Rehab Marketing Ideas Addiction Treatment Marketing

Rehab Marketing

Are you looking to have your detox or treatment center full on a consistent basis? Like most businesses addiction rehab centers need a steady follow of customers/patients in order to stay profitable. The biggest challenge for small rehabs is where to start and how can they complete with national companies that spend millions of dollars on branding through television, radio and the internet.

You probably also notice a jump in new rehab centers opening up everywhere because of the massive addiction issue we face today. Although that is a good thing that there are plenty of addiction treatment centers to assist those in need, it makes it tougher to turn a profit as rehab owner.

Here at Knack Media Inc. we understand the challenges of rehabs trying to compete in a competitive market, and know that you got into this business not only to help people, but to earn a good living as well. There are many affordable ways to market an addiction rehab without going broke. Below I’ll list some of the obvious and not so obvious ways to fill your beds.

  1. TV – Great way to build your brand and drive in calls, the problem with this method is cost for most small rehabs so we won’t go into great detail.
  2. Radio – done effectively and over a period of time these ads can work, but generally takes time and once your budget runs out, so do your calls.
  3. Internet – Here is where most of you have invested the majority of your money right? Maybe you own a few dozen URL’s trying to get organic traffic. Some of you have tried PPC on Google Adwords for rehab marketing and released that can get expensive quick.
  4. Affiliate marketing – There are websites that you can market to that can bring your cost down to as little as .05 cents. Some affiliates have contracts with hundreds of sites that allow them to market text or banner ads in your behalf.
  5. Social Media – By far the best investment in your company (over-time) this will bring you in a consistent amount of exposure which means more patients.
  6. Working your local market – many of you are still receiving referrals from meetings, therapists, or maybe other centers in the area. We all know the issues that come from that, but more importantly you must build your own steady flow of patients so you are not held hostage to “referrals”

Our firm handles online marketing for rehabs, so let’s discuss #3, #4 and #5. If you are looking to do marketing for a new rehab verses a more established rehab you we be behind eight ball a bit, but not for long. Here’s why, most websites are not “configured” correctly, so by some quick cheap fixes you can increase rankings. Website speed, and how well if shows on mobile devises are just some of the important on-site SEO factors for your site. You can get complete breakdown of on-page quick fixes by calling one of or consultants at 877-957-2244.

Let’s take a quick look at Google Trends (https://www.google.com/trends) for some ideas where some of the searches are coming from for some drug rehab related search terms.

addiction marketing
You can clearing see that the search volume has picked up for heroin related search terms. Is your treatment center targeting those? Do you accept patients from anywhere in the U.S.? Here is a list below of some the related searches.

  • detox from heroin
  • heroin detox drug
  • heroin withdrawal
  • heroin addiction
  • methadone detox
  • herion detox
  • rapid detox
  • heroin detox symptoms
  • heroine detox
  • heroin detox time

In addition to finding out which terms are begin searched by people you can also use Google Trends to find out what geographical area these searches most come from.

rehab marketing ideas

PPC for Rehabs

Google Adwords or PPC still works great for addiction treatment marketing to generate drug rehab leads or alcohol, or whatever vertical you’re focusing on. The issue many run into is the learning curve. Even an expert in PPC for rehabs will take a month or 2 to nail down your target market and get to a cost per acquisition you can deal with. Going in blind you might spend upwards of 10k to get one patient, and we know that doesn’t pencil out. We know that PPC for rehabs can still be done when you configure your campaigns correctly and your landing pages convert well. PPC can bring in patients affordably if you know what you’re doing and is a great addition to an overall marketing plan for an addiction treatment center.

There are other companies that offer Cost Per Click and do not use Google Adwords or Bing/Yahoo, and you can use them to drive clicks or calls to your rehab. They may use sites like Reddit or Tumblr to bring in cheap traffic to your site. In order to track your efforts effectively you will need tracking codes on your banners and call tracking on your numbers so you know which campaigns are working for you, and ones that are just burning through your money.

Organic Traffic for Rehabs

The best way is to drive in business though your website organically. Once your website is optimized properly, you can begin to build organic traffic, you don’t need 15 websites, just 1 good one. If you are looking for rehab marketing ideas than think about writing informative content (or have an agency write it for you). One of the most cost effective way to drive in drug rehab leads over time is through organic traffic.

The biggest mistake rehabs when trying to generate leads through “addiction marketing” is trying to rank nationally for phrases like “drug rehab” or “addiction treatment center”. You can possibly rank there one day, highly improbable. Instead use tools like https://ubersuggest.io/ and try to find 3, 4, 5, word long-tail keywords to rank your addiction treatment center. For more effective treatment center marketing you might write your blog post about “what to expect from heroin detox” or “addiction treatment center in San Diego”. Be sure to include infographics, videos, charts and images to get as much out of each post.

Social Media Marking for Rehabs

Now that your post is complete you should syndicate that content through all your social channels. Have all you staff, friends, family members share your content to their circles. Now that’s a good start, but you want to get that message to people you don’t know right?  To really get the biggest bang for your buck and take your addiction marketing to the next level, you will need to build a massive virtual community that wants to see your content on a regular basis.

In order to do this, you will need to build your social media connections. The cheapest way to achieve this you would a hire a consultant (Knack Media Inc.) to train a staff member on how to grow thousands of followers in a short period of time. The is no way to cheat the system when it comes to social media. Sure you can buy fake followers and likes, but that does make you any money, and will only make it difficult to test your engagement levels on your posts. There are tools your staff can use to help “automate” the process so they can spend less time, but think of social media as compound interest, over time is growing.

The other alternative to hire Knack Media to handle all your addiction treatment marketing. We can assist you in your web-design, one-site SEO audit, PPC marketing, content writing, affiliate marketing, and social media building and branding. To really succeed long term, you must have a strategy, sure there are ways to make the phones ring today, but you want the phones to ring always, consistently for a reasonable cost. Call one of our rehab marketing experts and discuss your options.