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When Birchgrove partnered with Grit & Gravel in October 2025, they had a strong brand and a compelling offering, but the marketing infrastructure couldn't scale with their portfolio. In the first phase of our partnership, we rebuilt the system. The early results speak for themselves.
Birchgrove offers something genuinely differentiated in the senior living market: independent living with optional support in a rental format. The brand was strong. The story was compelling. But the marketing infrastructure underneath wasn't built to scale with their expanding portfolio of neighborhoods.
A summer 2025 audit by Grit & Gravel identified the core issues: limited visibility into performance, incomplete attribution across channels, a website that supported direct enquiries but missed earlier stages of the decision journey, and a model that required market education most agencies aren't equipped to deliver.
The shared objective was clear: build a scalable marketing system capable of generating awareness, enquiries, and tours as Birchgrove continues to grow. The focus wasn't just on lead volume, but on lead quality and engagement.
This wasn't a campaign refresh. It was a full marketing transformation, executed in parallel across every channel that mattered. Our team rebuilt the infrastructure from the ground up while keeping the existing pipeline running.
New website Platform
Migrated from a restrictive HubSpot environment to a scalable Webflow site, launched February 2026. Built to expand across neighborhoods without structural redevelopment.
Marketing Infrastructure
Full analytics implementation, consent management, geo-redirect solutions, and ActiveDEMAND as a single source of truth across email, SMS, and call tracking.
Digital Advertising Overhaul
Restructured Google Search, Performance Max, and Meta campaigns at the neighborhood level, with dedicated landing pages and tracking for each community.
Demand Generation
Monthly blogs, gated eBooks, and a custom readiness quiz designed to capture and educate prospects earlier in their decision journey.
Email Lead Nurturing
Six automated workflows guiding prospects from early research through to tour and move-in, plus auto-responders for every gated submission.
Neighborhood-Level Social
Launched Facebook and Instagram for each of 8 neighborhoods, with a consistent content calendar of 10 to 12 posts per month per community.
Reputation Management
Structured review tracking and response processes across Google, social, and review platforms, with consistent neighborhood-team alignment.
Print Evaluation
Reviewed 30+ print publishers, consolidating from 42 to 20 titles. A 52% reduction freeing budget for higher-performing channels.
From November 2025 through April 2026, Birchgrove's funnel performance shifted measurably compared to the same period the year prior. Lead volume was slightly lower, but every conversion metric that matters improved, and downstream outcomes improved more than that.
Initial tours increased 15.5%. Return tours climbed 19.2%. Worked leads grew 10.7%. And at the bottom of the funnel, where it matters most, deposits increased 125% and sales and move-ins climbed 35.7% year-over-year.
Since transitioning digital advertising to Grit & Gravel in November 2025, Birchgrove has generated 54 deposits. Marketing has contributed 76.1% of all new leads. Lost leads dropped by 27.1%, meaning less budget absorbed by enquiries that go nowhere, and more spent on the ones that do.
"Really helpful, thorough, and great for people like me who don't know where to start looking. The videos were informative and reassuring." - Prospective resident, after engaging with the new Birchgrove website. She initially had no plan to speak with an advisor. She later visited a neighborhood in person.
Senior living decisions are local. Adult children researching options for a parent care deeply about the specific neighborhood, not just the parent brand. So we shifted from a single Birchgrove social presence to a network of accounts, one for each community, with a consistent monthly content calendar across all of them.
The previous Birchgrove account generated approximately 100,000 impressions per month. With eight neighborhood-specific accounts now active, Birchgrove has generated over 1,094,170 additional impressions since account creation. A tenfold increase in brand visibility.
And the impact extends beyond awareness: a confirmed move-in at Christ Church Apartments has been directly attributed to Instagram engagement. Proof that social channels are influencing not just visibility, but conversion.
An initially underperforming community has become a standout example of what's possible. 7 reservations came in during Q1 alone, 5 of them from leads generated in the last 90 days. Since the start of the Grit & Gravel partnership, Christ Church has recorded 10 reservations, with 8 attributed directly to our marketing efforts.
The new Birchgrove website does more than look better. It works harder. Neighborhood pages, which didn't exist in the previous site, are now central to the user journey. Banstead Place alone has driven 2,542 page views in Q1, followed by Pepperpot House at 1,939 and Ayrton House at 1,910.
Birchgrove's custom readiness quiz, built to engage prospects who are still deciding whether to move at all, has driven over 10,000 interactions and 1,600 completed submissions, with a 40% completion rate and nearly 5 minutes of average engagement per user. That's high-intent behavior, not passive browsing.
A new direct tour booking experience has eliminated the friction of enquiry forms and follow-up cycles. Since launch in February, 61 tours have been booked directly through the new system, letting the sales team spend less time coordinating logistics and more time talking to people ready to visit.
This was the first phase of a long-term partnership, and it was deliberately foundational. The website, the tracking infrastructure, the CRM integration, the neighborhood-level social structure, the email nurture workflows: all of it built to scale efficiently as Birchgrove adds new neighborhoods, rather than requiring a rebuild every time.
The early performance signals (stronger conversion rates, higher-quality leads, 125% deposit growth, and a tenfold lift in brand visibility) show what becomes possible when senior living marketing is treated as a connected system instead of a collection of one-off projects.
And with full-funnel tracking and attribution now in place, every future decision about where to invest can be made with confidence. That's the real foundation for sustained occupancy growth.
We don't generate leads. We build the system that delivers consistent occupancy growth, and we'd love to show you what that could look like for you.
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