Author Archives: jimpeake

Setting Drug Rehab Marketing Expectations

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I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. Here comes some truth telling you won’t hear from some other marketers in our drug rehab addiction treatment industry. Addiction treatment marketing is hard work. Drug rehab itself is hard work. In both disciplines are moving targets. With moving targets we have to pay attention all the time. Drug rehab like drug rehab marketing is a lot like putting in golf. What I mean by this is if you are trying to make a 30 foot but on a green that slopes to the right you better aim the ball 6 feet to the left and have just the right velocity on it in order to get it close to the hole. Getting it in the hole is HARD!!!

La Quinta Resort and Club

Here in lies the problem. You need to get an admission and I need to get you the phone call. Getting the ball close to the hole or the lead on your website is not good enough. Getting the caller to almost book the flight to your drug rehab is not good enough, it is not an admission! I need to get your website visitor to call and you need to get them to admit….PERIOD end of story! If we both don’t do this we fail.

So now we know this is a moving target and it is hard work what can we do to improve our odds?

Improving Drug Rehab Marketing Results:

1) Answer the phone by the second ring!
2) Make sure your website is getting good grades. See Web Page Test. Did you pass or fail? Call me if you are failing.
3) Build Trust – starting with a great brand. Does yours look like it was made by a 6th grader or a Madison Avenue professional? Trust makes the phone ring.
4) Add in depth profiles and pictures of your staff devote a page to each person. People do business with people they know like and trust…..PERIOD.
5) Write, write, write and write some more. When you get done with that then create videos. Create even more videos. Post content to your website every day. Yes every day.
6) What to do when the phone is not ringing? See step 5 and repeat. Repeat again. Build your authority on your website. Users are looking for great content.
7) Speak at your local high schools and college. Get links from them.
8) Get in the news. Get PR, get press. Don’t know how to do this, get some free PR training here.

Setting Drug Rehab Marketing Expectations:

Unfortunately in the drug rehab space more and more new money is coming in. With the new money it creates a challenge for us all. If you have a NEW 20 bed facility here are some guidelines for a $25K per month admit.

$10K per month marketing budget – you are kidding right?
$25K per month marketing budget – you are getting warmer but you will not fill all your beds
$50K per month marketing budget – same here as the $25K budget

20 beds times $25K per month = $500,000 in revenue PER MONTH (Guess what is a reasonable budget is to fill these beds? If you don’t know call me 888-405-0051).

SEO expectations – better be able to wait a year to see 5-7 consistent monthly admissions
PPC expectations – you will see some good admissions returns in the first 3 months but be ready to spend what it takes

Even when you have a decent budget and you have hired your marketing team are you helping them supplement their content with additional content from your staff? This needs to and must happen. When hiring new hires make sure they can write and speak in front of a camera. We all gotta create more content. This is what Google and the users want. When the content is good it is shared and when it is shared in links or social media circles Google takes notice and gives you credit!

Amateur vs. Professional PPC in Drug Rehab

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In my experience I can say that PPC is definitely the closest thing to instant gratification in the addiction treatment marketing business. PPC can generate fresh drug rehab phone calls in a matter of 24-48 hours if you have a budget to run Google PPC traffic at your website.

drug rehab ppc management services

The challenge is drug rehab PPC is expensive. It is in the stratosphere like insurance and mortgages in Google Adwords. I have seen cost per clicks go from $75 – $150 per click in the drug rehab space.

If you are going to engage Google and Bing in a serious PPC campaign then you must know what you are doing or else I would suggest that you are completely throwing your money away. The reason I say this is because people do know what they are doing in this drug rehab PPC vertical and if you don’t you will be out gunned.

For example, one of the challenges we have in the treatment center marketing space is we get a lot of dead beat calls from people who have no money or are social security. These people are looking for *free rehab,* and they type into Google “free drug treatment” or “scholarship drug treatment.” The problem for many private centers is they cannot take clients unless they have cash money or PPO insurance.

A good amateur PPC guy will put some negative keywords into their PPC campaign like -free drug rehab center or -stated funded addiction treatment. It takes time to build these negative keyword lists.

We as professional drug rehab PPC providers have 10’s of thousands of negative keywords just in the drug rehab industry alone. What this means for you is your will get far less calls from broke prospects. The down side is you have to pay us a percentage of the Google and Bing PPC spend. The upside is your money spent will generate a return for you and will not be an experiment.

The other advantage of using drug rehab PPC professionals is we have a team of qualified people who will build your campaigns who know buying keywords and know how to write ads that get clicks. This deep experience and knowledge will help a lot. At the same time this is not a part time job for us, it is full time and if you are going to spend any kind of budget in Google you must a lot a full time team to the efforts.

What if you get a lot of calls from your PPC campaigns? What if those calls are costing a small fortune how will you know which ad groups produce admissions and which ones do not? A good professional team will assist you in this area.

Lastly, most amateurs don’t know the first thing about call tracking or call scoring which is absolutely critical is making any drug rehab SEO and PPC campaign a success. If you don’t have this dialed in you can kiss your money good bye and help Google’s stock price soar.

Phone Tracking Inbound Drug Rehab Leads

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It is super simple to save a bunch of money and start tracking where your inbound phone calls are coming from. Keeping track of your Call Tracking Metrics is absolutely critical for the success of your business both long term and short term. The reason why it is so critical is because if you are spending money on Billboards or Google Adwords don’t you want to know which one works better? If you are buying keywords in Google Adwords don’t you want to know which ones work better for admissions? (i.e. Drug Rehab vs. Drug Rehab in Florida?)

