Fill Your Beds: Finding Residents for Assisted Living
Sep 16, 2024
This blog will examine a common question: How do you find residents for your residential assisted living home? Your facility's success depends on its ability to find and retain a consistent flow of residents, and knowing how to attract them efficiently is critical. Whether you're just starting out or looking to expand, having a solid strategy for attracting residents is critical.
Recruiting residents for your residential assisted living facility requires a combination of social media marketing, placement agencies, and community contacts. Social media marketing enables you to reach a large audience while highlighting your facility's unique perks. Placement agencies, on the other hand, connect you directly with families and individuals who require assisted living services, offering a more tailored approach.
Another effective technique is to build relationships inside the community. Engaging with local groups, healthcare providers, and community activities can help your facility become a trusted and important part of the community. By employing these tactics, you can maintain a consistent flow of residents and create a successful facility that stands out in the competitive assisted living market.
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Social Media Marketing
One of the most efficient strategies to attract inhabitants is to use social media, particularly Facebook and Instagram. Your target audience consists of potential residents' children, who are typically between the ages of 50 and 70. This demographic is active on these platforms, making them perfect for marketing.
To increase your visibility, develop and maintain active Facebook and Instagram profiles. Post regularly, highlighting interactions and events at your facility. Share images of events and ordinary life, but get permission from people before uploading. Your material should include conversations with residents and informative posts about your facility's benefits. Aim to post two to three times per week. Consistent posting fosters trust and puts your facility at the forefront of families' decisions.
Participating in groups is another key component. Join healthcare-related and community-focused Facebook communities. Engage regularly to raise awareness of your facility and establish a network that can result in referrals. Highlight your institution's lively and engaging environment to set it apart from traditional nursing homes.
Utilizing Placement Agencies
Placement agencies such as A Place for Mom, Caring.com, and SeniorAdvisor.com can help you quickly fill your beds. These organizations connect you with families seeking assisted living solutions.
When you register with a placement agency, your facility will be listed on their platform. Families submit information, and agencies give you contact information. Although there may be charges, the exposure and prospective referrals can make it worthwhile. Ensure your facility's presence on these platforms is informative and includes a link to your website. This gives families a thorough understanding of what you offer and fosters trust.
Building Relationships
Developing relationships inside the community is an effective approach to recruiting residents. This strategy incorporates both short-term and long-term activities, as well as networking with various individuals and organizations.
Communicate with care managers, hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and skilled nursing institutions. They can direct families to your facility. Connect with other assisted living facility owners. They may refer residents to you if they are unable to accommodate them. Join local business organizations and chambers of commerce. Attend gatherings, give talks, and promote your services. Consider forming connections with non-healthcare organizations such as estate sale companies or morticians. These collaborations can give useful referrals as families shift loved ones to assisted living.
Final Thoughts
In order to attract residents to your residential assisted living facility, it's crucial to develop a comprehensive marketing strategy. This should include leveraging social media platforms to reach potential residents and their families, partnering with placement agencies to connect with individuals seeking assisted living arrangements, and actively engaging with the local community to build trust and awareness. By effectively implementing these multifaceted strategies, you can establish a consistent stream of residents and cultivate a thriving and successful assisted living facility.
