Marketing your rehab center is a difficult proposition. You deal with extremely emotional, personal situations on a daily basis, and you don’t want your marketing to come across as…well, as marketing.
You want to position your rehab center as a ready-and-waiting solution for whoever needs it, and not as a salesy, money-grabbing enterprise that takes advantage of others’ misfortune.
To help you keep your marketing efforts professional, un-intrusive, and effective, we’ve put together a list of 4 common marketing mistakes that rehab centers make, and how you can avoid them.
This is the number one way to come across purely as a commercial enterprise that treats its patients as the means to a padded bank account, instead of real people in need of help.
It’s fine to have a place on your website that lists all amenities and facilities that your center provides, but these should not be the focus of your day-to-day message. You’re not selling your rehab center like you would a vacation home.
Highlight the benefits of choosing your rehab center, rather than the facility itself. Addicts and their loved ones are looking for structured support that ultimately results in an addiction-free individual. The vast majority of your literature should emphasize how your facility helps patients to achieve such results.
If you can forge an association between your rehab facility and successfully-rehabilitated former addicts, you will see bigger returns in the long run.
In many, many cases, your patients are not the ones who initiated the search for a rehab center. In fact, many potential patients will actively reject the idea of rehab.
Instead, focus on those who drive the process – a patient’s loved ones, whether they’re friends, family, or coworkers.
These are the individuals that are pivotal in convincing a potential patient that they need rehab in the first place.
Why waste your efforts marketing to someone who’s actively hostile towards what your rehab center represents on a fundamental level? You could instead be using your resources to make the process easier for those who can convince potential patients that rehab is the right move.
The rehab and addiction treatment industry is extremely crowded at times. This can actually be a big plus, however. If you keep consistent tabs on your competitors, you’ll never run out of marketing ideas.
While you shouldn’t literally copy your competitors, you can pick up on smart tactics they may be using and simply execute them better than your competitors are.
Tracking your competitors also gives you a baseline standard for your month-to-month marketing efforts. If your main competitor is putting out five blog posts a month, start putting out six! If another center just wrote a general guide on recognizing addiction, write an even better one that’s backed by research and statistics!
Essentially, if something is working for your competitors, you can often tweak it to work even better for your practice.
Marketing campaigns are as good as useless if you’re not tracking results. Even if a certain strategy seems to be improving your bottom line, how can you replicate that success if you don’t know why it’s working?
Tracking can (and should) be done on two different levels: online and offline.
Tracking your results online is greatly simplified thanks to free tool suites like Google Analytics. Once properly installed on your website, you’ll have all the data you could ever ask for. You’ll know exactly which pages are converting, which are underperforming, and everything in between.
Google Analytics is revolutionary in shaping the direction of future digital marketing strategies.
As for offline tracking, the complexity and extent is really up to you. You could simply ask all incoming patients where they first heard about you. Or, you could have each fill out a more detailed survey that really gets into the specifics of how and why they chose your rehab center.
This type of information is priceless, and results in a more distilled acquisition process moving forward.
The four listed mistakes are some of the most common marketing blunders made by most rehab centers. However, marketing your center is a thoroughly nuanced process with many potential pitfalls along the way.
Keeping these four mistakes in mind is a fantastic start to getting your marketing efforts back on track, but it could also be a good idea to partner up with a digital marketing agency that specializes in rehab and addiction treatment centers.
We’re a full-service digital marketing agency, and our expert team of Internet marketers has years of experience crafting custom online strategies for rehab centers across the country. If you’re looking for the touch of a professional, we’d love to help.
Contact us today for more information or a free quote!