Behavioral Health Marketing: 4 Tips for Success

Behavioral health facilities, such as rehabs or other inpatient health clinics, have an important role in society. Being good at what you do to help others is only half of the work. The other half is making sure you are marketing the right people, places, and demographics to find the clients that are right for your facility. Everyone has different needs and lists of requirements when entering a behavioral health facility, making it essential to reach the right people the first time so that you can provide the optimal chances for long-term success with their condition. The way you do this is through careful marketing tactics. Keep reading for 4 tips for success for behavioral health marketing and how you can get started improving your facility’s marketing today.

Behavioral Health Marketing Tip 1: Branding

The first and foremost tip for behavioral health marketing is to get your branding right. Branding is what shapes people’s minds to recognize you, relate to you, trust you, and align with you. If you miss the mark with your branding, you might be missing out on potential clients that need you.

While branding is a large concept that requires brainstorming, research, and data, it mainly consists of three prongs:

• Mission statement – If you could sum up what you do in one or two sentences, what would that be? Your mission statement is going to be the steering wheel for your marketing, so it is important to craft something that amplifies your purpose and a snapshot into the future of what you hope to accomplish.
• Core values – What are the single-word adjectives you can pin to your business? Think of phrases such as “fast, reliable service” for mechanics, or “caring customer service” for insurance companies, and apply it to your facility.
• Guidelines – Your branding guidelines are the bible for everything visual. What colors do you use? What fonts will you commit to? What is your logo, and what are its variations? Developing a branding guideline and sticking to it will help the recognition and trust factors. This requires much more than just guesswork — it involves research, brainstorming, and competitor analysis to come up with the proper visual guidelines for your business.

Behavioral Health Marketing Tip 2: Check Your Channels

What are you doing right now with your behavioral health facility’s marketing efforts? Every place that you advertise or place yourself is called a channel. A channel can be billboards, social media, Google, and much more. Then, check your competitor’s channels. How high up on the Google search pages are they? What is their engagement like on their YouTube page? Do their question-and-answer blogs rank high on Google’s schema? These are all things you need to consider when you’re amping up your marketing.

There are seemingly endless marketing channels and ways you can advertise yourself. However, not all of them are right for you, and many of them require careful crafting to get right. We have been helping behavioral health facilities successfully conquer the following channels:

• Competitor Analysis
• Website Analysis
• SEO/SEM
• Google PPC
• Facebook PPC
• Bing, YouTube, Yahoo, and Reddit Organic & PPC
• Social Media Marketing
• Local Directory Listings
• Google Business Optimization
• Blog Assistance and Creation
• Traditional Media/TV/Radio/Outdoor
• Tracking and Reporting Integrations
• Expertise in CRM Systems and Integrations
• Branding and Collateral Materials
• Coordination with Business Development Team
• Alumni Coordination
• Surveys and testimonials

Do You Have the Basics?

If you’re unsure of what channels your marketing is taking place on, chances are, you don’t have any. Let’s take a step back and just make sure you have a few of the basic things needed for marketing your behavioral health facility:

1. Website – There is nothing more valuable in digital marketing than a well-oiled conversion machine, also known as your website. These days, it’s much more than just a space on the web to showcase your services and information. Instead, it can be filled with landing pages, forms, lead-generating funnels, and much more to get your phone ringing.
2. Blog – Behavioral health recovery is a scary thing for many people, which is why potential clients and their loved ones like to do a lot of research first. Does your website have a blog that answers every possible question they might have? By frequently seeing your website like the one that answers all the questions they type into Google, they will inherently trust you more.
3. Social media – Behavioral health facilities shouldn’t be looking to social media to build followers and engagement. Instead, consider it a place to showcase your facility, your staff, and your offerings in a different way.
   Admissions team – By having a dedicated, 24-hour admissions team, you will be able to get more clients.

