SHN Sales & Marketing- Content that Connects: Creating Meaningful Marketing

This article is sponsored by Seniors Guide. It is based on a discussion with Geoff Duncan, VP of Marketing at True Connection Communities, Katharine Ross, President of Seniors Guide, and Matt Paxton, Featured Expert on “Hoarders”, Founder of Transition Franchise Brands. This discussion took place on February 19th, 2025 at the SHN Sales and Marketing Conference.

Senior Housing News: I’m joined by three great panelists, and I’ll start by just asking each of them to briefly introduce themselves. So Katharine, you wanna take it away?

Katharine Ross: I’m with Seniors Guide and I’ve been creating content in the senior living space for about 24 years, and I just hope each of you guys walk away today with a couple of takeaways to help elevate your marketing campaigns.

Geoff Duncan: I’m the vice president of marketing for True Connection Communities. We operate 20 communities today. We are active adults and independent living only.

Matt Paxton: I run Clutter Cleaner. We clean out estates and help people downsize and move into senior living communities. Most of you would know me from the TV show Hoarders. I was the host of that show for 15 years.

SHN: Geoff, if you wanna start out taking this one first, just wondering if you can provide an example or examples of how you built a connection through storytelling.

Duncan: So something that we’ve really focused on over the past 12 months is taking video to tell stories of our community and residents. That has been a complete game changer for us. We have not only increased impressions, views and eyeballs on our communities, but we’re telling authentic stories of our residents, and it is really the reason that people are starting to become more interested in our communities. Video is inexpensive, so we’re generating up to 2 to 3 million impressions a month, and of that about 5,000 to 600,000 views, and the thing that I love so much about 35% of people who are watching our videos are watching them 100% of the way through. That is a staggering number for me, so it really shows like people are interested in the content related to senior housing.

SHN: Matt, same question you can provide some examples.

Paxton: I wrote a book called Keep the Memories Lose The Stuff, to help families downsize, but I got the outline of the book through doing a podcast with AARP. I just wanted the content because I’d be on video with AARP and I knew they would have a lot of views, but what I didn’t know was we ran out of time because I talk a lot and we had 2000 questions that didn’t get answered and so I said, hey, can I get those questions? And they were like, sure. Once we got the questions we were able to convert that into the actual outline of my book. The book has done very well, it’s a New York Times bestseller because we didn’t, I didn’t write the book based upon my opinion. I wrote it on OK, we know exactly what the customer base needs and wants because they told us and then we were able to connect them that way and I think that’s why the book did so well because we listened to them and used their content.

SHN: Let’s talk a little bit about misconceptions about senior living. This is a perennial topic we’ve been talking about for years and years, but it’s still an issue. Katharine, I’d love to get your thoughts on what are the most common misconceptions about senior living today and how do you start to address them through content?

Ross: Well, I hope no one shoots me for this, but seniors are still scared of being put in a home. We see that because on Google Trends last week I saw that “nursing home” is still the most searched for term in senior living. Consumers are missing the value statement of senior living which is the camaraderie that is built inside the buildings. I think storytelling and content are really fun ways to address that. I think we can show people how they thrive and create new relationships, new friendships, not just with other residents but with people on the team as well.

SHN: Sure, yeah, Geoff, does that resonate with you?

Duncan: I think for me a misconception, at least on the marketing side of things, is we sometimes play it too safe in this industry, and I feel like we can showcase our residents and showcase our communities in ways that are real, that are authentic, and sometimes that means it’s okay to be a little edgy, right? These are people, and people are a little edgy and we can show that.

SHN: Yeah, love that. Alright, well I think that’s a good segue into talking more about specifically the content, so what types of content resonate best with older adults compared to their adult children and how do you address all of the audiences that you need to reach with your content. Katharine, do you wanna take that one?

Ross: So what we’re dealing with are two different sets of wants and worries between seniors and their kids. Seniors are worried about being put in a home and diminishing their lifestyle and losing their enjoyment of life in general. Their caregivers and adult children are worried about the care for their precious loved ones and they’re worried about their safety. We see that in the way the content is digested. We see that adult children want to know about safety and they want to know about care. Whereas seniors want to know more about what life inside the building looks like, video is a great way to demonstrate that.

SHN: Geoff, any thoughts on content?