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Show full transcript 👇
Transcript
00:00:01
Hey everybody, I'm Brandon Gustafson. Welcome back to the channel. In today's video, we're going to be getting into the topic of how to find residence for your residential assisted living facility. If you've ever wondered that, make sure you stick around. We're going to get into that in today's video. Hey everybody, I'm Brandon Gustoson. I own and operate two residential assisted living facilities and I created assisted livinginvesting.net to provide you with coaching that helps you start your own
00:00:33
residential assisted living facility. Welcome to Assisted Living Investing. In today's video, we're going to be getting into the topic of how to find residence for your residential assisted living facility. This is something that I see everybody asking about. They they all want to know how am I going to find residents? Is it possible for me to find residents and bring them into the facility? I've talked about this before. We did a video that was on is it can you really make $30,000 a month in a
00:01:00
residential assisted living facility? And the short answer to that was yes, you absolutely can. And it's largely because finding residents for your assisted living facility really is not that hard. But in our video today, we're going to get into kind of the more nitty-gritty of how you can find those residents and bring them to your facility. So you don't just have to take my word for it and you can kind of understand what that looks like. Before we dive into the topic though, I just
00:01:27
want to remind you get over to the website assistedlivinginvesting.net and make sure you are getting access to the free underwriting calculator. You'll also get on our email list where that we've got a little 12week miniourse that's going to help you through the process and with a few action steps to help you get started on your journey to investing in residential assisted living facility. You'll also then be the first to know once we launch our full 12week course, which is going to be a course
00:01:55
with 20 plus hours of content to really help you through the process. In the meantime, we have our business planning guide on the website, and you can buy that uh with a couple hours of content specifically around how to use that calculator more effectively, the updated version of the calculator, uh business plan guide, uh with a business plan template, and an overview of how to use that and how to edit it and and a few other things, some other bonus materials. So, go over to the website, get out get on the email list and make
00:02:25
sure you're signing up for that content because it's going to really help you out on your journey to investing in residential assisted living. Now, let's dive into the topic. So, how do you find residents for your residential assisted living facility? The first one I'm going to talk about is social media. So, this is something you can do with Facebook and Instagram. Uh, those are probably the two that I would focus on. Tik Tok maybe though I I probably would your your target market is not going to be on
00:02:54
Tik Tok. So I would focus a lot more on Facebook and Instagram. Your target market by the way uh if you haven't realized this is not the residents of the facility not the 80 year old. It is their children. So you're looking at the people that are like in their in their mid50s to probably about mid60s early 70s. that group, their parents are going to be the ones that are in your residential assisted living facility. More than likely, you might have some of them that are that are that age that are going to
00:03:26
be there, but more than likely, especially if you're a high-end facility, you're going to be targeting their children, and that's the age group that you're in. And that age group is largely on Facebook with a little bit on Instagram. So, that's where you want to be with your social media. that's where your population is and why you should be focusing on those two social media platforms. So, when you're on Facebook and Instagram, you want to have that account. You want to be posting
00:03:50
regularly. And I would suggest that you have a few different pieces of content. One is going to be uh content that's around like interactions that you're having with your residents. You have a party, you're doing activities, those types of things. You're taking pictures and and then you have to get permission in order to post these from from the residents. but uh you you're posting those on there. The next one, the next pillar of content that you're going to have is going to be just like some of
00:04:16
the benefits that you have or more informational type of stuff. And I would suggest that you're posting like two or three times a week uh if you've got your facility. And the more that you're posting, the more that people are going to see it. They're going to follow you. Um they're going to be like, "This is really useful information. This is really insightful. This is cool." uh when my mom or my dad is ready to go to a facility or when I'm ready to go to a facility myself, I'm definitely looking
00:04:39
into this facility because they're providing a whole lot of helpful information and getting it out there. The next thing I would suggest with social media is get involved in groups. Now, they're going to be groups that are kind of healthcare specific. We have an incredible one in Idaho that we're a part of and it kind of it's a around senior living and that's a good one for you to be at and kind of interact with people on and and make sure people are aware because you can get some referrals
00:05:02
from that source. But I'd also encourage you to get into more community focused like neighborhood type of Facebook groups and and make sure you're kind of posting on those with regularity so that people are aware of you and and the types of services that you offer that you're a fun place. you're not some stuffy old uh nursing home that doesn't do anything and doesn't interact with their residents. You want to make sure that they see you as a really cool and nice place for themselves or for their
00:05:31
