Your ED Talks, Extended 🎧

Six big senior living marketing conversations. One strategy-first perspective. And a little more than seven minutes to unpack them.

Inspired by the ED Talks at SMASH, we created a private edition of Smart w/ Heart exclusively for SMASH attendees.

Consider this your private Smart Girl ED Talk track. Hit play below and start wherever your biggest marketing challenge lives.

Across seven short episodes,  Katie Holt takes on some of the biggest topics shaping senior living sales and marketing right now. This isn’t another collection of shiny new tactics, Katie brings each topic back to the strategy underneath it. Each episode is intentionally short, so you can listen between sessions, on your flight home, or whenever you need a little strategy with your sparkle.

A new platform won’t fix a broken process. Katie shares four things senior living teams should get right before changing CRM or automation platforms — from cleaning up data to creating a clear migration plan and preparing the people who actually use the technology.

When sales says the leads are bad and marketing says the follow-up is bad, the real issue is often the handoff between the two. This episode explores four practical ways to better align sales and marketing around the customer journey, shared metrics, messaging, and feedback.

More data doesn’t automatically create more clarity. Katie breaks down the marketing and sales metrics worth watching, and how to turn dashboards from a collection of numbers into a tool your team can actually use to make better decisions.

SEO, paid media, content, automation, and your website shouldn’t operate like separate marketing islands. Katie walks through Smart Girl Digital’s EDGE approach and how traffic, conversion, nurture, and technology work together as one connected digital ecosystem.

Senior living has a sameness problem. Katie explores how a clear audience, brand strategy, customer journey, and differentiated messaging can help your creative stand out — without relying on another stock photo and another version of “vibrant living.”

AI can make your team faster, but it can’t replace the strategy underneath the work. Katie closes the series with practical do’s and don’ts for using AI thoughtfully, including policies, workflows, human review, and where senior living marketers should resist the urge to automate everything.