Duncan: I’ll give you an example. So we just ran a campaign on social media last week. It was really designed around Valentine’s Day, and the campaign was asking our residents for their dating advice. This is something our team came up with. So what we did is we mailed out white boards to each of our communities, we showed them an image of how we’d like it drawn up, and we asked them to basically interview their residents and share their dating advice. Some of the feedback that we got back in the pictures was fantastic. They were so funny. One person said take her to White Castle. I mean these were just like hilarious pieces of content and I’m mentioning this because I think that is absolutely appropriate for two different audiences and then they’re really, you know, it’s the same message to two audiences. Perspective residents, I think that’s really important because it showcases, hey, this is a real community, these are real people, this is, you know, this is a fun place to be. But I think also, you know, it’s really important because a family member wants to know that their loved one is gonna be in a place where they’re gonna have a good time they’re gonna live their life to the fullest and I think that this campaign in particular kind of nailed it on both fronts and I’m not sure that that was completely intentional at the time but I think at the end of the day that’s what we achieved and just, you know, we had one community go viral. We had 1000 plus shares. We’ve had 8000 likes on one community. We had a video crew come out from Channel 4 in Detroit and interview the community. So you know these things really matter and I think it’s just a way to show that the viral aspect would happen.

Paxton: I think what we keep dancing around that it’s user generated content. It’s there. I mean your content’s in the building. It’s already there. And we’re spending a lot of time and money. Put a microphone in front of them and ask questions like it’s that simple and we do that so we really believe, I mean we’re a service provider we’re not in the we’re not the community we’re helping them get into the community and so for us like they don’t actually want us right but we know as soon as we finish they’ll be happy. We’re always trying to get them excited about it and build trust and build excitement and so we’ve started doing live events. We partner with communities to do live events as the actual content and our life and our businesses is around stuff. And we kept trying to think, how do we get trust with stuff and it was like, how do we get them to tell stories? And so we finally started doing our content as an adult show and tell. And so we get them up on stage and I interview him like I’m Johnny Carson and prospects and residents show up. The residents will bring items and they wanna tell their stories. This one lady, she brought up a doll and she was in her 90s. I was like, what’s, what’s the deal with the doll? And she goes, well, after the war I got to go to a New York fashion school and she goes, I was gonna be a seamstress and then I got pregnant and happily I wanted to go home and be a mom and I did, and I raised my family. At 50, between grandkids and grandkids I got to actually start sewing again, so I started making these outfits for dolls and she holds up this doll and she goes, and they got really popular in Brooklyn. Now I still have people pay me $1000 to make these dolls. She goes, I love making these dolls. I started off doing it for grandkids and she’s like, “so all you ladies out there, all you young women out there that want to start a business, it’s never too late. I opened my first business at 70.” The room was applauding, it was like she won the football game. People were so excited and she’s talking to the young ladies in their 70s in the audience saying, hey, you can go build your business and it was super emotional and super inspirational and that is a free touch point. We had 150 residents and prospects in the room. I had no idea that was gonna happen. The stories are there, you just have to give them (residents) the space to speak.

SHN: The next topic I wanna talk about is empathetic guidance. I really like this topic because I think it’s kind of an undercurrent in a lot of the conversations at these conferences, this tension between how we can push our sales teams to be as aggressive as possible while at the same time making the sale that is, you know, so difficult and requires so much empathy. So basically my question is how do you balance that? How do you offer empathetic guidance? For families dealing with this uncertainty or guilt about transitioning to senior living. Geoff, do you wanna go first?

Duncan: I think our role in this industry is at the front end. People are not completely aware of all of the options available to them, right? So I think on the front end it’s actually really important to treat the situation as an advisor and I think that how that applies to content is we, we talk about it in the marketing department. It’s like okay well how are we creating the journeys in order to position ourselves as an advisor. We try to not be too salesy in certain parts of the sales funnel. However, we’re still in the business of trying to get move-ins and we want residents, so there has to be, once discovery has occurred, once we’re aware of their needs, there has to be a kind of increasing assertiveness and I’m sort of using that word intentionally. The messaging kind of ramps up a bit, right? We want to at that point when someone is aware of their choices and they’ve sort of already made the decision of what is appropriate for them and then it’s just a matter of okay well I have to get off the fence now I have to make that decision. We’re trying to think about how content can help people get off the fence, but on the front end you know you’ll hear me talk about authenticity and it’s really about a kind of softer messaging positioning ourselves as an advisor.

SHN: Matt, I would love to hear from you first on this topic of empathetic guidance.