Behavioral Health Marketing Tip 3: Review Your Admissions Process

How easy is it for customers to reach you and get more information or enroll? The easier it is for them to check their insurance, talk to you about pricing options, get specific information regarding rooms or amenities, or see if you have space available, then the easier it will be to get more clients. Behavioral health is a time-sensitive condition, especially when someone is agreeing to get the help they need after a long period of denial. Their mind could change quickly, and they or their loved ones need to be able to take action right away. This makes the admissions process an extremely important aspect of your marketing plan.

Our team has experience coming to behavioral health facilities to review the admissions process and check for peak efficiency and conversion rate. Important things to look for include:

• An admissions team ready to answer the phone
• Someone checking the facility’s general email box regularly for new inquiries via forms or social media
• Answers are readily available for staff so that nobody needs to be placed on hold to answer a question or find the answer to something
• A full understanding of every condition the facility treats so that the team knows the next steps or ways to help immediately

Behavioral Health Marketing Tip 4: Get Creative

Inpatient behavioral health facilities can seem like a scary concept for many, especially for people who are used to a certain luxurious standard of living. If a potential client has narrowed their choice down to two facilities, the dealbreaker between you and your competitor may be the virtual tour, comprehensive listing of amenities, and updated photos of the facility. That is why it is essential to get creative with your visualizations so that people know exactly what they might be walking into and where they will potentially be living for the next 30-90 days.

Things to consider showcasing in a creative way include:

• Details of your facility – What does each room look like? What do the common areas look like? Is there a gourmet kitchen with a chef? Do you offer resort-like grounds, a pool, or a beautiful view? Making videos of all of these specific things is important, and can be the thing that puts you above your competition.
• Your staff – If you offer Ph.D.-level staff and only employ the best experts in your facility’s industry, this is crucial to showcase. Connecting with the therapists and counselors at a facility is what can make or break someone’s stay, and being familiar with the faces they may encounter will help them feel more comfortable upon arrival. It will also help legitimize your business and act as a differentiator.
• Your accreditations – Is your facility certified in all of the right things, and more? Have you won awards or other accolades in your industry? Make sure you can showcase all of these things so that people feel more comfortable trusting you in your expertise.

How Do I Showcase My Differentiators?

The three main ways you can showcase your differentiators include:

• Video production – Video production is the number one way you can showcase your differentiators, and this is for many reasons. They include SEO purposes, trust and branding alignment reasons, and much more. People will feel more comfortable once they can see your facility, the people in it, and what daily life will be like for them.
• Other industry publications – If your website or facility name is always in the conversation for the services you provide, your customers will trust your expertise. This means collaborating with news websites, circulars, or local businesses.
• Design – Your facility’s imagery is everything. Make sure you have great designs when it comes to your website, logo, social media posts, and much more.
• Blogs – As mentioned, having a blog chock-full of information and resources will not only help your potential clients feel aligned with you, it will help your website’s SEO and overall marketing efforts.

About Navazon Digital

Behavioral health marketing is a very specific niche. Luckily, our agency has done all of the necessary research and development to know what is successful when it comes to marketing your behavioral health facility. Navazon Marketing Behavioral Health has helped facilities from Malibu to New Jersey and everywhere in between achieve dominance in their respective markets. We do this through our experience in the behavioral health industry and our vertically integrated marketing approach.

We complete this through our 4-pronged approach to marketing:

1. We start with refining your message so that it resonates within the market and with referrers, creating a permanent brand. We make sure that this message is carried through from Website, Outreach, Admissions, Clinical Staff, Discharge Planning, and Alumni.
2. Navazon will also come in and review your admissions process to make sure that it is operating at peak efficiency and conversion rate. Our system will produce high-quality leads that convert to higher admission rates because of our attention to detail.
3. Understanding your passion and capitalizing on our experience, makes for a team that will create a greater long-term census with reduced marketing costs.
4. In this highly competitive market, we provide the marketing acumen, sophisticated tools, creative approaches, and conversion assistance that your competition spends fortunes on both internally and externally.

Navazon Behavioral Health Division provides the above, and much more, with years of experience and market knowledge that will make us an integral part of your team. If you are ready to get started, reach out to us today for more information on behavioral health marketing.