Top 7 Drug Rehab Marketing Mistakes
What Are the Top 7 Drug Rehab Marketing Mistakes?
Drug rehab marketing mistakes are plentiful with addiction treatment centers lead generation. They are wasting a lot of drug rehab marketing dollars due to these errors. Many are suffering from digital Darwinism. Addiction treatment centers do not know the basics of search engine optimization. By addressing the top seven critical errors they could rank on Google without using pay per click advertising. The top 7 drug rehab marketing mistakes are;
- Not ranking organically on Google.
- Lack of proven drug rehab marketing strategies.
- Website is not structured to communicate with Google.
- Word of mouth marketing is sending mixed messages hurting the rehabilitation center.
- Lack of tools for Outreach.
- Trust and engagement is poor.
- Social media is not controlled.
These 7 important drug rehab marketing mistakes are costing rehab owners a lot of money. Getting an understanding of these would drastically reduce the wasted money with advertising. The addiction treatment industry is very competitive. There are $100,000’s spent every month by any addiction treatment center. This combined with new laws and regulations is making is more difficult to generate leads and addiction treatment calls.
Why A Solid Drug Rehab SEO Marketing Plan is Needed?
A drug rehab marketing plan reduces wasted advertising dollars. It re-directs outdated strategies and the need for immediate results. The high cost of Google Ad Words and Legit Script is no longer needed by the smaller rehabs.
The short-term strategies not working anymore have CEO and Marketing Directors searching for a solution. Many are realizing they need a solid plan to avoid common drug rehab marketing mistakes. They need drug rehab SEO marketing solutions resulting from a healthy marketing mix. They will not be able to survive using “laissez-faire” strategies. One of the biggest areas rehabilitation centers are looking at is their web marketing. We recently spoke with a couple of industry business, and marketing experts about what centers need to survive.
The web’s audience and traffic are staggering; it’s the largest place for marketing. By the time you finish reading this sentence, there will have been 2.3 million searches on Google, over 200,000 new Facebook posts, 22,000 tweets, and 22,000 gigabytes uploaded. So, “Why are centers not marketing, or poorly marketing, on Google and social media?” We took that question to the CEO of Addiction Rep, a nationally known and respected addiction treatment center marketing company.
This is what he had to say, “Many centers are short-sighted on their marketing, and expect immediate gratification. They want new clients immediately, and proper web addiction treatment marketing takes time, and work.” Many are realizing they need drug rehab marketing plan leads to generate clients and not just a buy rehab leads strategy. Whether your marketing an inpatient rehab, substance abuse IOP or opiate detox you need to get educated on the best drug rehab marketing strategies and implement them.
1. Why Google Must Be Included in Top 7 Drug Rehab Marketing Mistakes?
Treatment centers need to include Google in their drug rehab marketing plan because there are over 40,000 searches on Google every second. It is the #1 lead generation resource in the world. Contradictory to how treatment centers say word of mouth is our best lead source. There is no way an Outreach professional can even come close to the number of possible new clients, than page one of Google.
There are many reasons why rehab marketing fails, however it takes an understanding of over 200 Google ranking factors before you get ranked. There is also a need for a strong social media prescience on Facebook and LinkedIn. The outdated strategy was to utilize pay per cleick with paid ads. However, we need to consider that only 1.91% of page one Google clicks are paid advertising (top 3 ads on page one). Organic ranking (8 spots, and 3 Google Maps) on page one receive a whopping 50–60% of the clicks. This is why drug rehab SEO is so important.
What is stopping drug and alcohol addiction treatment centers from organically getting on page one with their addiction recovery marketing? We took that question to Brian Frye, CEO of Magna Technology, a well-respected website building agency. He told us this, “One of the biggest issues is incorrect and poor website structure. Google spiders will penalize you, or not rank your site if they cannot read it. This is probably why we hear so many say that web marketing hasn’t worked for them. Without the proper web structure, any marketing you put on top will perform poorly.”.
Drug rehab marketing mistakes and business strategies for PHP, IOP, detox, halfway houses, sober livings, or even independent practices are critical. The electronic assets are the largest portion of your business that generates revenue. Is your website’s foundation correctly set-up to foster the heavyweight of marketing, or is it built on sand?
The competitive landscape requires centers to generate leads for outreach. The best way is to rank on Google organically for the search terms individuals seeking treatment are looking for on Google. Rehabilitation facilities need to utilize drug rehab SEO blog writing. Many centers have poor blogs and do not know how to get them to rank on page one of Google.