parents to go to as they're going through that process of finding an assisted living facility. So, while getting on social media can be a little bit scary, it might take a little bit of of time to figure it out. Uh you can still do it. It's still a useful spot for you to spend some of your time on. I talked about this in a previous video. We'll link that up above about the concept of who and not how. So, if you are interested in doing that, make sure you get over there because it's going to
00:05:57
talk a little bit more about the who's and uh using a virtual assistant specifically to help you through that process of helping you out with your social media. Something that is is quite affordable uh and it's something that you can can really kind of work on and help you build out this presence on social media. It's it's a it's a really good thing for you to be able to do uh as you're trying to get out there and get the word out there. And you're going to find that you can get a few referrals
00:06:24
through that process. Uh it is it a lot of these things are a more of a long game. Um except for the last one. Uh but it's okay. You want to be playing the long game in addition to trying to fill your beds quickly. Uh because if you're playing that long game, it's going to help you have more longevity and have more people coming into the facility more consistently, which is something that you really want to make sure that you have as you're operating your assisted living facility. Next, we're
00:06:51
going to talk about placement agencies. And I just said the last one, but I actually meant the next one. Uh placement agencies are the ones that that could probably help you out a little bit more in getting your beds filled in the more immediate term. So in here you're looking at places like a place for momc caring.com senioradvisors.com uh and there's probably going to be some state specific resources out there that are available to you with like the aging commission in in your state. So if you
00:07:19
just do some quick internet searches for uh placement agencies for assisted living, you're going to get bombarded with them. Um and you're going to have a lot of those that that come out there. But that's it's a good spot for you to start. We looked at a place for mom uh for our Colorado facility and signing up with them. What we found is there's a cost associated with it and for us it just didn't make a lot of sense. Plus, there was like actually a waiting list and I don't know if that was specific to
00:07:46
Colorado or if that was in general, but there was a waiting list uh for us to get on it and there's a cost that's associated with us. We were full enough that it just for us it didn't make sense. But for you that that may not be the case. you might want to partner with them and get on on their websites. They in addition to kind of helping do placements. the the way that they work is uh you have you're you're on their list of of facilities that people could go to. I don't know if you would call it
00:08:16
preferred facilities, but they're they're on you're on their list and then when um somebody needs to place their parent uh or themselves in a in a facility, they're going to get on a place for mom and they're going to look on their or they're going to submit their information. uh and and then once that information is submitted because you're on that list, you're going to get that contact information for that person. You can reach out to them uh and and start to engage them. Also, on these
00:08:44
websites, they have kind of a platform that um lets you put your your bio for your facility on there and have some information on it so that people can learn about you, people can go in and rate things. So, kind of like a Yelp um type of a thing uh where where people can go in and and add ratings for your facility and so you can get, you know, a fivestar rating, a four-st star rating or whatever um and and have that on there. So, it's a really good spot for place people to go and find that information. Uh so, you want to just
00:09:14
kind of be careful with with how that is built and and what that's going to look like. In addition to kind of that and and what I would say with placement agencies because you can put this bio in there is you want to make sure it's linking back to your own website because your own website you can get a lot more indepth with things and how uh you're describing your facility. And so as as much as using a place for mom to or one of these other places to to kind of help you fill your facility is great and can
00:09:41
be really helpful, if you want them to get a much more full picture and see pictures of the facility and and all of these things, I would try to get them to your website so that they can see that information and it's going to help them make a more informed decision. Plus, you're going to be able to cater to them a little bit more on that website and give them the type of information that they need, and they're probably going to just feel a little bit more comfortable with it. So, it's just a kind of a quick
00:10:06
tip there on how you might use the um use those websites to help get people to your website, which is going to be more beneficial to them in the long term. The last one I'm going to get into is building relationships. And I honestly think this is the best one for you to do. And there's a lot of different relationships that you can be building. So, the one that you're you probably would think of is is going to be like hospitals and and those types of places, but there's a lot of good connections
00:10:33
that you can can make as you're trying to fill your beds. And this is actually both a short and a long-term strategy. So, something you want to be aware of and and why I think it's the best one for you. So, you want to be building these relationships. Some of the people you would build relationships with are going to be care managers, hospitals, rehab centers, uh skilled nursing facilities. You also would potentially want to partner and and build relationships with other facility owners
00:11:00