Not only can you track Google Adwords and Billboards but you can track any media including Twitter and Facebook and more. I really like the phone tracking software by Call Tracking Metrics for all drug rehab leads.

If you want help setting this up on your website give me a call at 781-990-8844 or click on the button below.

3 Tips – Establishing a Marketing Budget for a Drug Rehab Center

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3 Tips – Establishing a Marketing Budget for a Drug Rehab Treatment Center

I am often approached by existing and new businesses in the addiction treatment field with requests on how to market their businesses. As far as I’m concerned this is pretty straight forward. Build an audience large enough and tell them about your drug and alcohol treatment center and a percentage of them will pick up the phone and call you for treatment.

Then the question comes up “how much should I allocate in marketing funds to sustain my business?” My answer to this is pretty simple, 20% of what your monthly revenue is based on a 100% census. For example, let’s say you have a 10 bed facility. You are charging $10,000 per month for treatment. This means that $20,000 EVERY MONTH needs to go to marketing, or two patients out of the 10 need to pay for the marketing. Anything less is not realistic no matter how you are marketing the business unless you have a contract with the Fire Fighters or Airline Pilots unions.

To be even more blunt about this I would recommend that if you are a brand new treatment center or just starting out I would allocate at least 40% for your budget to get established or $40,000. Here’s the reason why. It is like boosting a rocket off the launch pad, it takes a pile of energy to get the rocket off the ground in the first 2+ miles before it heads off into space. Same holds true with the drug rehab industry you need a lot of energy to be noticed amongst the established players and to be noticed by Google most importantly:

3 Tips on How to Spend Your Marketing Budget

1) Build a brand and a great website(s) that converts visits to calls (I would build more than one website, this is a whole separate topic, see Building Outposts)
2) Be prepared to publish a lot of quality content, often and forever
3) Testing different media – Onground Marketing/Sales, SEO, PPC, Direct Mail, Billboards, Elevator Ads and tracking different media is a must – without this you are better off investing in a few days at a Las Vegas Casino.

Drug Addiction Treatment Websites

The value of a website is the same as a fishing net is to a fisherman. The net has to be big and wide and not have any holes in it. This is what your website needs to be like, a big fishing net that catches fish, but your fish are families and addicts who are addicted to drugs, alcohol, gambling, food, sex and other addictions.

The single biggest factor that will make your website convert is TRUST. Let me repeat that, TRUST is what will convert visits into phone calls. It starts with the brand and identity…..the LOGO. If the logo sucks it says a lot about the business. As my mentor said to me, “how you do anything is how you do everything.”

Remember in the movie Jaws Brodie said to Quint, you’re gonna need a bigger boat.” Well in the case of marketing in the drug rehab industry, “you’re gonna need a lot more than one website!”

Drug Rehabs Need to be Publishers?

Wait a minute! WTF? Did you say drug rehab centers need to be publishers? Yes! We all have to become publishers. Just like you are reading this article, I am a “publisher.” I don’t like it, but we all have to do it. People who seek addiction treatment and Google are looking for information, they want up to date high quality information. Do you have a program director whom is an industry leader and published author? Yes, great! Strap a microphone on him when he or she wakes up every day. Every waking minute they are basically publishing quality content that your audience wants to know about!

I say this to drug rehabs all the time, “you have to become as good at generating leads in the addiction treatment space as you are at rehab or else you will fail.” The reason I say this is because it is so competitive in this space it ranks right up there with insurance and mortgages.

Testing and Tracking Addiction Treatment Marketing

Being a professional marketer we all assume that all media is tracked, however in reality it is not. Installing Google Analytics is a breeze so tracking website activity and social media is simple to do and it does not cost anything to do so. Do you know how any people who visit your website view your site from a wireless device like an iPad or an iPhone? Do you know how many website visits you had last month? Do you know how many calls you had last month to the drug rehab?

We have to not only track the web activity but more importantly we must track the phone calls. Do the phone calls come from the web or did they come from a billboard advertisement? What is the cost of generating a call from the web vs. the billboard? How are the conversions/admissions rates different?

We at Addiction-Rep know the answers to all these questions. We set up these testing and tracking systems for you and manage them. They require full time management, we are a white glove service. You can also go to Google or Infinity and have them set up your tracking for you. I promise you there is a steep learning curve in this area but it is well worth the investment whether you do it yourself or hire someone to do it for you. I will say it has to be done to sustain the long term viability of the addiction treatment center.

Any questions or comments please call us at 781-405-5815.

Drug Rehab Leads – Adobe’s State of Online Advertising Report

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After reading this report I believe that Adobe releases a couple of pieces of information that we already know but just don’t do enough.  What every advertiser needs to do is tell a story.  I’m guilty because I don’t do it enough for my own business.  But because we are in the treatment business we have a lot of great stories to tell.    Each one of them very different for we have all walked different but similar paths.  We as advertisers and publishers all have to do a much better job at story telling.  What your your thoughts on this?  Are you doing it?  Do you have a story to tell?  Do you want me to publish it for you and link back to your website?  We can and will do that.

Adobe State of Online Advertising

If there is a single secret to success in advertising a drug rehab business online this just might be it. Tell a great story and use video. Develop TRUST. TRUST converts.

Here is a link to the entire Adobe report and it is a fast digestible read. Hope you enjoy it. If want help with your treatment center marketing visit Addiction-Rep or call Jim Peake at 781-990-8844.