Category Archives: Treatment Center Lead Generation

Different Types of Drug Rehab Treatment Leads – Not All Leads are Equal

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With so many addiction treatment centers in the marketplace all competing for paying customers you can easily figure out that finding and landing a paying client is a big deal. We will attempt to share with you some of the different types of drug rehab leads and which ones tend to be higher quality than others and why.

Bought Drug Rehab Leads – Fast and Expensive

Bought drug rehab leads can come in many different forms. For example, they can be “internet leads” coming from referral websites often times directory sites. They can be SEO or PPC leads. They can also come from radio and television advertisements. The good news about these leads is they are plentiful. The bad news is they are typically generic. The caller knows nothing about your addiction treatment facility or clinic. This requires the admissions person or the call center to try and convince the caller that their rehab is the best place for the caller. The biggest problem with many radio and television leads are the callers are tire kickers and are making an impulse call vs. doing research and actually learning the best facility for loved one who is an addict.

Even a bigger problem for bought leads is the cost. They are expensive. The calls can come with something called “buffers.” Buffers are time slots like 30 seconds, 60 seconds or 120 seconds. Basically, the idea is the admissions person has up to 30 or 120 seconds to qualify the caller to see if they have insurance or the ability to self-pay for their treatment. The longer the buffer the more expensive the call or the lead. Expect to pay $50 -$250 per call.

Drug Rehab PPC Leads – Google, Bing and Facebook Pay Per Click Leads

Here is another group of leads that can provide the addiction treatment center with “instant gratification” in the leads department. It is easy to turn on PPC leads and get the phone ringing in a matter of days. If you don’t know what you are doing it will cost you a small fortune. These leads are bought on a pay per click basis, not on a pay per call basis. If a Google user clicks on your ad it can cost your rehab $5 – $125 per CLICK! This not even a lead or a call to your rehab. Google reshuffled the deck in 2017 by limiting the inventory and the keyword volume that rehabs can purchase since so many rehabs and affiliates were engaging in deceptive practices in trying to gain new clients. Expect to pay $50 to $500 per call. (We’ve even seen some inept rehabs pay $1,000’s per call).

Drug Rehab SEO Leads –Best Quality Leads and Hardest to Come By

SEO is Search Engine Optimization and SEO is the “long game.” In other words, SEO is all about creating digital assets on the website. Assets like infographics, videos, e-books, white papers in-depth blog posts interactive quizzes and more. These digital assets add value to the website. These assets tend to be “evergreen” content. Meaning, content created today will generate calls tomorrow and into the next several years. You know you are really good at SEO content when other people share your content organically on the social networks. Expect to pay $5 – $100 per lead or call and there are literally hundreds of factors that will play into the costs.

Drug Rehab Chat Calls and Leads – Largest Growing Drug Rehab Lead Category

Chat leads are excellent for engaging the website visitor without asking them for a large commitment like a phone call or filling out a web form. Chat leads can be just as valuable as SEO leads because the drug rehab can collect a lot of information to take the prospect to the next step. The key here is to man the chat on the website. You can do this inhouse or outsource. Either way you need someone with a good script or experience to help the user to the next phase. Expect to pay somewhere similar to the SEO leads.

Drug Rehab E-Mail Leads – Super High-Quality Leads

Multi-Channel marketing includes email leads. All great marketing programs generate leads / calls customers from multiple different channels. Some channels are better than others however just like an investment portfolio you want a strong blend of leads coming in from multiple different sources. When a family or an addict signs up for your email list they are instilling trust in your company and your brand. They may not actually be in buying mode along their journey but in research mode first. However, when the email lands at the right time and there have been multiple different touch points with the family when they do make the call it tends to be the call that is a VOB or an admission call. Hard to put a cost per lead on email leads. The point here is if your are driving traffic to your website you want to list build and capture those names and email’s.

Drug Rehab Social Media Leads – Social Media the Untapped Lead Honey Pot

Generating leads on social media can be more art than science. We are seeing a lot of success with Facebook groups and Facebook pages. Some of these groups and pages can go viral and it is important that you have a marketing automation and CRM program in place to manage the volume. In all cases trust is the single biggest factor in getting people to raise their hand and ask for help from your rehab, especially on the social networks. The social networks also help in terms of SEO rankings as well. Google is paying attention to the number of followers, quality of friends, likes, shares etc. Expect costs per leads to run anywhere between $10 – $75 per lead in the social media category.

