How a 3-person marketing team manages 34 senior living communities and stopped guessing.
When Brandon Christiansen joined Primrose Retirement Communities as Director of Marketing, he inherited a familiar problem: too many locations, too little visibility, and a marketing stack that required more duct tape than anyone wanted to admit.
Primrose operates 34 senior living communities across 17 states, offering independent living, assisted living, and memory care. It’s a well-established organization, nearly four decades in the industry, with a reputation for choosing markets carefully and serving residents well. What they didn’t have was a clear picture of what their marketing was actually doing.
The “before” picture
Brandon’s team was doing what a lot of marketing teams do when they don’t have the right tools: improvising.
Lead sources lived in a catch-all “online” bucket in the CRM. Attribution meant cross-referencing Google Analytics with spreadsheets and hoping the numbers told a coherent story. Every email campaign was built manually. And when it came to knowing whether SEO, paid ads, or social media were actually driving inquiries, the honest answer was: nobody really knew.
“We were just throwing stuff at the wall, hoping for the best,” Brandon told us. “There was so much of that in the dark days.”
Running that process across 34 communities, with a team of three, wasn’t sustainable. Something had to change.
“It’s such a great partnership because they’re going to allow you to grow, but then they’re going to grow right alongside you.”
Finding ActiveDEMAND — sort of by accident
Primrose didn’t come to ActiveDEMAND through a formal vendor search. They discovered the platform through their CRM at the time, which included a version of ActiveDEMAND. It was self-taught, limited, and a little rough around the edges, but it opened a door.
When Primrose later switched CRMs and connected with the ActiveDEMAND team directly, everything changed. Brandon met Shay, their account success manager, and the real onboarding began — which mostly meant untangling years of workarounds and rebuilding things the right way.
“She was so gracious,” Brandon said. “She said, ‘I know this is how you’ve done it — but here’s how it’s actually supposed to work.’ And she walked us through all of it.”
What’s working now
Today, Primrose uses ActiveDEMAND to manage marketing across all 34 communities from a single account. The results aren’t flashy in a press-release way; they’re better than that. They’re practical.
Attribution is the biggest shift. Brandon’s team can now see exactly where leads are coming from – first touch, last touch, and every step in between. That data feeds directly into decisions about where to spend, what to cut, and which channels are actually earning their budget.
“Before, we were not able to know if SEO was working or not; we just didn’t have the visibility,” he said. “Now we have the data at our fingertips to make those decisions rather than just saying, let’s throw an extra $400 at Google this month and see what happens.”
The other game changer has been content delivery. Brandon’s team uses ActiveDEMAND’s dynamic content hubs to automatically send blog content to prospects based on where they are in the journey, no manual campaign builds, no one sitting down to schedule individual emails. The right content goes to the right person at the right time, and it runs itself.
“Now we have the data at our fingertips to make those decisions rather than just saying, let’s throw an extra $400 at Google this month and see what happens.”
“I couldn’t wrap my head around how we could do an ongoing blog campaign in email format,” he said. “And then it was literally that easy.”
Sales enablement is next on the list. Brandon’s team is currently piloting it across several communities, giving sales staff visibility into prospect activity without leaving their CRM. He expects it to be a significant shift in how the sales and marketing teams work together.
On the partnership
One thing Brandon comes back to is the relationship itself. Not the features. Not the contract. The fact that when the team hits a wall, there’s someone on the other end of an email who responds fast, knows the platform, and actually helps.
“Knowing that Shay is always an email away allows us to go in and play and try — and if it doesn’t work, we figure it out together,” he said.
He’s also quick to point out that the platform has grown alongside Primrose, not just despite them. Features they’ve asked about, pain points they’ve raised, some of those conversations have turned into real product developments.
“It’s such a great partnership because they’re going to allow you to grow, but then they’re going to grow right alongside you.”
When we asked what he’d tell a peer considering ActiveDEMAND, he didn’t pitch features. He asked a question back: ” What do you want it for?
“If you want something that can just send emails, ActiveDEMAND can do that. But if you’re looking for something that can help you understand your marketing better — and a partner that’s going to grow with you — then ActiveDEMAND’s a better fit.”
And if we had to sum up four years of working with Primrose in one line, Brandon already did it for us: “ActiveDEMAND doesn’t seem to have a box. If they did have a box, they broke it a long time ago.”
Primrose Retirement Communities operates 34 senior living communities across 17 states, offering independent living, assisted living, and memory care. Learn more at Assisted Living | Primrose Retirement Communities.
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