Assisted living marketing plan sample: a 90-day plan you can copy

What situation does this plan start from?

The community in this plan is an example, and every detail about it is invented. It has 48 licensed beds in private rooms, one resident per room, in a mid-size metro, with one building and one sales director who also covers the front desk at lunch. Today it has 39 residents, which is 82 percent occupancy once you round 39.4 rooms down to a person. Nine rooms are empty.

The rent figure is not invented. We use $6,200 a month, the 2025 national median for assisted living from the CareScout Cost of Care Survey, the survey that was Genworth’s for two decades. The survey ran July through November 2025, and the median was up from $5,900 in 2024 (CareScout Cost of Care Survey, 2025). Care fees and community fees sit on top of rent in most buildings, so the real value of a room is higher. We leave them out to keep the math conservative. Replace $6,200 with your own base rent before you use any number below.

Marketing so far, in the example: a website built in 2019, a Google Business Profile with 11 reviews and the newest one 14 months old, no ads, and about eight inquiries a month, most from a referral service and two hospital discharge planners. Nobody writes down where inquiries come from or how long the callback takes.

The market around it is not the problem. NIC MAP put assisted living occupancy at 89.1 percent in the third quarter of 2026 across the 31 primary markets it tracks, up from 88.3 percent the quarter before, with inventory growing 0.4 percent year over year (NIC, October 1, 2026). A building at 82 percent in that market is losing families to neighbors that show up first and call back faster. That is the premise of the plan. For the wider view of channels and follow-up, see our senior living marketing guide.

What is the goal, in rooms and in dollars?

The goal is 43 residents by day 90. That is 90 percent occupancy and four net move-ins. We picked 90 percent rather than full because a plan that needs nine move-ins in a quarter from a standing start will miss, and a plan that misses in month one gets abandoned in month two.

The math

• Empty rooms today: 9 rooms × $6,200 = $55,800 a month in rent the building is not collecting, or $669,600 a year. The rent is sourced, the room count is the example.
• The net goal: 4 rooms × $6,200 = $24,800 a month, or $297,600 a year at median rent.
• Move-outs: we assume two in 90 days. That is an assumption for the example, not a statistic. Your own last four quarters tell you the real number. So the gross target is 6 move-ins.
• Tours per move-in: we assume three. Again an assumption, not a statistic. If you have twelve months of tour and move-in records, divide one by the other instead. Three tours per move-in means 18 tours.
• Inquiries per tour: in more than 250 mystery shops of senior living communities during 2023, Bild & Co. found an inquiry-to-tour rate of 22 percent (Senior Housing News, February 12, 2024). We plan at 30 percent, because the follow-up rule later in this plan is the reason that number moves, and that is an assumption too. At 30 percent the plan needs 60 inquiries in 90 days, 20 a month, about five a week. At the 22 percent average it needs 82.

To be plain about what is sourced and what is not: the $6,200 rent, the 22 percent industry inquiry-to-tour rate and the 89.1 percent market occupancy come from the sources linked. The 48 beds, 82 percent occupancy, two move-outs, three tours per move-in and 30 percent inquiry-to-tour rate are the example’s assumptions. Replace each with your own records before you adopt the plan.

Why 90 days and not 30: ads produce inquiries in days, but a family’s path from first search to move-in often takes a month or more. Three months is the shortest window in which a plan can be judged on move-ins rather than on clicks.

Who does the plan target?

The adult child first. In our work, the person who fills out the form or calls is usually a daughter or son, not the person who will live in the room, and they are often employed. AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving counted 63 million family caregivers in the United States in 2025, nearly one in four adults, and six in ten of them hold a job on top of caregiving (AARP, July 24, 2025). That is who is searching at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday.

What that means for the plan:

• Searches happen at night and on weekends, after work and after visiting Mom. The follow-up rule covers those hours or it fails.
• Their questions are specific: what it costs, what is included, whether the cat can come, how soon a move can happen. Every ad, page and profile post in this plan answers one of those questions. None of them say "compassionate care in a home-like setting".
• They compare. They will tour two or three places. The one that answered first and gave a straight price gets the first tour.

The second audience is referral sources: hospital discharge planners, home health agencies, elder law attorneys and placement agents. They send families who already have a move date. The third is the resident, who decides on the tour and almost never online. Nothing in this plan markets to "seniors" in general.

Which channels get the budget, and what does each one do?

Free and fast first, paid second, slow and compounding throughout. The Google Business Profile costs nothing but time and decides the map pack. Google says local ranking rests on relevance, distance and prominence, and that "more reviews and positive ratings can help your business’s local ranking" (Google Business Profile Help). BrightLocal’s 2026 survey of 1,002 U.S. consumers found 97 percent read online reviews for local businesses and 74 percent want reviews written in the last three months (BrightLocal, 2026). A profile whose newest review is 14 months old looks closed.

The table splits three monthly budgets. The splits are our choices for the example, not benchmarks. Each column adds up to the band.

Google Ads takes the largest share at every band because it is the only channel that produces inquiries in the first two weeks. It is also the easiest to waste money on. Search only, no display, phrase and exact match on your town plus "assisted living", negative keywords for jobs and nursing, and a landing page that shows a price range. That is the whole first campaign, and it is what our paid ads service runs for communities that would rather not learn Google Ads this quarter.