Drug Rehab Referral Leads Are the Gold Standard

Getting leads in from alumni, interventionists, board addiction psychiatrists, other treatment centers are the absolute best because they are basically WOM or word of mouth. It is very hard to put a price on the leads because it can take years or development to build the relationships. So, if you are going to hire a sales person make sure that they do have these relationships already in place.

Bottom Line For Drug Rehab Leads – Make Sure Your Business is Capitalized

Invest in building a “lead generating engine” for your drug rehab vs. paying for or buying leads. Building a multi-channel marketing effort with SEO, Social Media, Chat, Email and referrals is the smartest way to feed your business consistent revenue on an ongoing basis akin to teaching a man to fish. At the same time building a lead engine takes time and is not done overnight and can sometimes take a year or more to really crank up the volume.

Rehab Marketing Trade Off’s

As with anything there are trade offs. In baseball you can trade for a power hitter who hits 40 home runs per year but he also strikes out 200 times per year. So do you want 40 home runs at the expense of 200 KO’s? Same happens in marketing. For example, we want users to fill out forms on our website. At the same time we don’t want to get a lot of SPAM. We can put a CAPTCHA on the web form but that sometimes can stop a well qualified lead or inquiry from coming in. Deleting a few extra spam comments is a small price to pay.

Tracking is so important in addiction treatment lead generation and web marketing. In the drug rehab industry tracking can be time consuming. We use software to track the calls and web forms. It is called Call Tracking Metrics. Here’s the challenge when we do call tracking. It requires someone to go in and score the calls. Usually this is the busy admissions person. It is time consuming. It breaks workflow. It can be labor intensive to some but the benefits are enormous.

Many centers think they do call tracking by “counting the calls.” But there is much more to it than that. If you are not doing call tracking correctly then be prepared to see a lot of your marketing dollars leak out the back door quickly.

Web design is another area where there are trade offs. If you are spending upwards of $20K per month on PPC traffic in addiction treatment marketing then you want to make sure you have a website that converts. You can save an extra $5K by putting up a great website that will get found but if it were me I would not only want to b e found I also what the people that come to my website to CALL ME! What makes them call? T-R-U-S-T. (One word) TRUST. It better look great! The logo and identity better look like there was some though and effort put into it. Do you have trust icons on the home page? Do you have insurance icons on the home page? Are the testimonials credible?

So the bottom line is we have trade off’s in pretty much everything in life…..and that is OK. 🙂

Setting Drug Rehab Marketing Expectations

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

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.

Don’t Panic it is Only Rehab Marketing

While we are all passionate about our businesses there are times when we can hyperventilate over some of the smallest things. Keep in mind that in our drug rehab business we do not typically have people on ventilators or on life support systems. So if something goes wrong and you let us know it will get fixed. The problem is sometimes it does not get fixed as fast as we want.

I’ll share a little story on the importance of priorities and marketing. A long long time ago sometime back in the 1980’s I was a printing sales person for a Chicago based printer and I was based in NYC. I had just broken into a huge account. One of the big record club companies. I sold a project back then that was about $20,000. Not really big but it was a start of what I thought could have been a career making account.

Truck

The company printed the project and I flew to Chicago and did the press check to make sure that everything went well which it did until we shipped the project. It was shipped on a Monday and was supposed to be in NYC on that Friday. Friday came and went. Client calls looking for his project. I start sweating. Monday rolls around and no delivery. We call and call the shipping company. No answer on their end, meaning, they did not have an answer for us. By Wed we knew something was really wrong, meanwhile this was probably going to be my last project for this huge client…..and he made sure to let me know.

What had happened was the driver of the truck was arrested by the cops for an outstanding warrant. The truck was parked in the New Jersey Turnpike at one of the rest stops with the printed materials in the truck.

So if you have a graphic that needs to be changed, a few bad phone calling coming in from a wrong number please take a deep breath. We will get to it and we will fix it….it is only drug rehab marketing.