2. Why Addiction Recovery Center Owners Need Proven Drug Rehab Marketing Strategies?
In the past, centers did not need a drug rehab marketing strategy. It was easy to generate leads with Google Ad Words. Now it is a waste of advertising budget and learning this the hard way is costly.
To avoid drug rehab marketing mistakes you need an extensive education on what needs to be done for web marketing to work. Many owners have relied on short-term solutions like a buy rehab leads strategy. Their drug rehab lead generation consisted of buying treatment calls and spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on pay per click. Drug rehab call centers are under the microscope of Congress and Google is controlling who can play the PPC game. These poor drug rehab marketing strategies have caused many recovery centers to file bankruptcy or close their doors.
Recovery center owners need to know what to put into place that produces treatment calls or referrals. They need to find comprehensive drug rehab SEO marketing agency articles. These are not easy to find since most drug rehab marketing agencies don’t have useful content on their websites. This also happens to be one of the biggest mistakes addiction treatment centers make. Their blogs have 400–600 words posts with no meat.
We are getting ahead of ourselves with that. Drug rehab SEO starts with a proper website structure, SEO, and social media marketing. Many have wasted a ton of marketing dollars without these key areas being properly in place.
Because these were not in place many centers have not seen page one of Google in organic rankings. The key focus in 2019 is a local marketing strategy. This means they must rank in the Google 3-pack in the maps section. In addition to ranking in the top 3 organic slots on page one.
What are the Advantages of Organic Drug Rehab SEO?
Once you achieve page one rankings you drug rehab SEO doesn’t cost you every time you want to rank. Page one on Google means you get a piece of the massive traffic generated. Getting to these cherished spots that produce a whopping 60–70% of page one calls is not an easy feat. However, they will spend much less on their marketing efforts in the long run and produce a tremendous amount of qualified treatment calls.
Treatment center owners should start by getting educated on web marketing in our industry by hiring a drug rehab marketing consultant. They can prevent you from wasting marketing dollars by trial and error. Once they have a handle on what needs to be in place, they should hire an SEO specialist to get to page one of Google.
With all these in place, you need to look at your outreach staff. You partially rely on outreach professionals to establish relationships and bring in new clients to keep your addiction treatment facility full. Do you train them in professional networking and marketing?
You rely on their expertise to bring new business, and they network with other treatment centers. Are they establishing enough new relationships with other addiction and behavioral health professionals to foster referrals and generate treatment calls? Are they positively, or negatively affecting your brand?
3. Substance Abuse Treatment Centers Website Development Lacks Structure and Important Information
Many treatment centers do not fully understand how to generate drug rehab leads. We look at many addiction treatment center websites, and many times, we can tell if they value marketing. Poor website development in drug rehab SEO and marketing is the #1 mistake made by recovery centers. Here are the top 12 drug rehab marketing mistakes related to addiction treatment center websites.
- incorrect structure
- no (or poor) search engine optimization
- no blog, or just old blogs
- no social media share buttons at the bottom of each blog post
- no listing of the last 3, or 5 blog posts at the bottom of each blog post
- no staff page
- no testimonials
- no Google map, or embedded incorrectly
- poor call to action
- offer very little value to their target audience
- no call tracking
- lack of understanding on Google analytics
Other factors contributing to drug rehab marketing mistakes include; no email marketing, no alumni campaign, no marketing plan, and no (poor) social media presence. These are some of the tools your outreach professionals need to rely upon every day.
Drug Rehab SEO Must be Included for Success
Drug rehab SEO is less expensive in the long run that paid strategies. However, many rehabs make the same mistakes over and over again. Some of the main reasons of drug rehab marketing mistakes are; poorly structured website, bad search engine optimization, no IoT assets built, lack of good back-links, no analytics, no tracking and not driving targeted visitors their website. Many problems stem from the most basic component, a properly structured website that Google spiders can read.
Many centers don’t realize what a good addiction treatment marketing strategy can do for their organization. Many give-up, and resort to “word of mouth” as their main marketing vehicle. It’s time to examine your drug rehab marketing mistakes.
4. What is Word of Mouth Drug Rehab Marketing?
Word of mouth marketing is someone that endorses you to someone else. The addiction treatment industry is full of gossip. We hear a tremendous amount of gossip every day. This treatment center is brokering, this opiate center provides poor care, this recovery center is swapping patients and so on.
Many times, the accusations are incorrect, hurting that organizations brand efforts to build relationships and get referrals that produce treatment calls. This drastically affects their “boots on the ground” efforts.
