Effective Marketing for Mental Health Treatment Centers
Even though mental health issues are currently at a peak, a certain stigma still exists regarding many of the disorders and the individuals who suffer from them. It does not help that the mental health industry is faced with statistics like this:
- Nearly 40% of individuals under 18 do not receive the proper mental health services to provide substantial relief.
- Almost 50% of adults suffer from issues related to depression or anxiety.
- And perhaps most shocking – is that the leading cause of death for individuals aged 35 and younger is unintentional injury – with suicide a close second.
Yet even while nearly half the nation suffers from some serious type of psychological disorder – mental health providers still find it difficult to reach those who need help the most. The need for powerful, highly-targeted mental health awareness campaigns is more important now than ever before – in addition to identifying the right avenues and how to speak to your target audience.
At Ads Up Marketing, we specialize in helping mental health professionals strategize and deploy the most impactful mental health marketing campaigns, helping you convey your intended brand voice not only in the right place – but at the right time.
If you’re like other mental healthcare providers, you know that this is no easy task – and one that takes a village to accomplish. The following article covers the specifics of mental health marketing efforts and covers the basics of the most effective mental health marketing strategies.
Keep reading to get more actionable insights, and remember you can reach out to Ads Up for a complete and complimentary consultation for your business!
The Significance of a Strong Mental Health Marketing Gameplan
In the distant past, mental health marketing and other behavioral healthcare promotional strategies were almost non-existent. During a time when most mental health facilities and substance abuse rehabs were found in sparse numbers, there wasn’t a very high demand for any specialized advertising or marketing for rehab or mental health resources.
Most major hospitals had a psychiatric ward and with a few mental health and substance abuse treatment facilities scattered across larger metro areas – and hardly any in rural locations – most people pretty much knew what their options were. Existing mental health services were “one size fits all” for many types of mental health concerns.
Mental Health Services Both Large and Small Expand Dramatically
However, as time progressed, the need for impactful mental health marketing has grown exponentially – with several driving forces behind this boom. First, there’s a much larger percentage of the population suffering from mental health issues – which, naturally, led to an explosion in the number of mental health facilities. This, in combination with massive advancements in behavioral and mental health – and there’s all of a sudden a multi-billion dollar market in just 10-15 years.
Now, not only are mental health services available outside of major hospitals, but they have expanded well into the rural regions of America. We now see mental health practice areas in niched-down categories – with facilities exclusive to dual diagnosis treatment, holistic therapy, and trauma-informed approaches.
Currently, having a mental health practice also means having a sharp mental health marketing effort. You can have the most cutting-edge treatment in the world, or offer all the specialized services you’d like – but without marketing those mental health services – your mental health practice is swallowed among the pool of those adhering to strong marketing plans.
So how exactly do you effectively promote your mental health services and get the most bang for your buck?
Luckily, behavioral health marketing professionals like our team at Ads Up Marketing are available to take the lead, putting experienced leaders in charge of promoting all of your mental health services. In the section below, we’ll demonstrate the approach we take to getting your mental health marketing strategies up to par.
Planning Your Mental Health Marketing Strategy
Your mental health marketing strategy isn’t something you just throw together in a day on the fly. It takes careful research on your most valuable resource – your clients. You must also take a deep look into your mental health facility and decide what your strongest points are, and what your focal points should be. This will help you develop a target demographic.
What do you want your brand image to look like? What is your mission statement? Are you taking a more traditional approach or leaning more toward non-conventional methods for mental health issues? After forming a concrete image for yourself, you can move on to your target audience.
Understanding Your Target Market
The building block of your mental health marketing strategy is understanding your target audience. This requires careful research, and deciding things like:
- The demographics of individuals that would benefit the most from your specialized area of practice
- Deciding the best avenues to reach these individuals. What are their age groups, backgrounds, and most pertinent needs – what problems do they need to solve?
- What are the best avenues/channels to reach these individuals? Should you focus on social media, SEO, GMB and local SEO efforts, paid advertising using Google Ads and others, or another ad channel?
By the time this stage concludes, we should be able to answer two important questions:
- Who is my mental health marketing targeted at?
- What are the best channels to reach them?
Moving on from this, you can begin working on the framework of your mental health marketing. But first, you want to ensure that you have a strong brand name.
Make Your Presence Known
There’s no longevity in building a house of cards. What do we mean by this? Your brand should be built on strong, rock-solid principles. You want to highlight the fact that you are an organization of experts but you’re also client-focused. Establish a compassionate and empathetic brand identity that makes clients feel comfortable before they even hop on a phone call with you.
Combine this with a demonstration of the credibility and expertise of your team and the success of your mental health services. Anyone with mental health concerns should be able to think of your company and go “Oh yeah, that’s the organization I heard good things about,” or have other positive connotations of your brand.
Building up your brand image doesn’t take a lot of financial investment – just a little ingenuity and some help from former clients. Use testimonials and positive reviews as a way to prop your company up as a pillar in mental illness treatment. Highlight the counselors and psychologists who work at your facility and focus on their credentials.
Accomplishing these goals is often done with little to no investment. Highlighting the amazing mental health professionals on your staff and your expertise on mental illness can be demonstrated by using the right online platforms.
Leveraging the Right Internet Platforms
Your marketing strategy doesn’t always have to entail a substantial investment. Sometimes, you can showcase your mental health service providers using a free marketing strategy that includes a strategic approach and the right type of content.
The following avenues can work wonders by raising awareness not only of your mental health treatment specifically but increased awareness of the public at large.
Social Media Marketing Strategies
Social media can be one of your best friends in the mental health business. The perfect part about leveraging social media marketing strategies is that each platform can provide you with access to different target audience options.
