Digital Marketing for Outpatient & Intensive Outpatient Services

Marketing for Outpatient (OP) and Intensive Outpatient (IOP) services requires a strong focus on targeting your audience locally. 

Why local marketing? Most admits for OP & IOP addiction treatment centers come from the local area since a majority of patients getting these types of treatments remain at their job and/or continue maintaining a normal daily life routine.

For drug and alcohol rehab centers focused on growing their outpatient and intensive outpatient admissions, there are a few different ways to do this using proven digital marketing channels and techniques. 

At the grassroots level, there are a plethora of opportunities for your treatment facility to do speaking and writing commitments at schools, local events, print publications, and televised news, etc. With these engagements many find the potential for new admits, patient referrals, and potential referral partnerships with other treatment centers. 

Additionally, speaking and writing engagements often come with their website counterparts linking back to or referencing your site as either an author citation or a backlink. When these types of sites link back to your rehab center’s site, it can (and often does) directly impact your search engine rankings and targeted traffic to your site which is a significant part of Search Engine Optimization. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is, without question, the most important piece of promoting your OP/IOP facility to an eager and proactive audience seeking your services and it comes in two different forms:

“Organic” SEO which is also known as “natural” search appears like this (highlighted in blue):

“Google Business Profile” which is also known as “Local SEO” and “Google Maps” appears like this (highlighted in blue):

Search Engine Optimization

Both organic and local SEO require unique technical and content marketing disciplines. When done correctly, they can provide your center’s site with immense targeted traffic and admissions potential that will last indefinitely. However, please note these digital marketing initiatives will take weeks or months to see results and should be ongoing for your center to gain and/or retain your positions.

PPC Marketing

In addition to a sustained SEO program, rehab centers can immediately capture traffic and conversions from digital through Pay-Per-Click Marketing, but it comes at a premium that can cost thousands of dollars each month and requires your center to be LegitScript certified before you can run ads on search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and DuckDuckGo. If you’re not already LegitScript certified, you can get the ball rolling by visiting their addiction treatment certification page to start the process.

If you’re operating a rehab facility outside of the United States, unfortunately, you won’t be able to run addiction treatment ads on the major search engines due to LegitScript not offering certification outside the US.

Social Media Advertising

Another way for your center to capture leads and admits for your facility is through social media marketing. Social media marketing for addiction treatment centers requires careful content planning and social profile updates to gain interest by those frequenting these platforms. The types of content that do well include images, videos, and inspirational statements in the form of images paired with meaningful content contributions. 

The main social channels we advocate promoting your center on are Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn with Facebook and LinkedIn being the primary ones to focus on for your marketing messaging. If your OP/IOP facility operates internationally outside of the United States, we also recommend Twitter since over 80% of active users are outside the US and Twitter has shown itself to be a viable marketing venue for international centers.  

All of these social media outlets offer advertising, but we’ve found the most impactful social media channel in terms of new admits will come from Facebook. Unfortunately, if you’re not LegitScript certified, you’ll be unable to run ads until you’ve received certification which can take weeks from the day of submission. 

Additional digital marketing venues should include:

• Email Marketing
• Vertical-specific Directory Submissions (psychologytoday.com, samhsa.gov, recovhub.com, etc.)

Go With Online Local Advertising Options

Lead to Recovery strongly believes OP/IOP rehab centers should focus their efforts locally. Whether or not you hire a digital marketing agency partner or do online marketing in-house, think local and stay local, but also be receptive to patients and patient referrals from centers outside your immediate vicinity. 

If you’re operating an outpatient treatment center and would like to learn how your center can get an additional 2-5 new admits month to your facility from online marketing, call Lead to Recovery today for a free consultation and let’s see if there’s a fit.