Search Engine Optimization and Other Rehab Marketing Services
With fentanyl and methamphetamine addiction running rampant across the United States with no end in sight, this steadily growing problem points to one certainty – there are never enough addiction treatment centers. In an epidemic that’s yielded new record highs in overdose deaths for nearly the last decade, multiple things are taking place in the addiction treatment space.
Now there’s no such thing as a “regular” rehab facility, as substance abuse treatment centers began adopting new strategies and areas of focus and expertise. You’ll now find niched-down recovery centers focusing on various mental health therapies, from dual-diagnosis to trauma-based programs. And while the multiplication of drug rehabilitation centers is excellent for the unfortunate victims of substance abuse, the “stand and wait” strategy is no longer sustainable in the addiction treatment industry.
Keep reading to find out more about how our drug rehab marketing campaigns can help take your addiction treatment facility to a new level of growth and success!
The Emerging Drug Rehab Marketing Sector
These days, many of the larger state-funded addiction treatment centers are at maximum capacity and struggling to keep open beds daily. This has led to an explosion in the construction of new addiction treatment facilities of varying specialties. In the past (the ’80s, ’90s), most of the privately owned rehab centers were considered out of range for the average lower-to-middle-class American citizen. If it wasn’t a state-funded treatment center, it was likely considered a luxury rehab, as it wasn’t typical for most insurance agencies to cover stints that included substance abuse treatment.
Fast forward to the present day, and the demand has driven an influx of new treatment centers popping up, filling the void in the much-needed struggle for quality drug rehabilitation that’s accessible to the average working citizen. This ultimately led to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, making it mandatory for all insurance companies to provide funding for customers who require a drug rehab program.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) now lists over 16,000 treatment facilities, many competing for the chance to help the same clients.
Competing in a Hypercompetitive Marketplace
As treatment centers continued their exponential growth, competition grew more intense, digging out a niche for those adept in digital marketing, social media, and search engine optimization. Operating addiction treatment centers had become a multi-billion dollar endeavor, and addiction treatment marketing quickly followed suit.
With those seeking relief via drug rehab centers, would-be clients in recovery commonly scour the internet using search engines to find information regarding at-home detox, home remedies for withdrawal, and of course – the best or fairest-priced drug rehab center. The sheer number of people searching for addiction treatment centers daily, combined with the growing issue of a lack of available beds in most addiction treatment programs, creates a huge opportunity to capitalize on multiple advertising channels and marketing strategies to reach the target audience.
Currently, having an efficient drug rehab marketing strategy isn’t just present an opportunity to gain an advantage over the competition – but instead acts more as a mandatory element in the drug rehab marketing strategies of today. In the sections ahead, we break down various types of drug rehab marketing and how to leverage each method most efficiently for the best overall value.
So, what is the best form of drug rehab marketing? As with any other digital marketing, it’s the type that finds your target audience at the precise moment. This presents a slight advantage for those deploying a drug rehab marketing strategy.
Breaking Down Drug Rehab Marketing
When it comes to digital marketing, the driving factor behind a winning effort includes:
- Developing a winning website
- Establishing yourself as an authority
- Choosing the right paid advertising
- Catering to the right audience
- Optimizing your SEO efforts
- Creating an effective content strategy
- Creating a uniform brand voice
- Hammering local SEO
- Effective public relations
- Tracking, analyzing, and repeating
In the coming sections, we break down each of these elements and demonstrate to you the best way of creating a powerful drug rehab marketing strategy. These methods work universally with all rehab centers and act as a great framework to harness the power of your digital marketing, search engine optimization, and other dynamics that go with effective drug rehab marketing.
Developing a Winning Website
The most important part of your drug rehab marketing strategy is creating a winning website. Without a powerful website, you have little to base the rest of your addiction treatment marketing efforts on, making it difficult to emerge successful. The following list outlines what a winning addiction treatment website consists of:
Drug Treatment Center Testimonials and Information
Relevant information and testimonials should be included. This gives potential clients insight into the quality of your facility and creates a powerful first impression. Ensure all contact information is on your website, in addition to high-quality photos of the facility and the programs you offer.
