Rehab News

The America in Rehab Blog

Welcome to the America in Rehab blog. In this section of our addiction treatment marketing website, you’ll find the latest in rehab industry news as well as expert insight, primarily authored by America in Rehab founder Jim Peake, who has more than 20 years of experience marketing on behalf of addiction treatment centers nationwide.

If there’s a technological or treatment advancement in the rehab industry, we’ll be here to break it down and offer analysis. We’ll also cover techniques and strategies that can help your treatment center better engage online visitors and capture admissions. Be sure to never miss a new post on America in Rehab by bookmarking this page or following our social media profiles.

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.

Is Your Drug Rehab Website Performing?

These days it is so easy for a user to hit the back button and go on to another drug treatment center site once you lose them they are gone forever. Users aren’t patient waiting for your site to load and the images to appear. Do you want to see what your site looks like as far as website speed goes? Click on this link and you will see.

While some of this stuff might seem technical and it is, it is also very important in terms of SEO. Who cares? Google cares a lot!

Website Speed Tool

Test your drug rehab website using this tool.

Now if you don’t have a bunch of green buttons with A’s and B’s then give us a call over at Webdesign-Rep and we’ll get you top drug rehab website grades ASAP.

Passing Grades

Your website grades need to be this good to be on top

Phone Tracking Inbound Drug Rehab Leads

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

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.