because um you know it's it's kind of an interesting world when you are working in residential assisted living. Uh it's very easy for you to from the outside to think oh man you know they're my competition and it's true they're competition. they're trying to to bring residents in as well, but in reality, there is such a large population for residents that um you are competing maybe for the best ones. Um but apart from that, there's enough out there to go around for everybody. And so, u
00:11:31
building relationships with other residential assisted living facility owners is going to do a couple things. one, when you have a resident that just doesn't meet doesn't fit your facility anymore for whatever reason, uh it doesn't necessarily need to be bad behaviors. It could be level of care. Um you can can work with these other facility owners and vice versa if they have somebody that you know level of care isn't there and you're building these relationships so that you can kind
00:11:58
of refer back and forth. We've done this in Idaho a couple of times. uh we have these relationships in Colorado as well and it just helps us through the process in develop in in bringing more residents in. You'd also want to potentially look at independent living. So skilled nursing and independent are kind of levels that surround assisted living. So building relationships with them is you know you got somebody in in in a nursing home and they need to step down their care. They can come in or you have
00:12:27
somebody independent and they need to step up and go to assisted living. Those are really good spots for you to be developing relationships with as well as you go through the process. And another one that is kind of outside of the realm of the healthcare industry is getting into local community groups. And by this I mean like the Chamber of Commerce here in Utah. We actually have uh an incredible uh group that that is just for business owners. is outside of the Chamber of Commerce, but they do weekly
00:12:54
lunchons at a lot of different places throughout the the Salt Lake Valley and across the Wasach Front. And you can go to those. You get a the ability to do like a 30- secondond commercial about you and the services that you offer. And you can also uh, you know, raise your hand and give a 10-minute presentation once a month, I think, is what they do, or once a quarter. Um, so finding those types of groups is going to be great as well. And in those groups, you're going to be able to find a lot of good people
00:13:21
to work with. Um, people that that I talked to, and I don't operate in Utah, so this was I wasn't able to like really make any headway with these, but uh some places that would be really good for me to network with, were there's like this place that did like um estate sales, which is actually a really good spot to to work with. Because if you think about it, you have somebody that's old and needs to move out and the kids can't take care of them anymore. They need to sell their house and sell all their
00:13:47
stuff. they're going to do an estate sale. So, this is a really good resource for you. Um, there's a mortician there, which kind of sounds bad, but developing that relationship uh could could be beneficial, mutually beneficial with both of us. Um, and let's see, there were a few others that that were kind of in that line. Some functional medicine people, which is what I did with Novas Health, my business that failed, but uh working with that group of people is also going to be beneficial. So, as you
00:14:13
get into that type of a of a location, it's going to benefit and that's not to mention all the people that they, you know, their parents and and you know, the just the people themselves that are in those groups, uh, are made aware of it. And so, when they get people that are needing to transition into that phase of life, they're going to think of you as you go into it. So, building relationships with people and and getting out and networking in the community, one of the most important
00:14:42
things that you can do for you to fill your beds, it it is a long-term play generally, but by doing it, especially if you're working with like case managers or rehab facilities, skilled nursing, those ones could be a lot more immediate term and getting the beds filled at your at your assisted living facility. So, in today's video, we've been talking about how to fill your beds and some of the strategies you can use to go and find residents to get your beds full at your assisted living
00:15:08
facility. The first one was social media, looking at that as as a way to get into into it. Uh, some websites that you could use to to bring people in and find potential residents. And the third one was getting out and networking with people as you go through that process. If you found this information helpful, first, if you haven't subscribed, why aren't you subscribed? Make sure you subscribe, ring the bell so you get notified every time. We're right now we're doing weekly content and getting
00:15:34
this information out to you. I'm hoping here in the next little bit I can start doing a little bit more consistent uh or more frequent content for you, even doing some live coaching and live sessions to really dive into this. So, make sure you are subscribed and ringing that bell so that you get notified [clears throat] once I start getting that information out because it's going to be helpful to you on your journey. Number two, get over to the website assisted livinginvesting.net net so you
00:15:57
can sign up for the free underwriting calculator and get on that that email list so that you can start uh start making some progress on your journey to investing in residential assisted living facilities. And uh on top of that, you're going to be the first to know once our course drops, which is going to have 20 plus hours of content that's ready for you to start learning and implementing as you get started on your journey to operating your own residential assisted living facility. Does residential assisted living sound
00:16:27
interesting to you, but you just don't know how to get started? At assisted livinginvesting.net, we're here to help you through the process start to finish. Thanks for watching and have a great day.
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