How to create a marketing campaign for your addiction treatment center

When it comes to marketing, if a clinic or rehab center leans too much toward hard sales tactics, they risk seeming pushy and out of touch with potential patients and their families. On the other hand, if a clinic skimps on marketing and sales altogether, they’ll miss opportunities to leverage online visibility to better reach those looking for help and recovery in the first place.

A successful addiction treatment marketing campaign consists of three elements:

1. Relevant marketing material that helps potential patients move closer to selecting a treatment program or facility.
2. The ability to measure and track the effectiveness of a campaign to maximize impact, keep advertising costs low, and serve more potential patients.
3. Confidential and compassionate communication with potential patients as soon as they contact a clinic or rehab center.

Here’s how to create and implement an effective addiction treatment marketing campaign that aligns with a potential patient’s addiction treatment search and establishes your clinic as a stepping stone on their path to recovery.

Step 1: Understand the patient’s journey and provide helpful, relevant marketing material

Individuals and their loved ones often begin the selection process well before they even contact a clinic, conducting 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 from potential patients is full of information you can use to inform and direct your marketing strategy. Over time, your inbound phone calls will reveal commonly asked questions, challenges your potential leads face, and feedback on your clinic. Each of these pieces of information can serve as a springboard for helpful content that meets a potential client right where they’re at in their addiction treatment search.

For example, maybe your recent phone calls reveal commonly asked questions about your facility’s amenities and treatment therapy programs. You can take this information and turn it 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.

And with automated solutions like CallRail’s Call Recording and Conversation Intelligence, you don’t have to worry about having to re-listen through each individual conversation to glean this information. Call Recording automatically records all of your calls and creates call transcripts so you and your team can quickly scan conversations. Then, Conversation Intelligence synthesizes each phone conversation and highlights commonly spoken words, questions, and phrases. Together, these two marketing tools can quickly provide you with information you can use to inform your healthcare marketing strategy.

CallRail helps your clinic or rehab facility maintain HIPAA and HITECH compliance in regards to patient confidentiality and data protection on all your phone calls.

Related: Learn more about how to use Call Recording and Conversation Intelligence to create hyper-focused marketing material to aid your patients on their path to recovery.

Step 2: Measure and track your campaign effectiveness to see how you can improve your marketing

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 of your campaigns 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 to 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 in your addiction treatment program.
• The second piece is a short Facebook video tour of your facility.
• The third piece is a new landing page offering a discounted week-long trial stay in your facility. As soon as you hit the publish button, your phone starts to ring and your inbox fills with online form submissions.

Without a tracking solution, it’s difficult to attribute those calls or form submissions to a particular channel. But with Call Tracking and Form Tracking, you can immediately identify which channels are driving the most traffic to your clinic — and use this information to hone your marketing strategy and materials to reach and connect with more potential patients.

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: Prioritize quick follow-ups and response times to build trust with prospective patients

Your clinic’s lead response time (LRT) — how long it takes you to respond to a phone call, text message, email, web form, etc. — can make or break your marketing campaigns. 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.

According to a Lead Response Management study, the chances of connecting with a potential patient are 100 times greater within the first five minutes after they contact you. Taking the step to research addiction treatment options is a vulnerable one. Every minute a potential patient has to wait before hearing back from you is a minute they might second guess their decision to contact your clinic in the first place.

To help cut down on LRT, consider using CallRail’s Lead Center, an all-in-one business communications solution that organizes all of your patient communications in a single inbox.

With Lead Center, whether a potential patient calls, texts, emails, submits a web form, or uses a chat box on your website, every conversation and touch point is organized and stored within your Lead Center database.

You’ll never have to worry about missed connections or misplaced conversations again, and the ability to quickly look back and recall previous conversations with potential patients will demonstrate your clinic’s attentiveness to their needs and situation.

Give prospective patients the information they need to make the best decision

Addiction treatment marketing must be characterized by empathy. By first understanding what potential patients are searching for as they consider addiction treatment, you can create relevant marketing material that not only provides helpful information on their journey to recovery but positions your clinic or rehab facility as a partner in that journey. Paired with CallRail’s marketing, analytics, and communication solutions, you can cater your marketing material to reach more people with a message of hope.

Get started with CallRail today with a free, 14-day trial.