Paxton: I mean we’ve really struggled with not being too pandering and to us the empathy is really more about just dropping the BS and being brutally honest with them. So we’ve tried to be much more direct and much more honest about our communication. When I started this business we would ask what did you do during the war, we’d ask their job and now we ask, did you go to Woodstock? Your residents got high at Woodstock. That’s a reality. Is your messaging really on point for them? I mean, it’s kind of like you talk to your teenagers. I say things I did to my teenager, and they think it’s a joke. They laugh at me because they’re like, Dad, it’s so old school. So we’ve really tried to take out just a much more brutally honest, and again give them the space to tell their stories, but we don’t pander and that’s been really the like probably the best thing we’ve done. We just like to go, yeah, instead of you know trying to convince them 6 different positive ways of why we should move there. We say, oh God, I bet you’re really upset that we’re here. I bet you just don’t want to move. I bet you really don’t want us here. And they’re like “yeah, I do not want you here.” And then we’re able to negate that issue and then we can build on that right away. So we’re getting trust right away by breaking that wall of BS. So for us we think that’s how you’re empathetic.

SHN: Break the wall of BS. The headline is writing itself in my mind.

Paxton: Well, we all do that, right? Like it’s because we want to be perfect. We want to make it golden and gentle and perfect and like that’s just not who the resident is anymore. I really try to think I have 7 kids. I have 6 teenagers. I have 6 boys, 11 to 16 and a 19 year old girl, so I have to constantly learn how to re-communicate with my kids, and I tried to do the same thing with our residents. Why are we not changing the way we communicate? Not technology, but words.

SHN: Geoff, how do you distribute your video content?

Duncan: A number of different ways, we’re big on YouTube, we leverage YouTube quite a bit, but that’s one of the starting points. That’s not the ending point. So we use YouTube, we’re doing remarketing, we’re doing display advertising, we’re leveraging video and all of those. We are using organic social through meta obviously but then also LinkedIn for more corporate type of content. There’s different reasons that you would put out content, something we have to be focused on is why would someone want to work for our company as opposed to, you know, any one of you. We have to put messaging out there, to make sure that we’re seeing it in a way that is attractive to potential candidates so LinkedIn is appropriate for that. We’re doing something, maybe a bit unique, when we put out video content or really any content as an organic post on say Facebook, we’re also then taking the posts that are performing well from an organic standpoint and then we turn them into ads. Now that’s not boosting posts, we’re turning them into ads and we’re doing this a lot. It’s a huge reach but it shows organic content. This is a lot of user generated content as our teams are sending in photos to us. And, it’s really hard. We’re doing 250 of these posts a month. It’s a lot of posts that we’re promoting along with a lot of other things. The distribution is trying to kind of span the whole spectrum of distribution to try to get as much, you know, eyeballs on, on things as possible.

SHN: Katharine, any thoughts on distribution beyond that?

Ross: We really have to think about where your audience is and the truth is with all the generations doing research in senior living right now, our audience is everywhere. They’re on TikTok, they’re on YouTube, they’re on traditional media too and so video content is a great opportunity to display that way. One of the things I wanted to echo on with Geoff’s point earlier, you mentioned that your videos are getting watched completely. We find that seniors will watch an entire video; whereas I’m a GenXer, I fast forward through TikTok so think about that when you’re designing content.

SHN: I guess this also gets to this question about accessibility if your audience has hearing, vision, any tips there for.

Ross: So one of the things I noticed with some provider websites is they’re not necessarily taking into account the web content accessibility guidelines W-CAG, the weirdest word in the world to say, right? But they’re great guidelines. They talk about high contrast, they talk about background noises they’re really thinking through the experience for the visually impaired and the audio impaired, which is so important for our seniors.

Paxton: Back to the different types of content, we B2B or B2C, we have found we are looking like I’m on TV obviously I’m not telling you guys to be on TV, but we don’t do TV for the TV viewership, we do TV for it when they convert it to TikTok and YouTube. Our conversions come from TikTok and YouTube. I do TV shows just for those conversions. Then I get on the morning local media. I really think that’s still super ignored like your local morning after The Today Show, there’s still TV on and they are dying for content and you guys have incredible content and I just cannot stress to be your local expert in your local morning media like they need your content badly and it’s not very cost prohibitive, but I mean I do everything from speeches to book; but if I that that morning media I am talking to people that are still at home at least watching eating breakfast, and that is something we I really push. Please go be your local expert.