Optimized for All Devices and Fast Loading
Your website should be viewable across all devices and have efficient load times. These two elements combined may be the biggest pitfall when it comes to addiction treatment websites.
There is a lot of information contained on websites for drug rehab centers. You must have the hosting to handle all of the information and content you plan on including on your site.
Dynamic but Easy to Navigate
You want your website to look great but not be too overwhelming. Your addiction treatment website should include dynamic graphics and text that pops out – but you don’t want readers to find it difficult to navigate.
They should easily be able to find what they’re looking for within two to three clicks from the home page. Anything more makes for a confusing experience, which can lead to high bounce rates.
Establishing Authority for Your Rehab
Establishing yourself as an authority is a broad topic that can be broken down into several, more easily accomplished steps. Authority certainly includes and is synonymous with SEO but isn’t limited to this element. Establishing yourself as an authority in the addiction treatment space includes:
- Building an excellent reputation for your rehab centers
- Posting content that’s considered valuable by serving the most asked questions among your audience
- Generating great reviews and testimonials
- Ranking high on search engines
- Establishing a social media presence
- Being active in the community
As time goes on, you’ll find opportunities within your drug rehab marketing to capitalize on all of these elements separately and in combination. Don’t break off too much at once; look for the most efficient ways to bring these elements to fruition.
Choosing the Right Paid Advertising
Your addiction treatment marketing strategy must include an effective paid advertising strategy. This is mandatory if for no other reason than keeping up with the competition.
The budgeting for paid advertising of drug rehab centers is sizeable, and you must be efficient in this selection to not waste precious resources. It’s not difficult for an addiction treatment marketing budget to get out of hand when it comes to paid advertising.
Focus on your target audience and carefully plan your campaigns. Make sure your creatives speak to the audience you’re looking to reach and your copy conveys the message without being overly complicated.
After pinning these elements down, it’s all about finding the most effective channels for reach and moving on to testing. As with any paid advertising strategy, tracking, testing, revising, and scaling will be your most important steps.
Dialing in Your Addiction Treatment PPC Budget
Allocate a certain portion of your budget to testing but start small – you don’t need to break the bank testing winning creatives. By beginning small you can find what works without wasting large chunks of money. Most algorithms reveal their mechanisms in a much more efficient way by starting with smaller amounts of money, anyway.
If you use too large of an allotment, you may get unrealistic results that seem powerful initially, but will almost certainly trail off over a week or two. If you’re not experiencing conversions at first don’t abandon ship. During the initial stages, you’re tracking metrics like impressions, cost-per-click, and click-through rate.
After nailing these down you can optimize your landing page creatives. Use heat maps to determine where the focus is on your landing pages and pair your winning creatives with the best-performing landers. After reducing to your best four or five options, slowly begin to increase your budget by 5 and 10% increments per day.
What you’ll typically find is by starting with 25-50 test ads, you’ll end up with two to five winning combinations in the end. Not all of your final combinations will scale – keep what climbs efficiently and eliminate what doesn’t scale.
Catering to the Right Audience
Technically, this step comes before the others – but it’s a work in progress at all times. Over time during your addiction treatment marketing efforts, your target audience will change organically. This depends on several important factors, including the services you’re offering, the geographical locations, insurance-based content, and specific digital marketing based on various therapies.
Catering to the right audience is accomplished by conducting market research – this is handled in several different ways. Using different marketing tools to research other organizations, in addition to researching statistics conducted by other marketing agencies can be very telling.
You can also leverage the power of your current client base by using surveys and other questionnaires during and after treatment. Find out what’s most effective when it comes to different elements of your marketing strategy.
Choosing a Drug Rehab Marketing Strategy for Content
What works for your blog content may be slightly different than what works for your social media efforts. In addition, you may need to alter your addiction treatment marketing plans based on geographical locations.
