How to compete with the “big guys” without “big guy” budgets.

By Susan Saldibar

Senior living is a tough, competitive market. And it’s not letting up. So, when Robin Craig was brought in by MBK Senior Living as Corporate Director of Marketing four years ago, she knew she was headed into a challenge. And she was ready for it.

The challenge: How to compete with the “big guys” without “big guy” budgets.

MBK owns or manages 22 communities with over 2,200 units of independent living, assisted living or memory care. Their mission is to enhance independence and quality of life with personalized service and care; all delivered with integrity, dignity and compassion.

The challenge Robin faced was how to get their community on the radar in a hotly competitive marketplace dominated by major players with multi-million dollar budgets. She knew they needed not only traditional advertising and outreach campaigns, but a focused, coordinated digital marketing effort.

“The big challenge was to figure out where to best allocate our online budget to compete with large senior living companies,” she said. “Another issue was to make sure we could update our website and social media on a consistent and relevant basis to drive engagement and lead conversions – and do this better than our competition.”

Enter G5 – Bold, innovative, collaborative and ready to rock.

Robin looked at several digital marketing companies, but selected G5, a Senior Housing Forum partner, based on their reputation for building and developing highly collaborative relationships with their clients.

G5 went to work to create a fully integrated web, SEO, paid advertising, call tracking, reputation management, and reporting/analytics platform. Liking what she saw, Robin had them help with some of their other marketing efforts, including Google Adwords and Bing ads, as well as remarketing and display campaigns.

Increase in leads and conversions; decrease in cost per lead. Pretty impressive.

The results of the collaboration speak for themselves:

  • 50% increase in online leads (year over year)
  • 315% increase in online form conversions (with only a 52% increase in spend)
  • Improved ad position average from 2.7 to 1.9

But the real measure of success of any advertising effort in senior living is in the move-ins. After using G5’s integrated digital marketing program, MBK saw a 42% increase in move-ins generated from the MBK website.

“Our partnership with G5 has been a key driver of our online success and an important part of our overall increased portfolio occupancy over the past four years,” says Robin.

Find out more about how G5 and MBK collaborated for impressive digital marketing results by downloading the full case story here.

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