A nursing home marketing plan sample from Net Solutions Interactive: eight sections, each forcing one decision, in a market where the median skilled nursing facility ran at 83% occupancy in 2024 (MedPAC).
Hold one frame before you write a word: a marketing plan is not a document you file to prove the work happened. It is a decision record, and every section forces a choice: which referral sources you will pursue, which clinical needs you staff to accept, who owns each dollar.
Why the choices bite: around that median, a quarter of buildings ran above 91% occupancy and a quarter at 70% or below, per MedPAC — same market, very different outcomes. A plan is where you decide which quartile you are building toward. MedPAC’s Medicare figures on this page count traditional Medicare; Medicare Advantage enrollees sit outside them.
Key takeaways:
- A nursing home marketing plan is a decision record: every section forces a choice, names an owner, and sets a review date.
- Every number in your plan should come from your own records, not a template.
- A sample is useful for structure only; once your plan could belong to another facility, it stops working.
We read nursing home marketing plans for a living, and the weak ones share one tell: you could swap them between any two buildings in the county and nobody would notice. Below are the eight sections of a plan that could only belong to yours, each with the question it must answer — the planning companion to our nursing home marketing guide.
1. The census and referral situation assessment
The plan opens with evidence, not intention. Record where your census stands and where it actually comes from: recent admissions by payer (Medicare short-stay, Medicaid long-term, managed care, private pay) and by named referral source. Record which hospitals sent you patients, which discharge planners referred them by name, which referrals you declined or lost and why, and who competes for them.
Get the payer proportions right first: a plan built for the wrong payer plans for the wrong business. MedPAC puts fee-for-service Medicare at 13% of total facility revenue and fee-for-service Medicaid nursing home spending at $46.3 billion, both in 2024. By July 2025, 14,232 nursing facilities were Medicaid-certified, and KFF counts Medicaid as the primary payer for 63% of nursing facility residents in 2025. A plan that treats short-stay Medicare rehab as the whole business is planning for a minority of it; long-term care marketing belongs in the plan too.
A weak situation assessment is a paragraph of adjectives (“we are a respected provider in a competitive market”) with no names, no sources, no declines.
The question this section must answer: where does our census actually come from, and what has changed in the past year? If your own admission records cannot answer it, stop writing and go pull them.
2. The positioning statement
One or two sentences stating which patient your building is the obvious first call for, and why. Positioning for a nursing home is clinical before it is emotional: the capabilities you staff for that your neighbors do not — complex wound care, ventilator or trach support, orthopedic rehab, bariatric capacity, dialysis coordination, a secured memory care unit (see memory care marketing). A positioning statement names what you are built to take, never what you guarantee.
The weak version is interchangeable. “Compassionate, high-quality care in a home-like environment” could be taped to the door of any facility in the state, which means it positions you as nothing.
The question it must answer: for which patient should a discharge planner think of us first — and what would that planner say if you read them the sentence we just wrote? If it would surprise the people who refer to you, it is an aspiration, not a position.
3. Referral-source targets by role
“Grow hospital referrals” is a wish. A plan names people. List the roles that control the referrals you want (hospital case managers and discharge planners, hospitalists, the surgeons whose patients need short-stay rehab, managed-care case managers, home health liaisons, geriatric care managers, elder law attorneys, families calling directly) and for each role: the named individuals or accounts, who on your staff owns the relationship, and the contact rhythm that keeps it warm.
The weak version names institutions instead of people and assigns ownership to nobody, which is how “the hospital relationship” becomes something everyone assumes someone else is tending. Our guides to assisted living referrals and home health marketing build the same account map, with owners and a contact cadence.
The question: which people, by name and role, decide where the referrals we want will go — and which person on our staff answers for each of them?
4. The channel plan
Record which channels carry which message to which audience (in-person referral development, your website, local search and your Google Business Profile, reviews, professional and community events, any paid visibility you chose) and for each, who it reaches, what it should produce, and who runs it. Which channels move census, and why, is marketing strategy for our guide to nursing home marketing; the plan is where the decision lands, not where it gets argued.
