5 Common Mistakes in Addiction Treatment Marketing
Marketing is a critical function in growing your addiction treatment facility by ensuring you are reaching your target audience to promote your services. Unfortunately, addiction treatment marketing is not as easy as the click of a button, and mistakes happen. Wondering what those are? We’ll go over the top five mistakes in addiction treatment center marketing, so you won't make the same mistakes.
1. Only Marketing as a Sales Pitch
Addiction — and the recovery that follows — is an extremely personal and vulnerable journey for the person who is addicted and their family and friends. When people look for rehab for themselves or loved ones, they need to know the facility is not just in it for the money or self-promotion. If you fail to show empathy, passion, and purpose in your treatment center marketing and instead lead with your pocketbook, you’ll turn off potential clients in a heartbeat. Instead, lead with emotion, understanding, and compassion. Make sure your addiction treatment marketing is centered around what you can do for the client, not just about your awards and accolades.
Connect with people who are looking for rehab by sharing personal testimonies from your staff and current or past clients. Use content marketing and write blog posts centered around your treatment philosophy, the local community, and how and why you started the facility. Outshine your competitors by providing content and advertising that is meaningful.
2. Not Using Social Media to Forge Meaningful Connections
Social media gives you a chance to get to know your target customer — and for them to get to know you — on a level that other marketing channels simply can’t compete with. If you’re not on social media or your strategy is lacking, you’re missing out on forming deep and meaningful connections with a whole new audience. Social media allows you to let your personality shine through while amplifying your mission and purpose to the masses.
There are an increasing number of places for you to meet your target audience where they are, so make sure you are present on a number of social media platforms, including Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Also, make sure your content on each platform is tailored to the platform’s audience. For example, if you’re trying to reach parents, posting your content on TikTok is likely not the best avenue. But if you’re trying to reach college kids, TikTok is great. If you’re trying to reach parents, consider Facebook.
3. Not Having Any Idea What Your Target Audience Wants
There’s no shortage of treatment center websites and blogs out there. While it may be tempting — and easy — to mimic what other addiction treatment centers are doing on their websites and other marketing channels, that’s not a strategy that gives the customer what they’re truly looking for. When you take the time to get to know your target audience and what they’re looking for in a rehab, you can fine-tune your marketing strategies to align with their wants and needs are to make sure you’re showing up with engaging ads and content where they spend time. This prevents you from becoming “just another treatment center” in an often-crowded arena.
4. Neglecting the Power of SEO
Whether you’re marketing a rehab facility or a swimming pool, you can’t ignore the power of search engine optimization or SEO. SEO becomes even more popular in booming industries, like the addiction treatment space, because strong SEO helps your facility rank higher on search engines like Google.
Another reason having a honed SEO strategy is so crucial for rehabs is that Google recently placed restrictions on drug rehab campaigns to protect the community from scammers. This means that if you don’t have a strong SEO strategy, your messages may never be delivered to your target audience.
To keep your drug rehab SEO strategy strong, focus on the following:
Regularly publishing relevant and meaningful content
Posting videos
Producing long-form content such as blog posts and white papers
Optimizing your content with keywords — and using them appropriately
Using short URLs
Including backlinks in your content and making sure they are valuable to the reader or linking to one of your services or blog posts
Fixing broken links
Making sure your website is mobile friendly
Optimizing your website and web pages so they don’t load slowly
Setting up a GoogleMyBusiness profile
5. Not Working with a Team that Knows the Industry
Your everyday run-of-the-mill marketing just won’t cut it when it comes to convincing your target audience to trust you to help them navigate the complex and emotional rehab journey. You need a marketing team that knows the ins and outs of the addiction treatment industry and how to effectively reach and engage audiences. This is because the drug rehab industry is highly specialized with its own set of unique idiosyncrasies that most marketing teams just don’t know about.
Contact The Drug Rehab Agency
The first step to helping those who suffer from addiction is to help them find you when they are ready. Unlike most online marketing agencies, we specialize in connecting drug and alcohol treatment services with patients.
Let the treatment center marketing experts at Drug Rehab Agency handle the heavy lifting when it comes to building addiction treatment marketing campaigns that convert. The Drug Rehab Agency team brings a 360-degree view to marketing rehabilitation centers in the United States. Our team of marketing specialists creates drug rehab marketing plans for more than 60 treatment centers nationwide.
Do you have a marketing goal in mind, or want to find out what we can do to increase your revenue and patient care? Reach out to us today — we’re happy to help. Contact us today to learn more.