It is happening every day, whether you want to believe it or not, and affecting your referral sources. One way to overcome untrue gossip is through effective branding. Making your message strong enough, reaching a big enough audience, for people to question the validity of the accusations.
Word of Mouth Lead Generation is Only One Piece
Many treatment center owners and sales/service organizations say, “We do best by, “word of mouth” for referrals.” Being on page one of Google organically is the best possible word of mouth you can achieve. When you’re on page one, you get 1000’s of treatment calls, and clicks to your website. It outperforms all other addiction treatment marketing combined.
Also, you need to consider, “What really is word of mouth marketing?” The problem is they have no long-term marketing strategy in their marketing mix. A good drug rehab marketing mix provides both, in a dedicated effort. However, it takes time, resources and investment for a long-term strategy.
5. Drug Rehab Marketing Tools are Needed for Outreach
Drug rehab marketing tools for Outreach are severely lacking in the industry. They are just trying to get referrals from other treatment centers. There is so much more to consider her with drug rehab marketing.
You most likely hired your outreach employees because they convinced you they could produce clients. Most outreach professionals in our industry are “boots on the ground.” They have a limited amount of referral sources, and many do not have a formal marketing education, or resources to continually grow new relationships.
Your outreach staff relies on you for guidance to perform well. If your organization is short-sighted and making the common drug rehab marketing mistakes, “How can you expect your outreach staff not to be short-sighted?” Many centers use short-term solutions for long-term problems with their substance abuse marketing.
All businesses require short, and long-term marketing strategies. The Google control on paid addiction treatment marketing ads has brought to light the extreme importance of solid marketing strategies, properly built websites, organic marketing and having an audience that you own.
What Are the Essential Drug Rehab SEO Marketing Tools?
One of the biggest tools needed include using drug rehab SEO schema. This is a special code that goes on your website that increases search engine optimization. since many rehabilitation centers are not utilizing this, it is a way to get more google juice for your SEO.
Tools that not only help establish new relationships but also promote the organization. You need to provide tools for assisting your staff in increasing quality and targeted relationships. These tools include; ways to grow an industry professional network, understanding social media, using social media, and using a marketing strategy getting your entire organization involved in generating targeted website traffic.
Your rehab marketing plan should include building your organization’s unique brand with front-line professionals to generate targeted relationships and find your niche in the addiction treatment market.
Outreach professionals may be hurting your brand with the messages they are putting out on social media. Behavioral Health Network Resources is on social media 12–15 hours a day. We own over 30 social media groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. We see many outreach professionals posting messages that are not good for branding.
6. Branding to Build Trust and Engagement
Building trust and engagement with drug rehab marketing to get potential clients is critical. Your website and content must make them feel that you are the substance abuse treatment center for them. Many rehabilitation facilities across the United States think this is have beautiful pictures on their website. Branding, trust, and engagement are so much more.
Building your brand is not advertising. It’s establishing a relationship that allows your target market to get to know you. It is attaching your organization to their emotions and feelings. Think of it as if you are single and looking for a long-term relationship. You causally meet someone. You are looking to see if they are attractive and engaged with what you like. If they do, then you want to get to know them. As you get to know them better, you get feelings and emotional ties to that person. Branding is much like this, it is not about your organization, but about being attracting, engaging, and getting emotionally attached.
Branding is much bigger than marketing, and marketing should support branding. Marketing is your website, search engine optimization, advertising, email marketing, etc. Branding is the culture of the organization itself, that builds trust over the competition. It identifies, connects, touches the emotions, and feelings of the target audience. If repeatedly successful, your organization gets attached to those emotions, and feelings of that individual. This must be considered in your drug rehab marketing plan leads strategy.
Value of Drug Rehab Marketing Agency
Addiction treatment outreach professionals must completely understand the key social media (Pinterest, Facebook, and LinkedIn) in our industry. This is a huge drug rehab marketing mistake. They are valuable tools for their toolbox. Used correctly they can generate clients, establish new referral sources, and brand the treatment center.
Facebook has 2 billion people that include many individuals seeking help, and behavioral health professionals. LinkedIn has over 550 million members and a minimum of 20 million addiction and behavioral health professionals. There is nowhere else you can go to reach these large numbers, and must be included in your long-term drug rehab marketing plan leads strategy. These are the most powerful tools for outreach professionals.
They must also be used by treatment centers to grow an IoT targeted audience they own. They are also the best way a treatment center can generate targeted visitors to their website. Treatment centers can use these for paid. and organic marketing. If your organization is interested in social media training, please give us a call at 561–235–6195.