If you welcome a large number of out-of-state clients, using state and region-specific addiction treatment marketing campaigns may give you the upper hand. For example – if a particular drug is more prevalent in certain communities, you may want to advertise certain therapeutic measures and options for this drug heavier in one area.
In addition, if a particular form of insurance is more popular in a geographic region, you may want to capitalize on this fact and use the wide availability of any one provider to your advantage. Using the right insurance software for verification of benefits can also be a difference-maker.
Understanding these intangibles about your audience keeps you one step ahead, allowing you to speak to specific audiences and draw them in using hyper-focused campaigns.
Optimize your SEO Efforts
One of the primary focuses of your substance abuse marketing should always remain on your SEO efforts. In large part, SEO is cost-free to a certain degree, depending on how you approach your rehab center marketing and advertising efforts.
Optimizing for search engines includes a wide variety of different actions and steps, and you should distribute your efforts equally across on-page and off-page SEO.
On page SEO
On-page SEO consists of anything that takes place physically on your website or a blog post. This includes keywords, meta tags and titles, alt-descriptions, slugs, image sizes, video, and image SEO, and the quality of your content in general.
Off Page SEO
Off-page SEO includes things like link-building and guest posting.
Social signals are also a big part of your SEO efforts, so sharing your content across multiple channels should be a priority. It’s important to ensure you remain active in offering and participating in guest posts. This is one of the most effective ways of obtaining high-authority backlinks to other authority sites.
Your social media marketing is a huge part of your off-page SEO, so you must remain active across all social media channels. The more your content is mentioned, shared, and commented on, the more social signals that are recognized, boosting your off-page SEO.
Creating an Effective Content Strategy
The content strategy for your treatment center is an expansive collection of various online marketing efforts – or a facet of your marketing strategy, that includes creating content for a varying degree of mediums and channels. This content should be comprised of valuable material that gives your readers helpful insight and education regarding your industry or your organization in general.
You should always strive to create content that’s unique and unavailable in other places. The more exclusive your social media content is, the more valuable it is, giving your rehab facility a large degree of authority for distributing sought-after information and knowledge for no charge. Your content strategy can include any of the following:
- Blog posts
- Website content
- Press releases
- Infographics
- Videos
- Slides
- and more
Regardless of how many different platforms and channels you create content for, you must maintain the same brand voice throughout your efforts. This brings us to our next facet of rehab center online marketing.
Maintaining a Uniform Voice
What is your brand voice concerning your treatment center marketing? And why is it important to maintain a uniform voice?
The voice of your organization is the way that your organization put itself on display during any front-facing situation. Your voice is the stand your organization takes on certain moral issues.
Your brand voice is how your organization approaches and talks to clients or handles certain situations. Your brand voice can be considered the personality of your organization.
Why is Nailing Your Brand Voice Crucial?
One word – integrity. Consumers get used to a company behaving in a certain manner or demonstrating a certain pattern of behavior or actions. When they get used to this, consumers begin to rely on these things – this is how trust is built in a brand.
When brands defer from this, it breaks trust among the general public and makes your organization seem unreliable. In addition, maintaining a uniform voice across all marketing channels ensures that all potential consumers get the same general message and value from your content regardless of how it’s delivered.
How do you maintain a uniform brand voice?
Collaboration is one of the most powerful advantages you have. Get your content teams together – if you have a team for social media, have them work with the writers for your blog and website. Allow them to work across projects and share information. This gives them a chance to reference each other’s work, in addition to bouncing ideas off one another.
Your paid advertising should also send the same messaging as your free content. You don’t want to send one message in a PPC ad and turn around and deliver a completely different idea or attitude in a blog post.
Local SEO for Drug Rehab Marketing Efforts
We’ve touched on SEO for your treatment center. However, local SEO is even more critical for your marketing efforts. This is what brings you a great deal of your online business and presents some of the most important information regarding your company to searchers.
There are multiple ways you can leverage the power of SEO. The basic idea is getting your rehab center to rank high for terms that include cities or towns local to the facility.