The weak version lists every channel that exists, marks them all “ongoing,” and owns none of them.
The question: for each channel we fund, whom does it reach, what do we expect back, and who runs it? A channel that cannot answer gets cut.
5. The reputation and public-ratings plan
Before a discharge planner sends a referral or a family agrees to a tour, someone looks you up. Inventory what they find and who owns each surface: your Care Compare standing and survey history, your reviews on Google and the senior-care directories, how review requests are made ethically, and who answers what gets posted — negative reviews included, with composure, never argued in public.
CMS has scored every nursing home from 1 to 5 stars since December 2008, rating three domains separately: health inspections, staffing, and quality measures. Your staffing star is computed from payroll data you submit each quarter, published since 2017. And hospitals are federally required to use and share post-acute quality and resource-use data when helping a patient choose. This section owns those surfaces or concedes them.
The weak version says “improve our online reputation” and moves on: no surfaces named, no owner, no process for asking or responding.
The question: what does a referral source or a family find when they look us up tonight, and who owns changing it? Write the answer as it is, not as you wish it were.
6. The admissions-response and follow-up process
Referral development wins the referral; admissions response keeps it. Document what happens when a referral arrives: who is notified, in what order; a response commitment in minutes and hours, never business days, set from your measured response time; clinical review turnaround; how capacity gets communicated back; and night and weekend coverage, because hospital discharges do not keep office hours. Document, too, what the referral source hears when you decline.
Write the coverage rules in too; your admissions staff field them daily. Medicare covers a skilled stay only after a qualifying inpatient hospital stay of at least 3 days in a row; time under observation or in the emergency room does not count. Coverage then runs to 100 days per benefit period. Under traditional Medicare in 2026, days 1 to 20 cost the patient nothing (the $1,736 Part A deductible applies to the qualifying hospital stay), days 21 to 100 carry a $217 daily copayment, and after day 100 the patient pays all costs. Leave those numbers to memory and referral sources stop trusting your answers.
The weak version is unwritten — the whole process lives in one admissions coordinator’s head, which means it takes vacation when she does.
The question: how fast and how competent is the answer a referral gets when it arrives at the worst possible hour — and how does the sender know that before they send it?
7. The budget and ownership table
This is where sample plans do the most damage, so hold the order of operations: the budget derives from the channel plan, never the reverse. Build one row per activity, with columns for cost, the decision it funds, its owner, and the return that would justify it. Price each activity you committed to above, in your market, at your volume. Distrust any template that hands you a percentage of revenue as a starting point; it describes someone else’s building.
| Activity | What it costs | The decision it funds | Its owner | The return it must earn |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Referral-development time and travel | Staff hours per month against the contact rhythm set in section 3, at loaded cost, plus mileage | Which named accounts get face time, and how often | The staff member section 3 names for that relationship | Referrals from the people who actually control them |
| Website upkeep | Hosting and maintenance for the year, plus the content hours the channel plan commits to | Whether the site answers the discharge planner and the family who look you up | Named owner of the site as a channel, per section 4 | A site that says what section 2’s positioning says |
| Review and reputation tooling | Per-surface subscription, plus the monitoring and response hours section 5 assigns | Who watches Care Compare, Google and the directories, and who answers what gets posted | The monitor named for each surface in section 5 | Current, answered public surfaces at the moment someone checks |
| Collateral | Design and production per piece, per service line you positioned | Which buyer each piece is written for | Named owner per piece, per section 4 | Materials a referral source can act on without a translator |
| Events | Fee, staff hours and materials per event | Which rooms are worth your people being in | Named owner per event, per section 4 | Contact with the roles section 3 targets by name |
| Paid visibility, if you chose it | Monthly media plus management, capped before the first dollar is spent | Whether paid coverage fills a gap the other lines cannot | Named owner of the spend, per section 4 | Inquiries you can attribute to the spend, or a decision to stop |
The weak version is a single blob number, or percentages copied from a download, with no owners. A budget line without an owner is a donation.
The question: for every dollar in this table, what decision does it fund and who answers for it?