SHN: I guess to that point about both cost and ease of creation, we have a question about how do you create the video content? If you use an iPhone, do you need to get a professional videographer? I don’t know, Geoff, what’s your approach?

Duncan: We’re doing an array of things. We are paying for production, a very well-produced video. However, I would just want to stress the authenticity piece, we really want the video to seem authentic because we do not script residents in any way when we do interviews. We don’t script anyone, not even our team members, and that’s by design. We get asked every time that we take a video, what questions are you gonna ask me? We want it to come off as natural as possible. We’ll do the cuts that are needed to, to make sure that the video tells a story however, we want it to be candid and in the moment. These produced videos though are fairly inexpensive and you know really it’s because it’s a resident on camera speaking, yes we’re using some different camera angles to try to you know make it interesting, but generally you know we’re doing interviews in a couple of rooms, you can move around, it’s one camera pretty simple. We are also doing some just straight like iPhone videos that’s great for short form content, great for social, I’m still really big on that it’s like, hey, yes, it’s not as great quality but you know people kind of like that. It’s real, I think it’s important.

Paxton: In TV there’s a term called good enough and it’s actually ruined TV for us I mean YouTube is good enough. It’s the reason it works and it’s really affordable. I will argue the microphone is more important, the quality of the microphone is more important than the quality of the camera and the camera guy is shaking his head agreeing with me right now. I mean if you are starting at the bare bottom, if you just go ask a few questions to each resident. We did a community in Wisconsin and called them story starters and asked questions like, what’s your first car? What was your first job? Where was your first kiss? They’re very simple questions that the residents can answer. One of their questions was, what’s the coolest invention you’ve seen in your lifetime? And the lady was like, well, space travel is pretty cool, indoor plumbing is amazing and she’s like, but hair curlers for me it’s hair curlers, right? And then she explained she’s like, I’m from West Virginia we couldn’t do our hair till I was like 20 that was and that story ended up going pretty viral for them that was literally on an iPhone. You can try this, you can test it on your iPhone at very little cost and see what works, get it posted, spend the money on the expert to help you place it properly and, and then if it goes well, go from there. We’re not saying don’t use experts, just use the right experts properly.

SHN: Well it’s 2025, so we have to talk about AI on this panel. It’s a simple question, how does AI play a role in all of this that we’re talking about in terms of meaningful content creation?

Paxton: Put yourself in the role of the local expert. I actually use AI to find out what my top 10 search words are each morning. So when I go on to do media, I find out what are the top 10 words that have most recently been searched for me and so I use those words in my interview. Before that would have cost me 2 people in like a 2-week spreadsheet. I was like I’m the one that’s that AI has no place in our industry. We’re helping people. Now we offer online estimates. I use AI to actually scan a house and I get a full inventory of the house and I can start talking to the family immediately because I have an inventory of the house because the grandson put his phone in the house and he used to have to wait 3 weeks before I could get all the family members together and they’d have to fly somewhere. It would make it, you know, 3 months before they can move into your community. Now we’re talking to them on the phone that night. So AI actually, once I opened my heart to it. It’s there, but I don’t think they’re gonna replace my job. I don’t think a robot’s gonna go in and sort the house, at least not yet.

SHN: Geoff, have you opened your heart to AI?

Duncan: I guess from an AI standpoint, I’m really high on using AI especially right now for internal type of marketing. So when you think about training that has to be developed and how long that typically takes, we currently are using AI to summarize a bunch of things that we are currently doing, provide training materials on our SharePoint site, it’s completely sped up the process for generating training content. In the future I imagine that’s especially in this industry, this far in the future, so just know that, I imagine it being used for content to help a sales person understand what they are missing during the sales process, like live in front of a resident on the phone or on a tour. What are they missing, you know. If the CRM or some system can tell them hey this is something that the person said in Discovery they are interested in the pool you only spent so much time at the pool, go back, make sure that you hit on those points. I think that is like a key thing in this industry.

Paxton: That exists now on HubSpot’s AA tool. It’s pretty crazy. I didn’t think this would actually work, but they record all of our incoming calls and we now know like if they ask about a piano, that’s gonna be an estate sale. And we didn’t know that, or they might need in-home healthcare or they might need, you know, so there’s other service providers we’re gonna and and as that grows, as they grow that database, it’s really amazing the data that we’re gonna learn what our clients need before they even tell us.

SHN: Katharine, thoughts on AI?

