You want to market to seniors and assisted living residents, but you’re not quite sure how. You might find that you have to navigate some stereotypical mindsets as well as the usual marketing challenges presented by digital natives. Here are some suggestions to help you break into the lucrative senior market as well as the more specific requirements of the assisted living population.

Find Your Niche

If you’re brand new to marketing to seniors, it’s crucial to find your niche. What is your target audience, and how do you intend to reach them? Once you’ve established a clear understanding of these questions, you can develop content that resonates with your intended audience.

If you want to target the affluent senior audience, then you need to consider producing high-quality, original content for older people. This means you’ll need to get creative with your storytelling, and it also means investing in tools that will allow you to integrate video, images, and other rich media into your content.

Create Personas

The process of establishing the target audience for your content is more effective when you do it thoughtfully and with rigor. One technique that can assist you is called persona development. With persona development, you can think of yourself not as a disembodied voice in a sea of people, but as an actual human being. You can craft personalities that are as specific as you need for different purposes. These personas can then be implemented into ad campaigns or PR plans.

Understand How People Search

Many consumers use search engines to find the information they need. It’s crucial to understand how people are searching for your product or service, and what they’re looking for. If you want to market to seniors, then you need to understand what phrases they might use to find your product or service. It’s also crucial that you do this analysis for both traditional and digital searches.

Create A Buyer Persona

As stated above, you need to understand your target audience’s psychographics. You can do this through the establishment of a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a fictional character devised by marketers to represent a group of people who have a common set of traits or attributes. Personas can be very effective in helping you identify the type of content that will resonate with specific audiences. They can help you define a group of people who will benefit from your product or service. If you want to market to seniors, then you can use their search behavior, buying habits, and lifestyle to craft a persona that will help you target the right audience. You don’t need to have all three attributes to create a persona, but you should have enough information to make the character realistic. If you don’t have the time to devote to creating perfect personas, then you can use heuristics – which are measurable shorthands that save you time and effort while still enabling you to make data-driven decisions – to create a narrower group of characters for more specific purposes. For example, you might want a sporty male persona for a blog post on running shoes, or a female persona for a post on how to dress for your body type. This way, you can still be strategic with your marketing while not needing to create perfect personas for every post.

Content Is King (or Queen)

While it’s crucial to produce high-quality, original content for older audiences, it’s also important to remember that they will potentially receive and consume much more content than your typical consumer. This means that your chosen medium – whether it’s a print magazine or a digital website – needs to possess a certain level of value to attract and retain this audience. If you want to succeed as a marketer for seniors, then understand how value is measured in this demographic, and use this knowledge to your advantage.

Mobile First

If you’re reading this, then you’re probably already aware that many people prefer to read content on their mobile devices. The number of people who access the web via mobile phones increased by 30% in just one year, according to Statista. In 2019, 68.2% of all searches were conducted on mobile phones, while only 26.6% were completed on desktop computers. As the number of people using mobile phones and tablets continues to grow, marketers should take this into consideration when strategizing content for this audience.

Vary Your Media

The rise of digital natives and the constant connection to their devices means that varying your media is now a key strategy in attracting the right audience. Varying your media can be an effective strategy when planning content for the mobile audience. When someone accesses your content on a mobile device, they expect to see different formats and varying textures. If you want to stand out among your competition, then you need to put the work in to ensure that your content is prepared for maximum exposure on all platforms.

Localize

While content is crucial for attracting and retaining customers, the language used in the content is just as important. If you want to target the international market, then you must localize your content for International audiences. Google Translate can make content much more accessible to non-English speaking individuals, enabling you to expand your reach globally. When creating content for the global market, you need to ensure that your language is clear and easy to understand, and that you use the correct and appropriate words and phrases. If your language is not as prevalent as you think it is, then consider translating some of your content – especially longer pieces – into other languages to reach more people. While machine translation is getting better each year, nothing beats human translation, and it’s still much more efficient (and therefore cheaper) than trying to find someone who speaks the target language to help you out with your content.

Be Scary Good

Last but not least, we want to remind you that scaring people is a key element of successful marketing. It’s not enough to produce decent quality content and hope that the target audience finds your content valuable and frightening. You should go the extra mile and put the time and effort in to ensuring that your content leaves an impression. Consider researching and utilizing the latest trends and technologies to bring your stories to life, and use techniques like white-noise marketing and fear of missing out to get your message across.

Takeaway

To get started, you’ll need to determine your target audience. You can use the above suggestions to guide you, and to kickstart your marketing efforts, visit this useful resource from the Content Marketing Institute. Once you’ve settled on a brand voice, create compelling content that will engage and retain your audience. Make sure to vary your media and translate your content into other languages as necessary, and do what you can to scare the hell out of your audiences. Good luck out there!