Senior Living Marketing Gets Personal As Operators Put Residents Center Stage

With AI usage on the rise, operators are shifting marketing strategies to embrace authenticity by putting their residents in the spotlight.

They’re also finding ways to address resident feedback when experiences are less than ideal. 

A widespread practice that is becoming increasingly popular is replacing the use of stock photography for social media posts and websites with photos of the actual residents. Both Farmington Hills, Michigan-based Beztak and Omaha, Nebraska-based Heritage Communities have been leaning into the approach when it comes to marketing materials.

And they’re seeing benefits from doing so, leaders from the organizations told Senior Housing News.

“I love that it represents who is in our communities,” Lacy Jungmann, chief marketing officer at Heritage Communities, told SHN. “I want future residents to know and have a real, true glimpse into what they could be moving into, and for them to see themselves inside of our communities through the website.”

But while residents are beginning to see themselves more in marketing efforts, at times, they are also feeling unheard.

As one example: A resident from a New Perspective Senior Living community recently reached out to SHN to voice concerns about feeling uninvolved, with unanswered concerns and complaints.

“Get our input, please, because this is our life,” the resident wrote to SHN. “We want to be comfortable.”

Chris Hyatt, co-CEO of Minnetonka, Minnesota-based New Perspective Senior Living, told SHN that his organization does its best to answer all questions, concerns and complaints in a timely manner. 

While collecting feedback is easy, closing the loop and executing on it is the most difficult part, according to Jason Kohler, executive vice president of senior living at Beztak.

“One of the biggest mistakes an operator can make is allowing an information vacuum to develop. When residents know there is an issue but do not know what is being done about it, uncertainty can quickly become frustration and speculation,” he said.

Addressing feedback

When residents have concerns and feedback for communities, some operators state they can often reach out directly to the community’s executive director. Others have additional formal steps as well.

Hyatt said aside from reaching out to the executive director, residents are able to submit publicly posted “resident grievances or concerns” forms, given at move-in and upon request.

“We investigate grievances promptly and provide responses/results of investigations back to the resident in a timely fashion, with specific timeframes dictated by state regulation,” Hyatt explained. “We also conduct annual resident satisfaction surveys, and the data from those surveys is analyzed and acted upon in numerous ways. We approach every situation by listening empathetically, acknowledging the resident’s concerns, thanking the resident for bringing their concerns forward and doing our level best to resolve the issue.”

Other standard practices across New Perspective communities, according to Hyatt, include monthly resident council meetings, care conferences with community and regional leadership, using LifeLoop to communicate the goings-on and results of resident council meetings to family members and garnering feedback through semi-annual outreach to residents or legal representatives.

Other communities have similar practices and are likewise focused on ensuring residents feel heard.

Heritage Communities has stepped up the frequency in which it seeks feedback from residents to ensure concerns are being addressed, according to Senior Vice President of Operations John Pryor. Rather than conducting annual feedback surveys, they are now conducted quarterly, a change that has been ongoing for the past 18 months. In addition, executive directors are encouraged to be out in the community and active with residents so they feel open about sharing their concerns and feedback about what can be improved.

The increased involvement has helped increase resident satisfaction scores, Pryor said, and the operator has made steps to identify CapEx projects that can help, such as installing a putting green at one of its communities or building raised garden beds at another.

“Those are things that we’ve appropriately gotten the feedback of for the ideas that the residents want for their home, and [we’ve] been able to turn around and deliver on that,” Pryor said.

Garnering feedback from involved residents has helped operators handle missteps as well. According to Kohler, one Beztak community opted to remove all paper communications in favor of electronic communications without properly informing residents of the change on a Friday, leading to unhappy messages and a petition to have them reinstated by Monday.

“The residents had a valid point. The issue was not simply whether paper or digital communication was better. We had changed something that affected their daily lives without sufficiently involving them in the decision,” Kohler said. “We failed to listen and underestimated how important the change would be to them.”

Residents in marketing

Resident involvement also extends to a willingness to be in marketing materials for the communities.

According to Jungmann, showcasing real residents and highlighting their stories helps sell prospects on the idea that they belong in senior living. However, there are also times where their involvement can lead to learning moments for marketing teams.

For Heritage, one incident included using a resident’s image in a direct mail piece advertising a fall prevention AI platform, which the resident later found out about and voiced disappointment.

“It was a really important lesson for us to be able to respect the residents’ decisions and choice in different types of collateral use,” Jungmann said. “That was one for us … where we really need to do a check back with the communities and get another layer of permission for that.”

New Perspective has used resident input to help steer the direction of its marketing efforts as well. In one instance, Hyatt said, new prospects had commented that the operator’s technology-enabled falls detection and management program was a deciding factor for a move-in, which led to a shift to better market that program to the wider community. In other instances, the company’s marketing team speaks with prospects who move in or ultimately opt to go elsewhere to determine what factors led to the decision to better inform future campaigns.

Beztak’s sales and marketing teams also focus on getting facetime with residents and prospects on a regular basis, according to Kohler.

“Even in my position, they sent in a lead form and came to me,” he said. “We had a 45-minute conversation. It was a fantastic wealth of information from a local prospect that is interested in a new development.”

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