8. Measurement and review cadence
The last section decides how you will know the plan is working — and how fast you will know when it is not. Choose a short list of counts from your own records: inquiries by source, referral-to-admission conversion, response time, declines and their reasons, review volume and rating movement. Set each target as movement from your own baseline; a target imported from a benchmark you cannot verify is a decoration.
Then set the cadence: a monthly review of the numbers, a quarterly rewrite wherever the evidence contradicts the plan, and an immediate revision when the market moves.
The weak version lists metrics no meeting ever reviews: the plan is written in January and opened again in December, describing a market that no longer exists.
The question: when this plan is wrong, how quickly will we find out, and who changes it?
What a nursing home marketing plan sample, or a downloadable PDF, is actually good for
A sample marketing plan or downloadable PDF for a nursing home is worth using for exactly what this page just handed you: the sections, the order, and the specificity a finished plan holds. It kills the blank page and shows your leadership team what done looks like.
Copying goes wrong the moment the sample’s contents survive into your document: budget percentages adopted because they look authoritative, targets kept because inventing your own feels exposed, positioning left because it sounds professional. The result is a plan for a facility that does not exist, written by a sample that does not know your market, your payer mix, or your referral sources.
Use the shape. Replace every word of the contents.
Get the free Nursing Home Marketing Audit and Plan Template (2026)
A 36-page workbook: audit where referrals and admissions slip away, then fill in a blank eight-part marketing plan with owners and review dates, sent to your work email.
Frequently asked questions about nursing home marketing plans
What should a nursing home marketing plan include?
Eight sections, in order: a census and referral situation assessment, a positioning statement, referral-source targets by role, a channel plan, a reputation and public-ratings plan, an admissions-response and follow-up process, a budget and ownership table, and a measurement and review cadence. Each section should end in a decision with an owner’s name on it.
What are some effective marketing ideas for nursing homes?
The ones a plan can give an owner: named referral-source accounts, each with a staff member who owns the relationship and a contact rhythm that keeps it warm; an admissions response measured in minutes and hours, with night and weekend coverage; and public surfaces (your Care Compare standing, your Google reviews and the senior-care directories) that are current and answered. Which channels move census, and why, is the subject of our nursing home marketing guide; the plan is where you decide which ideas you fund and who runs each one.
Is there a nursing home marketing plan PDF I can download and use?
Yes. Our free Nursing Home Marketing Audit and Plan Template (2026) runs an audit of where your census leaks, then gives you the eight sections on this page as blank fill-in pages with owners and review dates. Use any download, ours included, for the section headings and the push past the blank page — never for the contents. Pre-filled budget percentages and ready-made targets were not derived from your building.
Who should write the marketing plan?
The administrator owns it. Admissions, the director of nursing, and the business office each draft the sections they will be held to — response process, clinical positioning, budget lines. A plan written by one person, or delivered finished by a consultant, dies quietly because nobody in the building is invested in it.
How long should the plan be?
Short enough to reread before every monthly review. The ownership table and the referral-target list carry more weight than any amount of prose; if a section is not forcing a decision, cut it.
How do I set targets without industry benchmarks?
You already have the only benchmark that binds you: your own last quarter. Pull three or four quarters of whatever your building already counts, and write each target as a move off that trailing figure. A target built on your own records can be defended in a leadership meeting; an inherited one cannot.
How often should the plan be updated?
Review the numbers monthly, rewrite whatever the evidence contradicts quarterly, and revise immediately when the market moves — a referring hospital changes ownership, a competitor opens or closes, a survey lands. A plan updated once a year is a record of last January’s assumptions.
The plan is the easy part
With this outline, a working plan is an afternoon of honest writing plus a week of pulling your own numbers. Plans rarely fail on paper; they fail in week six, when the referral visits stop, the response commitment drifts, and the monthly review falls off the calendar.
Before you commit a year to this plan, have it read by people who run this work every week. Book the 15-minute market walkthrough, and you keep what we find either way. If you would rather build it alone, this outline is enough — and the only version that fails for certain is the one that stays a search query.