Some of the best ways to strengthen your local SEO efforts include:
- Make sure your rehab facility is listed on Google My Business. Your listing should include your company name, address, and phone number, in addition to reviews by customers. This is one of the first places new searchers encounter your brand, and having full, accurate information, along with positive feedback can make or break whether someone chooses your rehab center.
- Using Google Maps is also an effective way to strengthen your local SEO. Register with Google Maps and make sure your organization stays active in this regard. This includes photos within Google Maps, in addition to reviews here as well.
- Including the names of local towns close to your rehab. Mention other businesses and local landmarks in your blog posts and other content. Google can make this connection and it plays a huge role in your local SEO rankings.
Handling Public Relations
A major responsibility of any treatment center, among other things, is how well they handle public relations. The chances are high that your organization might be included on the local news or handle a certain situation that could be controversial.
Using the frontward-facing members of your facility, you can handle these situations professionally and without much incident. Public relations might also include how you or your clients interact with the community.
How the face of your treatment center interacts with the public, in general, falls under the category of public relations, and the more you can positively frame your organization, the better you’ll end up.
If you do happen to encounter a negative situation at your facility, don’t shy away from it or appear to dodge it in any way. It’s important to tackle controversy and challenges head-on, demonstrating to the public you don’t shy away from the truth and that no matter what, nothing will jeopardize the integrity of your organization.
Using your alumni program can be an excellent way to boost public relations. If your alumni program includes activities for past members to remain active in the community, this is a surefire way to boost the public’s view of your rehab.
Track, Analyze, and Repeat
Perhaps the single most important element of any digital marketing strategy is the act of tracking. After tracking you must analyze, and then repeat what works and scrap what doesn’t.
But what exactly do you track and measure during your marketing campaigns? Everything you can.
If you’re not tracking your results across every channel and platform you use, it’s difficult to understand what efforts are working and what isn’t working. One of the worst mistakes you can make from a management or ownership standpoint is to engage in any form of marketing or advertising without some type of measurement system in place.
Key Metrics and Measurements for Addiction Treatment Marketing
At the minimum, you should be tracking the following:
- The platforms you’re using
- The specific type of marketing you’re campaign entails
- How many different varieties of content or advertising is taking place on each channel
- The creative element of each
- The numbers: impressions, clicks, calls, conversions, etc. In. the case of substance abuse clinics, a conversion would be a successful admission into your program.
After gathering and analyzing your data, you can decide what your most effective strategies are and repeat them. In addition, you can track which potential clients engaged with your content and figure out the most effective way to remarket to these individuals.
This might include follow-up emails, more targeted advertising, follow-up phone calls, or offering some type of incentive for choosing your rehab center.
Looking at Channel Strategies and Tracking Results
Depending on the channel you’re using to create your marketing efforts, there are multiple ways of tracking. You can use programs designed specifically for tracking, giving you an in-depth look at all of the key metrics that define your success.
Tracking can also be accomplished by using a link shortener or some type of link-tracking system that measures clicks that originate from different sources.
For example, maybe you create multiple blog posts on secondary platforms like Medium or Blogger. Using special links that track specifically which platform the clicks originated from – or what specific phrase you hyperlinked, can give you valuable information on what to repeat in the future.
Honestly, all of your marketing should be built around tracking and data. No decision should ever be made on a hunch or guess – approach everything with the proper and most efficient data to back anything you do moving forward.
Take Your Rehab Marketing Strategy to the Next Level
At Ads Up Marketing, we specialize in creating and optimizing marketing strategies for substance abuse treatment facilities with decades of results under our belt proving our expertise in the industry.
Whether you desire simple consultation or a full-on takeover of your marketing campaigns, our digital marketing services are equipped to meet your needs, regardless of complexity. Our team is well-versed in PPC, social media strategy, and content marketing via blogging, video marketing, e-mail marketing, press releases, and other sources.
We’ll help you rank higher on Google thanks to our content development strategy and cutting-edge SEO techniques. For more information on how we can help your company go the distance with its marketing efforts, contact us today, and let’s schedule a meeting.