owned channels, recruitment, agency fees, tools, and a contingency. Our line-by-line budget template walks through each one.
Agree how you will measure it before anything launches
Most arguments about marketing performance are really arguments about definitions. Settle them in the plan: what counts as a qualified inquiry, which attribution window each care type uses, where the source of truth lives, and which single number the executive director owns. Our guide to senior living marketing KPIs and tracking setup covers the full list and how to wire it up.
Then set the review rhythm: the funnel weekly, cost per move-in monthly, and budget allocation quarterly. The quarterly review should be willing to cut a channel, not only add to one.
The one-page version
If the plan does not fit on a page, nobody will use it. For each community:
- Position: occupancy, move-ins and move-outs by care type; open roles and turnover; the binding constraint
- Goals: move-ins, tours, qualified inquiries, cost per move-in, speed to lead; hires, applicants, cost per hire
- Audiences: who, what triggers them, how urgent
- Competitors: pricing, tour booking, reviews, response time
- Channels: each with one job and one measure
- Actions: the call to action per audience, and what happens next
- Budget: built from move-ins and hires needed
- Measurement: definitions, windows, cadence, owner
Write it as “[Community Name] marketing plan, 2027,” date it, and review it every quarter against what actually happened. A plan that is never compared with results is a wish list.
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