By Liz Weir
Colleges Figured Out Personalized Recruiting Decades Ago. Senior Living Is Still Catching Up.
I have a unique vantage point when it comes to thinking about senior living marketing. Prior to my current role in the agency world, I spent a good portion of my career working in and around higher education marketing. Currently I’m simultaneously the mother of a rising college sophomore, a soon-to-be college freshman, and a rising high school junior. That means college marketing has been a near-constant presence in my professional and personal life for as long as I can remember.
And the more time I spend in the senior living space, the more I keep thinking: these two worlds have so much in common, and one of them is so much further ahead.
The Group Event as Default
Ask most senior living communities about their primary marketing tactic and you’ll hear some version of the same answer: events. Lunch-and-learns, luncheon tours, group information sessions. And that makes sense in a lot of ways. There is safety in numbers. Prospects feel less pressure in a group setting. Getting a roomful of people to come to you is more efficient than chasing them one by one, especially when resources are scarce
But is that actually the best way, or is it just an assumption we’ve repeated so long it became accepted wisdom? In higher ed sales, we used to say our biggest competitor was inertia. The more time I spend around senior living, the more I believe inertia is the biggest stumbling block here too, and not just for prospects. It’s just as real for teams used to doing what they’ve always done simply because they’ve always done it that way.
The other thing group events do that we don’t talk about enough? They give unqualified prospects perfect cover. They get a nice free lunch, smile politely, and walk out saying “Thanks so much, I’ll be in touch.” And you’ve spent real money and real time on someone who was never seriously considering your community to begin with.
In sales, getting to “no” quickly with the wrong prospects is just as valuable as identifying the right ones. Group events, by design, make it easier to avoid that honest conversation, not harder.
The College Parallel
Here’s what struck me as my own kids were going through the college search process. The fundamental goal of a college admissions office and a senior living marketing team is essentially identical: get the right prospects onto your campus so they can experience it firsthand and see themselves there.
Colleges figured out decades ago that the path to that visit couldn’t be one-size-fits-all. Go to virtually any college or university website and you’ll find a menu of ways to experience the school. Virtual tours. Self-guided tours. Individual guided tours. Group information sessions. Overnight visit programs. Open houses. Admitted student weekends. They built an entire infrastructure around the idea that different students want to engage differently, and that meeting people where they are is how you earn the visit.
Now look at most (not all) senior living community websites. One event. Monthly. Usually a lunch.
Boomers Want to Be Treated as Individuals. So Treat Them That Way.
Communities will tell you this themselves: today’s senior living prospects, largely boomers, want to be seen as individuals. They want personalization. They want to feel like a community was built for someone like them specifically, not just for “seniors” as a category.
And yet the dominant marketing tactic is a group event that treats everyone identically.
As the daughter of boomers myself, I can tell you with some confidence that the last thing my parents would want is to sit through a lunch-and-learn surrounded by strangers. What they’d want is a real conversation. A tour where they could ask their specific questions. Time with a resident or two. The feeling that someone was actually paying attention to what mattered to them, not running through a standard script.
I don’t think my parents are unusual in this. I think they’re a big chunk of the market.
What Borrowing from the College Playbook Actually Looks Like
The idea isn’t to abandon events entirely. Group visits absolutely work for certain prospects and certain stages of the decision process. The point is that they shouldn’t be the only option, and probably shouldn’t be the default one.
Think about building a visit infrastructure the way colleges do. Offer individual tours with flexible scheduling. Create a self-guided option for prospects who want to explore on their own terms before they’re ready to talk to anyone. Develop a “day in the life” experience where a serious prospect can spend a few hours alongside a current resident. Build out a virtual option that’s genuinely good, not just a video slideshow, for adult children who are doing early research from across the country.And take a harder look at who’s showing up to your current events and whether they’re actually the prospects worth spending your resources on. Lead quality matters more than lead volume, and the communities that understand that are building smarter marketing programs because of it.
Colleges learned all of this through decades of competing for the same students and paying close attention to what actually moved them toward a decision. Senior living is facing increasing competition, a sophisticated and demanding prospect base, while managing shrinking marketing budgets. That sounds like exactly the moment to stop doing what you’ve always done and start borrowing from the playbook of people who figured this out first.