Ross: I mean, my only thought with AI is be careful, right? We are serving the most vulnerable population, so we’ve got to make sure we do it right. I love AI, I play with it a lot. If you follow me on LinkedIn, you’ll see some generative art that I had a lot of fun experimenting with. But AI can connect the wrong dots and lead people down the wrong paths. On our team, we make it a policy to have human review of anything before it goes live because we don’t want to leave anybody vulnerable to grabbing the wrong information.

SHN: There’s no doubt that storytelling differentiates. How do you measure the value, especially in our world where leads are so highly valued. If any of you have thoughts on that, I’d like to hear it. Maybe Geoff, you know, you brought up tracking the data around views and clicks and watching to the end. How do you see that translating to an ROI?

Duncan: That is one of the questions obviously our ownership groups get to ask us that question. We quantify, we try to quantify everything in our business. However, we have to kind of take a step back and realize that we’re marketers and not everything can always be quantified and tied directly to a move in. There are a lot of touch points that we have to care about and a lot of communication channels we have to care about messaging. In this business we have to remember that it’s the resident that’s moving in. There are influencers that help the residents move in. Sometimes when we put messages out, the influencers try to directly move in, that’s a really tough thing to attribute, right? Yes, we still care, we track everything from, you know, all the clicks we track everything. We understand fully what’s happening. We understand which campaigns are working. We tie everything back to UTMs, but at the end of the day, if an influencer who’s a friend sees a video, has a conversation offline we’re never going to track that so I still care about top of funnel marketing funnel type of activities. I care about impressions. I care about views. Is the content being consumed? That’s what I care about. Leads are gonna happen. We’re still tying things back to campaigns, but at the end of the day, I care about the marketing activities.

Paxton: I’m a service provider, so it is straight up, did they move in. And then what we’ve pushed harder is on our services, do they get to go to dinner the first night? Like that’s actually important to us. Did we get our job done fast enough and good enough that they’re they feel content enough to now jump into their community and so we actually that’s, we feel like we failed if they don’t go to dinner the first night and we’ll literally go to dinner with them if that gets them to dinner because we know that first night’s super important.

SHN: I want to talk about video content and interactive tools and what role video content plays with interactive tools. Katharine, you wanna take this one first?

Ross: Yes, but I’m gonna split that question. What I’m gonna say is people are doing research in senior living, they want to control their own journey and you know we’ve talked a lot during this conference about meeting people where they are and about the importance of brand strength, and I think to Geoff’s point, brand strength isn’t always quantifiable. It shows up in great Google reviews. It shows up in great word of mouth happening at a church where multiple church members move into the same community. I think when it comes to interactive tools online and video online that goes back to building the journey that helps people co-create their own path and find out and discover things at the rate that they’re interested in. One of the most interacted pieces on our website is a care assessment tool, that allows them to really evaluate home care and senior living all in the same question module and we see a lot of positive engagement from that. We also see that videos on profiles on our site increase engagement rate by 40%. People are really enjoying video content and seniors will watch the whole thing, so keep that in mind.

Paxton: To us, we have to build trust. That’s our whole point of the video. It’s not about closing the sale, it’s just about earning trust. So for us, we talk about nostalgic interaction. And if you’re from the 80s, you are super proud of being from the 80s. You’re not kinda excited about it. You’re insane so our issue is with interactive nostalgia. I did a book tour a couple years ago and I was in the middle of nowhere Nebraska and not one person showed up for a 2 hour VIP book signing. I’m sitting there by myself humiliated, like questioning my entire career and so instead of crying, I took a picture of me on an empty stage with a stack of books that nobody bought. And I went online and said, nobody showed up. This is humiliating. What’s your most embarrassing moment? Everyone interacted with their most embarrassing moment. Everything is an opportunity to interact positively. You just have to ask the question and so when we say interact, I hope you actually interact like I don’t like selling hard on a post. I’m different. I’m a service provider. I wanna build trust and then I’ll get them in a different way and then I’ll do the sale, but I don’t know them yet. They don’t trust me yet, so it’s not time for me to ask for that sale and so we use video to do positive nostalgic interaction. And all that nostalgia is in the walls of your community.

SHN: Terrific. Well, it was super fun to interact with all three of you. We’ve got 30 seconds left, so I’m just gonna run right down the line and ask each of you just sort of flash questions, any last thoughts that you wanna leave our audience with?

Ross: Make senior living fun. Share the fun stories.

Duncan: Don’t be afraid to fail.

Paxton: Your content is inside your building right now.

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