MYTH: We Don't Need Personas for Marketing Our Senior Living Services

Approximately 47 million seniors live in the United States. We can attribute this number to Baby Boomers, but it doesn’t mean that’s where your senior living marketing demographics stop.

Think of your grandparents, or maybe your parents and your in-laws. Do they enjoy all the same activities? Are they the same in terms of health and ability? If your relatives are anything like mine, the answer is no. Just in the small circle of seniors I know, the abilities, hobbies, and desires vary dramatically. 

Now, think about moving all of them to the same senior living facility or providing them all with the same senior living service? That probably wouldn’t work. This is why personas are crucial for senior living services. 

Tag along as we dig into the details of why personas matter and how you can make sure you’re targeting the right people.

Why Personas Matter

Simply put, a buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. Your personas can be based on actual data, as well as educated guesses of your customer demographics, goals, behavior patterns, and motivations.

Personas allow you to identify where your customers are on the internet, so you can meet them there. They can help guide content development, because when you understand your customers’ goals, you can create content to help them accomplish what they are trying to achieve and overcome obstacles along the way. Personas allow you to focus your time. Last and definitely not least, personas can attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers to your business.

In senior living, you might think the only people you’re marketing to are seniors themselves, but that’s simply not the case. A majority of the time, caregivers and family members are the decision makers for seniors. What you think appeals to the senior may not appeal to their adult daughter, so you need to make sure you’re serving that audience relevant content as well.

How to Create Personas for Senior Living

You should spend time and effort creating your personas. To start, look through your current residents. Who made the decision to move? Was it the senior, their adult children, a doctor, or a caregiver?

Each of your personas should have different motivations and reasons for choosing your service. Your job when building your personas is to find a customer that fits the description and demographics of your ideal customers.. Here are a few things to avoid when building your personas.

Once you've done your research, interview each of these people and ask them a series of questions to clearly define their decision-making process. From this research and interview process, you should end up with three to five of your top customer segments clearly defined. Then comes the fun part.

Using Your Buyer Personas in Senior Living Marketing

Whether you’re marketing care services or care communities, your personas should fuel your editorial calendar. Use the pain points you uncovered in the research process to create blogs, videos, and graphics to help your audience along in their individual buyer journeys. Remember, you should have different content for each persona. What appeals to an adult daughter may not be top of the list for a senior on their own.

If you created content before you had your personas, you can go back and repurpose it to appeal to your new personas! Creating new content and updating your old content isn’t where you should stop, though. Make sure you’re using your new persona information to nurture leads throughout their entire buying process, specific to their individual needs—not your need to close a sale. 

You can also create experiences specific to your personas. Seminars and events are great ways to serve content to your personas.

Well, I think we’ve effectively debunked the myth that we don’t need personas to market senior living services. The industry is booming and the audience landscape is ever-changing, which means it’s time to peel back all the layers and make sure you’re marketing senior living services to the right people.