Marketing for aged care and retirement living operators
Occupancy is the number the board watches, so the work is aimed at the adult child doing the research and the referrer standing at the bedside.
Where the money moves.
An empty bed costs money every day it sits empty, and that revenue is never recovered. It makes occupancy marketing a different discipline from brand marketing: the metric is days vacant, the pipeline is measured in weeks rather than quarters, and the enquiry usually arrives mid-crisis after a fall, a hospital admission or an assessment that changed everything in a fortnight. Speed to first call decides more placements than creative ever does.
The person being marketed to is rarely the person moving in. A daughter in her fifties does the searching, compares homes on the government listing, reads the star ratings, works out what a refundable deposit means against a daily payment, then brings a shortlist to her father. Everything you publish has to survive her sitting with two browser tabs open, one of them showing your accommodation prices and rating. Any gap between the two reads as something being hidden.
Referrers fill beds quietly. Hospital discharge planners, placement consultants, geriatricians and community nurses move people at the exact moment of decision, and they need a single page on each home they can hand over: room types, current vacancy, care capability, dementia support, what the daily payment covers. That material is usually months out of date, which is why a placement consultant rings the home they spoke to last week instead of yours.
Retirement living sells like property and explains like a contract. The buyer is downsizing by choice, weighing the village against staying put and against a unit on the open market, and the deferred management fee is where most enquiries go cold. Explaining it plainly, early and in writing loses a small number of enquiries at the top and converts far more at the bottom. We build the two funnels separately, because the buyer, the timeline and the objection are not the same.
What we run.
Home-level pages
One page per home carrying room types, current vacancy, accommodation pricing consistent with your government listing, dementia and palliative capability, and a tour booking that still works at ten at night when the daughter is finally free.
Enquiry response
Your sales and occupancy team gets a CRM that routes an enquiry to a named person within minutes, a call approach suited to a family mid-crisis, and a nurture sequence that stays useful through an assessment wait instead of going silent.
Referrer packs
A current one page profile per home for discharge planners and placement consultants, refreshed with vacancy, backed by quarterly contact so yours is the name on the desk when a bed is needed on a Friday afternoon.
Village campaigns
Display suite bookings, downsizer content that answers the deferred management fee before the sales appointment, and resident stories filmed with consent and capacity checked, because a village sells on the people already living in it.
Questions we get asked.
No, but say something about it. The rating is public, the family will find it, and silence reads as an admission. Naming what changed, who was appointed and what the last audit found does more for enquiry conversion than a campaign that pretends the page does not exist. We have written that page for operators mid-remediation and it holds up.
The adult child, usually a daughter between forty five and sixty five, with the referrer network worked in parallel. The resident matters enormously during the tour and in the decision to accept a place, and almost not at all in the search that produces the enquiry. Retirement living inverts this, because there the buyer is the resident.
You should, and it has to match the accommodation pricing published on your government listing. Families check. Where operators come unstuck is a website showing a rounded number and a listing showing a real one, followed by a very sharp conversation at the tour.
Enquiries by home, enquiry to tour, tour to move-in, average days vacant, and cost per move-in against the daily revenue a bed carries. Occupancy percentage is the board number, so the report opens there and works backwards into what marketing moved.
Also in care services
Talk to us.
9 services under one team, run against the numbers your business already reports on.
Contact the Ignis Team
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