Addiction treatment and rehab centers face a difficult question: How do you market effectively to a vulnerable population without sounding too ‘sales-y’? Although marketing is necessary for any sustainable clinic, aggressive sales tactics risk alienating potential patients and their families.
Fortunately, finding that balance can be as simple as listening to your patients and learning what they need to make decisions for their care. Here’s how to create and implement an effective addiction treatment marketing campaign that aligns with a potential patient’s treatment search and establishes your clinic as a stepping stone on their path to recovery.
Step 1: Tailor your marketing to answer your patients’ questions
Individuals and their loved ones often begin the selection process well before they even contact a clinic. They conduct online research for helpful information about addiction recovery, types of therapies, and insight into professional treatment.
One of the most effective ways to map out your marketing material is to review call recordings. Every phone call your clinic receives contains valuable information you can use to inform and direct your marketing strategy. Your inbound phone calls will reveal commonly asked questions, challenges your potential leads face, and feedback on your clinic.
For example, if your recent phone calls reveal commonly asked questions about your facility’s amenities and treatment therapy programs, you can turn this information into blog posts or a guidebook about the different types of therapies your clinic provides. You could also create social media posts with professional images highlighting your facility and the amenities you offer.
Reviewing call transcripts one by one is tedious and creates extra work for an already busy staff. CallRail can help. CallRail’s Conversation Intelligence® uses AI-powered tools to synthesize each phone conversation and highlight commonly spoken words, questions, and phrases. With a quick glance at your call summary or call sentiment reports, you can see what patients want to know and how they feel about the information your team is sharing.
Many clinics hesitate to use call recordings due to patient privacy concerns. CallRail’s Healthcare Plan helps your clinic or rehab facility maintain HIPAA and HITECH compliance regarding patient confidentiality and data protection on all your phone calls and integrates seamlessly into Freshpaint, so you can use your newfound insights to create an effective healthcare marketing strategy.
Step 2: Highlight and prioritize effective marketing campaigns
Even with the relevant marketing material you create in Step 1, you still need to prove your campaigns and marketing channels are driving traffic to your clinic.
An easy way to measure the effectiveness of each campaign is to use Call Tracking and Form Tracking to assign unique phone numbers and forms to each of your marketing channels. Tracking the performance of your marketing channels helps you understand which ones drive the most traffic to your clinic.
For instance, say after analyzing your previous phone conversations in Step 1, you create three pieces of marketing material to help potential patients learn more about your clinic.
- The first piece is a series of blog posts on your website illustrating a day in the life of your addiction treatment program.
- The second piece is a short Facebook video tour of your facility.
- The third piece is a new keyword strategy in your Google Ads, using keywords that surfaced during prior phone calls.
Without a tracking solution, it’s difficult to attribute calls or form submissions to a particular channel. Call Tracking and Form Tracking immediately identify which channels are driving those calls or form submissions. This allows you to hone your marketing strategy and materials to reach and connect with more potential patients.
According to a recent CallRail analysis of 1.1 million leads across seven verticals, including the healthcare industry, Google Ads was the most valuable channel for driving qualified leads for healthcare practices. But it’s not the only channel – Organic Search and Google My Business were also important channels for driving qualified leads. Call tracking lets your practice see exactly where your leads are coming from, even outside your expected top-performing channels.
You can also use CallRail’s Call Tracking and Form Tracking in your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to gain even deeper insight into the effectiveness of your paid marketing campaigns. With an integrated analytics suite, you can quickly identify your cost per lead (CPL) and return on investment (ROI) metrics as they pertain to your marketing campaigns, all from a single, easy-to-navigate analytics dashboard.
Step 3: Speed response times to improve patient experience
Your clinic’s lead response time — how long it takes to respond to a phone call, text message, email, web form, etc. — establishes your reputation. That’s why the final step in creating and implementing an addiction treatment marketing campaign is to ensure your clinic can quickly follow up with potential patients as soon as they contact you.
Rather than waiting for a manager to assign next steps after a patient call, AI-powered tools can increase response times and create a more positive patient experience. Callrail’s Convert Assist uses a three-pronged, AI-powered approach to instantly analyze communications and create step-by-step action plans for your front office team.
For example, if a prospective patient calls and asks whether an inpatient treatment program is covered by insurance, Convert Assist instantly guides your team.
- Action plan: Instead of waiting for instructions from a manager, the intake team can follow the AI-generated steps to check insurance availability and pricing and plan follow-up.
- Smart follow-up: Approved and effective messaging that communicates the relevant information is instantly created and ready to be sent via email, text message, or callback without having to reference notes.
- Call coaching: Conversation coaching assesses each call or message and highlights areas of excellence and opportunities for improvement.
Your intake team is often the first representative a patient encounters, so it's essential to create fast, informative, and empathetic interactions. Convert Assist helps create a positive patient interaction from the beginning.
“Especially for prospect calls, we find Smart follow-up to be a significant time-saver and very supportive. It helps draft emails by providing a concise summary of key points to focus on. They’re more effective because they not only include our standard content but also capture the specifics of each individual call in real time.”
Response times to patient interactions are important, but what if you never connect initially? The healthcare industry has the highest rate of missed calls of any industry in Callrail’s analysis, at 32%. If you’re missing nearly a third of incoming calls, your lead-to-sale pipeline ends before it begins.
That’s why visibility into your inbound calls and follow-up process is critical. With Call Tracking, healthcare providers can see exactly when calls go unanswered, who missed them, and where they originated — whether from a specific campaign, location, or time of day. Smart call routing helps reduce missed calls in the first place by directing patients to available staff or backup numbers based on custom rules.
Clear the path for your addiction patients to succeed
Addiction treatment centers must balance patient care and revenue goals. Your patients need your services, but often complete extensive research before ever picking up the phone. Learning what they’re searching for and making sure their calls are answered, no matter what time they call, allows you to help more people who need your valuable services.
CallRail’s lead engagement tools help you streamline and optimize your marketing efforts — so you can reach more people, connect meaningfully, and guide them toward the support they need.
Disclaimer: This article is based on aggregated and de-identified data and is provided for informational purposes only. To ensure the privacy of our business customers and comply with applicable data protection regulations, the analysis and insights presented herein are derived solely from deidentified data, excluding any sensitive or protected information as defined by privacy laws and regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. This report aims to provide a comprehensive overview of market trends without compromising individual privacy. Any reliance on the information presented in this report is at the user’s own risk, and we disclaim any liability for decisions made based on this report.
