When you want to effectively plan your marketing strategy for your assisted living center, it pays to be strategic and thoughtful during this process. Depending on your region, you may have stiff competition in the assisted living center market. This can make it all the more important to place a strong focus on marketing efforts to avoid getting lost in the sea of other facilities. Whether your assisted living center provides standard services or specialized ones, there’s almost certainly something that your facility does better than the other ones in the region.

If you can hone in on what makes your assisted living center ideal for your target customers, you’ll be well on your way to marketing your organization effectively. From attracting high-quality candidates for open positions to bringing in new clients and their families to your facility, there are key benefits to a great marketing strategy in the assisted living industry. To market your assisted living center, follow the list of tips we’ve compiled based on evidence-based research and expertise.

1. Know Your Strengths

In the nursing home industry, every facility has strengths to boast about and weaknesses that could be improved. As the head of marketing efforts, your job is to highlight the strengths of your organization and communicate those to potential clients. If you know that your nursing home meets expected nurse staffing levels in the numbers that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recommend, you’ll be a rare commodity. As data from the Payroll-Based Journal indicates, almost 75% of nursing homes failed to meet this expectation in 2017 and 2018.

Although this is an unfortunate reality of the industry, it can show how much your organization cares about safety and compliance if you can demonstrate that your facility is staffed adequately. This is a key point to include in marketing materials. If you know your organization’s strengths, it will be easier to share them with potential clients, partners, and staff. Safety, qualified staff, and other strengths will give you starting points for marketing.

2. Stand Out From the Crowd

Depending on what services your assisted living facility provides, you might have more competition than others. For example, if your services include prescription dispensary services, you’ll have to compete with over 30,0000 other prescription dispensaries in the United States, according to Envicare. Even if your facility has specialized care that makes it one of the only facilities with those offerings in the country, you should still market as if you have a decent amount of competition. It never hurts to reassure potential clients and staff that your facility takes your reputation and the quality of your services seriously.

3. Highlight Specialized Offerings

If your facility offers specialized treatment like pelvic floor physical therapy, make sure to include that in your marketing. After all, almost 24% of women in the U.S. experience symptoms from one or more pelvic floor conditions. Since these disorders are common, providing treatment in your assisted living facility or making partnerships with those specialists will only help your marketing efforts thrive. In general, when you can include partner providers in your marketing, you’ll build trust in clients.

If you don’t have any partners or providers who work with your facility to provide specialized care, you can build up those professional support networks before you launch your new marketing campaign. Making your facility the best it can be is one of the best marketing strategies. You’ll get great word-of-mouth marketing if the families who already use your facilities are happy to speak positively about it online and in person.

In short, marketing your assisted living facility takes some time, effort, and deliberate planning. Besides following best practices for marketing, you can get the word out about what makes your facility amazing. Highlighting strengths, partnerships, and specialties will make your assisted living facility stand out in the best way.