The local search line is the slow one. A rewritten assisted living page and a pricing page start to rank in two to four months, and a state payment guide can bring in families for years. We lay out what those pages need in our senior living SEO guide. At the $2,000 band the plan is mostly labor, about 25 hours a month from the sales director and the executive director, and the cash goes almost entirely to ads.

What gets built and measured in each of the 90 days?

The calendar below is the plan at the $5,000 band. The $2,000 band drops the paid review service and the second guide page. The $10,000 band adds the second ad campaign in month 2.

The targets along the way, on the example’s assumptions: by day 30, 15 inquiries and 4 tours. By day 60, 20 inquiries a month, 6 tours and the first two move-ins. By day 90, 60 inquiries, 18 tours and 6 move-ins, which with two move-outs puts the building at 43. If month one comes in at half of that, the plan is not broken. Check the response time and the ad search terms first.

What is the follow-up rule?

Every inquiry gets a phone call from a person within five minutes, from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., seven days a week. An inquiry that arrives overnight gets its call by 8 a.m. This is the rule the plan depends on, and it is where most communities quietly fail. In Bild & Co.’s 2023 mystery shops, 53 percent of web inquiries got no response within two hours and 13 percent of calls never got a response at all (Senior Housing News, February 12, 2024). Every ad dollar in the table above buys an inquiry that then sits in that gap.

The cadence, written down so that it survives a sick day:

1. Minute 0 to 5: call. No answer: leave a voicemail with your first name and a direct number, then send a text saying the same thing.
2. Hour 1: call again if there was no answer.
3. That evening: a text with one question. "Is there a good time tomorrow to talk about your mom?"
4. Day 2: call. If you reach them, the goal of the call is a tour date, not a brochure.
5. Day 4: an email with the pricing page and a photo of the room that fits what they described.
6. Day 7: call.
7. Days 14, 30 and 60: a call or a text. Families who are not ready go on a monthly check-in until they decide or ask you to stop.

In the example, the sales director cannot cover 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week and also give tours. Nobody can. The two honest options are a second trained person with the phone on weekends, or a partner who answers. This is the part of the plan we are most often hired for: our lead handling service answers the inquiry within minutes, qualifies the family, runs the cadence above and books the tour onto the community’s calendar. We don’t promise a specific number of leads, tours, rankings or move-ins. We do promise the call happens.

Which numbers get tracked every week?

Five numbers, in one sheet, reviewed every Monday in twenty minutes.

1. Inquiries by source. Profile calls, website form, Google Ads, Facebook, referral partners, walk-ins. This needs a separate tracking number for the profile, the site and the ads, and a source field on the form that someone reads.
2. Response time. Minutes from the inquiry arriving to a person speaking with the family or leaving a voicemail. Track the median and the worst case.
3. Tours booked and tours held. Count no-shows separately. A high no-show rate is usually a confirmation problem, fixed with a text the morning of the tour.
4. Move-ins and move-outs. Both, because the goal is net rooms.
5. Cost per tour by paid channel. Spend divided by tours from that channel. In the example, $2,300 of Google Ads producing four tours in a month is $575 a tour, and at three tours per move-in, $1,725 a move-in against $6,200 of first-month rent. Example arithmetic, not a benchmark.

Two rules for acting on the sheet. If a paid channel’s cost per tour is above a month’s rent after six weeks, pause it and move the money. If median response time is above 15 minutes in any week, that is the only thing fixed that week, because every other number sits downstream of it. Setting up the tracking numbers, the form source field and the tour log is what our analytics service does in the first two weeks, so the Monday sheet fills itself in.

What does the monthly review cover?

One hour, once a month, with the owner, the executive director, the sales director and whoever runs the marketing. Same agenda every time:

1. Occupancy against the line. Residents today against the goal line: 41 at day 30, 42 at day 60, 43 at day 90.
2. The funnel by source. Inquiries, tours and move-ins this month against the 20, 6 and 2 the plan calls for, and which sources produced them.
3. Response time. Every inquiry that waited more than 15 minutes, and why. Names, not averages.
4. Lost families. Who toured and did not move in, where they went, and what they said. This is where pricing and tour problems show up first.
5. Spend. Cost per tour by channel. Move money from the worst to the best. One change a month, so you can tell what it did.
6. Reviews and the profile. New reviews, current rating, map pack position, and the five families to ask next month.
7. Next month’s builds. The list from the calendar, with a name and a date on each line.

The decisions get written down. A review that ends with "let’s keep an eye on it" has not happened. At the day 90 review the question changes to "which parts earned the next 90 days", and the answer usually cuts one channel and doubles another.

How do you turn this sample into your own plan?

Swap five numbers: your bed count, your occupancy today, your base rent, your move-outs over the last four quarters and your tours per move-in. If you have no records, start the sheet in week 1 and use the example’s assumptions until you have 90 days of your own. Then pick the budget band you can hold for a full quarter. A plan funded for one month and cut in the second has not been tested.

Most single communities can run the $2,000 band themselves if the executive director owns the profile and someone owns the phone. The plan needs help when nobody can cover the follow-up hours, when the website has to be rebuilt before ads can land on it, or when there is more than one building. Care Growth works with assisted living communities across the country on this plan: we build the pages, run the ads and the profile, answer the calls and book the tours, and we charge a fee per move-in rather than a retainer, with a 30-day move-out refund. To see the math for your building, ask for a free growth audit.

Related: Lead handling · Paid ads · Analytics · Google Business Profile · Senior living marketing guide · Senior living SEO guide