Facebook is a great platform for targeting all ages, as a wide variety of residents use it daily. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok are great at catering to the younger generation. We can help you carefully plan and decide which platforms work best for you.
Create Insightful Content
Using your blog as the backbone, we’re able to craft marketing strategies using SEO-optimized posts that not only help you rank high and enhance your search engine optimization but also bring immense value to prospective clients. This type of content helps raise awareness in the mental health space, so you’re doing a service for the industry as a whole while self-servicing your marketing needs.
There are additional ways to bring this type of content to light. We’ve found the best strategies to be:
- Educational blog posts
- Hosting webinars and workshops
- Creating podcasts
Each of these can also be integrated with your social media efforts, enhancing your views and impressions and putting your brand name out there.
Collaborate with Influencers and Advocates
Yes, even influencers have made their way into mental health topics and can provide a breath of fresh air that’s different from run-of-the-mill mental health ads. Using influencers and advocates can put a unique spin on your marketing efforts, and help you connect with prospective clients more directly.
Many people look at influencers as a more intimate way to digest content, especially if they go live and interact in real-time with their audience. By working with the right individuals and collaborating with reputable advocates, you can produce some positive publicity for your organization.
Targeted Advertising for Mental Health Providers
The antique strategy of good ol’ targeted advertising. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. You can still cover a vast array of mental health topics and laser-focus your marketing efforts by deploying targeted advertising. This is still, and always has been one of the most efficient ways of directly cornering your market. Again, this goes back to understanding your target market and optimizing your campaigns to nail down winning creatives, landing pages, etc.
You’ll have a wide array of platforms at your behest by opting for targeted advertising – Google Ads, Facebook, Native Advertising, and Instagram – just to name a few. Our professionals at Ads Up Marketing can help deploy and monitor your ad campaigns to get the most value for your dollar from your ad spend budget.
Engage the Community In Conversation and Become Interactive
Creating platforms where prospective clients and their loved ones to engage with your brand can play a huge role in marketing your behavioral health services. Establish an open community and encourage discussions about various topics. This can include a message board on your website, creating a Facebook group, or several other ways to directly communicate with potential clients and those genuinely curious about educating themselves on mental health practices.
A newer, modern way of doing this is by creating a chatbot for your website. You can easily have a chatbot created that caters specifically to your website and the browsers that most commonly interact with your brand. Chatbots can be trained to answer specific questions, or route users to a live agent.
The sky is truly the limit with chatbots, and being able to talk with someone in real-time, 24/7, is becoming more of a preference for consumers daily. This holds in any market – and mental health is no exception.
Measure the Impact of Your Campaigns
The final step is putting everything together in the end and analyzing the impact of all of your campaigns. You must have a strategy that measurably tracks your success and failure rates. All of your efforts putting together campaigns paid or otherwise, are lost to the wayside without having some type of way to capture the data and analyze what works the best.
At Ads Up Marketing, we can effectively monitor all of your marketing channels, and focus on the things that are working, while eliminating the efforts that weren’t as successful. By using smaller, segmented campaigns to test, we can prevent spending your marketing budget on less-effective efforts, and scale winning campaigns to give you the most bang for your buck.
Additional Efforts to Consider
In the mental health marketing world, there are a few more efforts to consider that you may not have otherwise placed on your list of considerations. The following, although some non-conventional, can bring a boost to your marketing strategy.
Creating a Regular YouTube Channel Series
Creating a YouTube channel and video series that highlights before and after cases for your organization can be an excellent way to showcase the success of your organization.
Of course, this is no easy task, as you’ll need to ensure the proper legal strategies are in place about client participation and anonymity – it’s something that’s not seen as often but can drive a huge impact.
For successful practitioners who can attract attention on YouTube (that can also translate to TikTok in terms of shorter-form videos) this can be a huge difference-maker.
Collaborate With Other Local Businesses
If you operate a mental health facility, think about collaborating or forming some type of collective effort with other local businesses. Primary care physicians, hospitals, and substance abuse rehabs encounter potential clients for your business daily.
By forming relationships with these local organizations, you can create a referral arrangement when they encounter a client who needs your services. For example – if someone sees their primary care physician and believes it’s best to refer them to a mental healthcare professional, they could refer these clients to you in return for the same courtesy.
Likewise, many substance abuse recovery organizations commonly refer clients to mental health professionals after they complete treatment as an aftercare procedure. By developing relationships with these businesses, you can help one another and establish a circle of top-notch facilities within the community.
Network at Seminars and Events
The mental health industry hosts some of the most extensive networks of national seminars and conferences, as well as other forms of events yearly for professionals to gather and discuss various topics regarding the industry. These are beneficial for two reasons. First, those attending from your facility gain insight into the latest practices in the industry.
Discussions include new cutting-edge techniques and discoveries in behavioral and mental health. Second, these are great places to market your services and exchange information with other professionals.
A Proven Team for Mental Health Marketing
At Ads Up Marketing, we have years of experience in the mental health and substance abuse recovery industry. We’re made up of a team of professionals with expertise from every side of the marketing world, from SEO to paid advertising, including social media and Google ads.
We also have a top-tier content creation team that can help you put together some of the most engaging, well-researched content pieces for your blog. Our writers are also skilled at creating supplemental long-form website content (information pages, etc.) press releases, and other short-form content.
Reach Out to Ads Up Marketing for a Consultation Today
Attempting to juggle your marketing strategy can be too much for any facility to handle in-house, and even harder for smaller offices and mental health practices. Leave it up to our professionals and let us audit your current efforts, conduct market research about your target demographic, and handle the creation and deployment of all of your marketing campaigns, paid or organic.
For more information, contact the team at Ads Up Marketing, and let’s hop on a strategy call. We’d love to hear more about your organization and how we can work together to help make your business the best it can be!