Your addiction treatment center helps people create a new life free from addiction. But the people who need your services have to be able to find you if they’re to take advantage of the life-giving fresh start you offer. That’s why addiction treatment marketing strategies are so crucial.
Without addiction treatment marketing, your facility could easily languish, unable to connect with the clients who need your addiction treatment center so badly.
Take a look at five of the key digital marketing strategies that can attract the admits you want.
Focus on Local
The potential admits to addiction treatment centers aren’t flung across the nation — they’re right in your neighborhood, for the most part. That means your local marketing efforts should sit at the center of your rehab marketing strategy. There are a few specific steps you can take to boost your local marketing.
Google Business Profile
Since most people seeking addiction treatment services will start with Google, your Google Business Profile listing becomes vital to your marketing. Your GBP listing can attract potential clients who are searching in a moment of desperation, helping them find you rather than one of your competitors. The listing helps clients see that you’re geographically close by, and it provides all the essential contact info they need. Google Business Profile is also of great value for mobile search, which now accounts for the majority of all local business searches.
Local Directories
Of course you want your addiction treatment center to show up on all local directories. But to really catch the attention of potential clients, you must make sure you’ve optimized all your local listing profiles. Keep all information absolutely consistent to help boost your Google rankings, and verify your listings with Yelp, SAMHSA, Bing Local and Apple Maps — having your addiction treatment facility show up on a map can provide a powerful psychological boost to someone looking for local help. In addition, seek out positive reviews on your local listings to increase your rankings and give clients a reason to choose your center.
Lean Into SEO
You may have already spent some time on search engine optimization for your treatment center’s website. Now’s the time to dig a little deeper and make sure your SEO is doing all it can for you.
Have you incorporated local search terms into your drug rehab SEO? You should be targeting not just the city or neighborhood where your facility is actually located but also place names for other nearby areas. Consider making separate pages for those other cities to help users feel seen.
In addition, develop a keyword strategy focusing on your specific addiction treatment services to get your center to the top of search engine results pages. Adding service keywords to your collection of geocentric keywords will make it easier for potential clients to find you through their targeted searches.
Market on YouTube
You may not have thought of YouTube as a marketing platform for addiction treatment centers, but it’s a dynamite opportunity for you to reach potential clients, many of whom are spending a lot of time on the site. Once you create a YouTube channel, you can use it to answer people’s questions about addiction, about recovery, about your services — really, about anything that might be on potential clients’ minds.
Many people choose to get their information in visual form rather than reading a wall of text, and YouTube meets that need. The platform handles more than 3 billion searches per month, and it’s actually the No. 2 social media platform on the internet. As a bonus, you may find it less expensive to advertise and market via YouTube than on traditional search engines.
Consider creating testimonial videos from satisfied clients, tours of your facility and FAQ videos to answer the questions you hear most often from clients. Make sure to use closed captioning, as many people may watch your videos on their mobile devices in public places where they don’t want others listening. You can also place YouTube ads on specific channels that cater to your clientele.
Create Content
Addiction treatment marketing relies on content to a large extent. Through your website, blog and YouTube channel, you can attract visitors to your site and help them see you as a trusted provider of substance abuse treatment. Keep in mind that when you create content for your center, you’re not overtly marketing your brand. Instead, you’re forging a connection with possible clients and their families.
Direct your content toward the needs of those clients and families by answering their questions, including the questions and concerns of the family members who are anxious beyond belief about their addicted loved one. Share research in addiction science that clarifies the techniques you use at your addiction treatment center, as well as news stories about advances in mental health and addiction treatment. In addition, many family members may need a basic introduction to the world of addiction treatment, including an understanding of terminology that may seem routine to you.
If you already have a blog, consider updating the articles you’ve already created. Update the SEO and bring the content up to date, then republish it to generate more traffic. Providing informational pages helps establish you as a trustworthy expert in your field, and blog posts can address timely issues. With keyword-driven content, you can attract clients to your website and from there to your facility.
Answer People’s Questions
The main goal of your content marketing, whether on your website, on your YouTube channel or as part of your blog, is to attract visitors to your addiction treatment center. You do that by answering their questions. And people who are in need of services at addiction treatment centers typically have a lot of questions.
Develop a robust FAQ page for your website that poses questions the way your potential clients are asking them. Question-based searches have been increasing steadily in recent years, and the growing use of voice search is likely to boost that type of search. Ask the questions overtly on your site, either as FAQs or as headings on your pages, to hone in on the keywords that are driving addiction treatment-related searches. Then use the experts you have in-house to start providing answers.
If your addiction treatment center could use a hand with marketing, Lead to Recovery is ready to help. We’ll provide the digital marketing services you need, promoting your offerings to the very people who need them most. Contact us to see how we can lend a hand today.
Reviewed by:
Matthew Travers
Rehab Marketing Expert