7. Controlling Social Media in Drug Rehab Marketing
Social media drug rehab marketing works in generating treatment calls and lead generation, however, it is not social. I say that because there are specific goals that treatment centers or sales/service organizations must strive for on social media. These goals include; attract, engage, capture and convert. For drug rehab social media to work you need an intimate understanding of how each one works. They all have their strengths, secrets, tricks, and back-doors.
A blog is one of the most valuable pieces of organic social media marketing and is an absolute must for all drug rehab marketing plan leads strategies. However, addiction treatment centers and sales/service organizations must realize their blog is not about them. It should be attracting and engaging with their target audience. Blog posts must be optimized for a keyword or a tail. Many center’s blogs are not optimized correctly and are not inviting for the target audience.
Understanding Tools for Drug Rehab Marketing Plan Leads
We’ve explained the power of social media, and why it is paramount for drug and alcohol treatment centers, and addiction treatment sales/service organizations to be organically marketing on them. Some treatment centers will hire an agency to do their social media marketing. They usually do this for a 3–6-month period, before they realize not too much is happening. At this point, they have nothing to show for their money. Many centers and sales/service organizations then say, “Social media doesn’t work for us”.
You not only need to push your blog out through social media, but you also need to capture a targeted audience. Not capturing this critical audience is a big drug rehab marketing mistake. A drug rehab Marketing and SEO professional can help with Google and social media. As a matter of fact, they should already have an addiction treatment centers audience. This audience is part of your long-term drug rehab marketing plan leads strategy because there is a lifetime value to owning your own targeted audience.
A good social media push on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and G+ should generate a minimum of 500–1,000 targeted click-through to your website. If the article is shared a lot, it could be much higher. Behavioral Health Network Resources has built one of the largest organic social media audiences in the nation.
Our drug rehab SEO marketing on social media should include FLICKR, LinkedIn and Facebook. We have built a targeted audience on all these platforms. Our audience consists of addiction professionals, and individuals seeking information on treatment (210,000). Give us a call at 561–235–6195, and ask us about our 90-day social media marketing package that instantly taps you into our audience, and builds an audience your own.
Addressing Poor Social Media Posts About Recovery
Addiction treatment centers must be aware of what their employees are putting out on social media. We see posts like, “Sunshine Recovery, we are a PHP, IOP, are JACHO accredited and have 2 beds available.” A post like this not only hurts the person posting it but also the brand of the addiction treatment center. Your entire organization needs to be on the same page with social media marketing. CEO’s, Directors, and Outreach must be putting out a message that compliments and supports the brand.
It’s Time to Examine the Top 7 Drug Rehab Marketing Mistakes
Examine and learn from the Top 7 Drug Rehab Marketing Mistakes. These are the most common errors made by drug rehabilitation centers. Many addiction treatment centers closing from a poor marketing strategy when seeking treatment calls for substance abuse treatment clients. The addiction treatment industry is more competitive than ever. CEO’s and Executives need proven drug rehab marketing solutions. Many centers are closing due to poor web marketing. This article laid out 7 extremely important areas to address in your marketing strategy.
- Google Must Be Included in Drug Rehab Marketing Plan Leads Obtain better substance abuse marketing strategies on Google.
- Addiction Recovery Center Owners Need Proven Strategies for Drug Rehab Marketing. Utilize proven substance abuse treatment in web marketing strategies.
- Drug Rehabilitation Centers Websites Lack Structure and Important Information. Improve proper website structure, SEO, and content.
- Controlling Word of Mouth Addiction Treatment Center Organic Marketing.
- Drug Rehab Marketing Tools for Outreach Professionals.
- Branding Builds Trust and Engages Individuals Seeking Addiction Treatment.
- Organic Marketing on Social Media for Recovery Centers. Focused organic social media marketing to generate treatment calls and targeted website traffic.
Learn More About Drug Rehab Marketing at Our Addiction Conferences
As an addiction treatment center Owner, you’ve mastered the skills to start your practice and provide a great clinical service. The missing component of getting clients is strategic marketing. Where are your drug rehab marketing mistakes coming from? There are many important aspects you need as a foundation and components that should be in your marketing mix.
Whether you are just starting out, or have a seasoned team, you need clients to keep your census high enough to keep the doors open. You put a tremendous amount of pressure on your outreach and marketing staff. Are you providing a solid foundation, effective tools, proven methods to foster new business and a strategic plan to grow your organization’s electronic assets? Learn from these proven drug rehab marketing mistakes and start getting ranked on Google.
Have we missed any points that you’d like to add? Post them in the reply section below.
