Market to Seniors: 9 Tips for Home Builders & Developers

5-min read

Learn why digital marketing is so important for home builders and developers and the tips to market to seniors.

Many seniors are retiring and preparing for a phase in their life where they won’t earn as much as they did before. As a home builder or developer, are you marketing to seniors effectively? Continue reading to learn proven techniques to market to seniors, how to increase your senior buyers and more tips about senior marketing…

In marketing to seniors, it’s important to recognize that digital marketing can be the most effective way to make sales. This aging population represents a huge, but relatively untapped, marketing opportunity for home builders and developers. Are you one of the ones pursuing this market?

Table of Contents

Why You Should Market to Seniors:

You should market to seniors because they represent a large audience and the fact that we are only in year two of baby boomers turning 65. Boomers makeup 73 million individuals in the United States and are approaching retirement quickly. We have another nine plus years of demand from seniors. You need to take advantage of this window of opportunity.

In addition to senior demand, marketing for seniors is a big boost to your business, according to a recent report from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) and the American Real Estate Association. Here are some proven ways in which you can market to seniors…

9 Tips for Marketing to Seniors:

Tip 1: Invest in Paid Campaigns

Seasoned marketers have found that paid campaigns lead to more engagement. For instance, paid campaigns include SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay-per-click) and other strategies such as retargeting and social media, which I will discuss later in this article.

You need to know that seniors rarely change their minds about their brand preferences. When considering paid campaigns, your marketing needs to target more than just what influences them. For example, consider adding an educational component that can help guide seniors in buying one of your homes or properties.

Tip 2: Consider Retargeting

Retargeting is a proven digital marketing strategy to increase brand awareness, gain traffic to your website and help lead seniors along the homebuyer’s journey. Also, retargeting gives your home building or developing firm a chance to re-engage with an interested homebuyer.

Retargeting in its basic form, simply tracks website user’s browser cookies in order to “retarget” them on another website they visit. Here is the definition: Retargeting ads target consumers based on their previous Internet actions. For example, its able to track online users by using a pixel within the webpage. It can also use an email which then sets a cookie in the visitor’s browser.

When you contemplate adding retargeting to your marketing mix, consider partnering with a third-party digital marketing agency. Expert assistance can not only make your retargeting campaign more successful, but it can also give you much needed insights about who interacts with your ads.

Tip 3: Target their Families Too

You may have assumed that the target market for senior living is people 65 and older, but there is another group you may have overlooked: adults with children. This target audience plays a major role in a senior’s choice for a home. This is because many seniors are family-oriented and trust their family’s decisions on where they purchased.

While many seniors have adult family members or friends to help them make final housing decisions, most adults over 55 play an important role, even if they don’t make the decision entirely independently. When marketing to seniors, consider adding their families as a secondary target audience.

Tip 4: Marketing to Families the Right Way

Bombarding adults and children with intrusive ads asking them to “email” or “act now” is not the way to go. Introduce people to engagement campaigns that raise awareness of your brand. That could mean launching a campaign that promotes the importance of finding the right home for parents as well as the benefits of building homes for seniors.

When setting up a website or running an advertising campaign, it is recommended to take particular care not to exclude potential residents from your message. In some cases, it may be useful to run ads aimed at a potential resident’s family, including messages addressed to them. In essence, advertise to the whole family unit and not to an individual senior.

Tip 5: Use Facebook

So many people use Facebook to catch up on what’s happening with their friends and family and to stay in touch. According to a study by Sprout Social, 60% of baby boomers are looking for promotions and information on social media. Plus, consider that 62% of online seniors 65 or older are on Facebook.

While there is no specific recipe for success, Facebook advertising offers a wealth of opportunities for marketers to promote to the elderly. With the right strategy and message, home builders and developers can generate leads and customers at a lower cost than traditional media.

Setting up your first Facebook ad campaign can be overwhelming, and you can potentially make costly mistakes. So, I suggest consulting with a social media expert and explain to them your goals for the campaign to ensure proper implementation.

Tip 6: Nurture their relationships

Seniors want value, location and convenience in a home. Some of them even rely on their shared homes to make them more attractive to them and their families. This should impact the way you approach seniors and the way you cultivate customer relationships with them. This will ultimately help them achieve their real estate goals and desires.

Tip 7: Your Competitors Are Doing it

As baby boomers continue to age, retire, and relocate, this share of the population continues to grow. This heavy demand of buyers fuel the real estate market for years and decades to come. In recent years, more and more real estate professionals have been considering the expansion of this particular market. Plus, they’re adjusting to take advantages of this growing opportunity.

You should market to seniors because your competitors are already doing it. While there is a wide variety of what seniors are looking for in a home or condo, you should always consider them as a key audience.

Tip 8: Research Seniors Further with Help

If you want to market to your older clientele, you should heed the following advice. The more information you know about your audience, the better your marketing results will be. As with any potential customer, strategy and consistency need to be right.

Most Internet marketers are usually young and do not fully understand the senior market. So, it makes sense to add at least one person to your marketing team who has experience. Or consider partnering with a marketing firm that does.

Tip 9: Advertise on Senior-Friendly Platforms to Market to Seniors

When conducting a digital marketing campaign for seniors, consider advertising on the websites they use the most. For example, consider running ads on websites like AARP, Pogo.com (a gaming platform with traditional games), and seniors.lovetoknow.com, which is a lifestyle blog for seniors to read about fashion, beauty and home décor.

If your online advertising is designed to appeal to a larger audience, it would make sense to create a landing page or an alternative start page that is specifically tailored to that audience. By doing so, seniors have a place to land on. They land on this after they click on a banner ad from one of the senior-friendly websites.

For more articles about tip to market to seniors, check out the following:

Comments are closed.