At first glance, drug detox and marketing don’t seem like they should go together. After all, marketing is about selling to someone, and convincing them that they need a certain product or service. Drug detox is about saving someone’s life. It’s also about providing compassionate care and medical supervision to help them get through physically and emotionally difficult periods.
There’s something decidedly icky about drug detox marketing, and hyping up addiction relapse services and programs. However, according to the World Health Organization, approximately 35 million people worldwide are living with a substance use disorder. If your organization has the resources and people in place to help, you can harness as many methods of reaching them.
Effective drug detox marketing is the way to do that, though radio jingles and late-night TV commercials are long gone. These days, the most effective drug detox marketing takes place online, in what is known as digital marketing.
Marketing that relies on an electronic device, like a computer, phone, tablet, or another device, is considered digital marketing. Digital marketing appears in many forms, including display ads, search engine marketing, online video, and social media posts. Traditional marketing, meanwhile, refers to advertising seen in magazines, billboard, radio and television, and direct mail.
Guidant Financial’s Small Business Trend report for 2023 expanded on digital marketing trends. It states small business owners planned to invest nearly twice as much in digital marketing efforts than traditional ones. Small businesses, like detox facilities, are investing in digital marketing because it helps level the playing field.
After all, an effective piece of digital marketing like a Facebook ad or a high ranking on Google is inexpensive. We can see this when comparing it to advertising on radio, television, or billboards. Plus, the message is more likely to find its target audience.
And the target audience is only increasing. As the use of smartphones and other internet-connected devices has exploded, many people are online all day long. According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, roughly 30% of U.S. adults reported they are online “almost constantly”. This represents a 10% increase from six years prior.
Another benefit of digital marketing is its measurability. Digital marketing allows you access to various tools. Some can analyze the performance of your marketing campaign with hard data updated in real-time. In this way, you can customize and adjust your marketing strategy toward what works.
A third benefit of digital marketing is its wide variety of customer interactions. Consider all the ways that you interact with digital marketing every day. For most, it’s email, text messaging, website content, videos, static images, banner ads, and posts on social media like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. All these venues fall under the umbrella of digital marketing. As a result, they can help you reach different segments of your target audience.
The trick of digital marketing for detox facilities lies in pinpointing how these practices can best connect us to an audience open to our message. Perhaps more than any other industry, marketing drug detox means making a human-to-human connection. Seeking professional help for one’s drug or alcohol addiction involves trust. And trust is exactly what the focus of effective digital marketing for drug detox ought to be.
Whether traditional or digital, marketing is about landing leads and converting them to clients. However, the difference between drug detox marketing and marketing for other industries is that we’re not trying to sell a product. We are trying to help people recover from their sobriety and regain control of their lives.
There are six tried-and-true ways of drug detox marketing that can result in higher-quality leads that can possibly turn into saved lives. Read on to learn the intricacies of these six methods and how your organization might benefit.
The idea of seeking professional help for one’s substance use disorder can be intimidating. In fact, a study in the November 2018 edition of Substance Abuse and Rehabilitation reported that the negative stigma surrounding addiction remains a leading factor in people choosing not to seek professional help for a substance use disorder. More than 80% of the 46 million U.S. residents aged 12 and over who are living with a substance use disorder choose not to seek treatment. Thus, overcoming the negative stigma of addiction remains a challenging yet vital goal.
However, the internet has given people struggling with a substance abuse disorder a way around this negative stigma. Searching for detox clinics, addiction treatment facilities, recovery centers, or just resources about addiction on the internet is private and confidential. As a result, more people feel comfortable doing so. Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, enables search engines like Google and Bing to find and catalog your site as an authority on drug detox. The better your SEO, the higher your ranking on search results.
Countless businesses have seen a significant influx of clients by investing in SEO for a particular word, or combination of words. According to an October 2022 study of organic click-through rates by Backlinko, three-quarters of all clicks will go to the top three results on a search engine’s results page. Moreover, three out of four people never scroll past the first page of search results.
Perhaps best of all, SEO brings people to your site who initiated the conversation. This is an audience that wants to know more about you and what you do. In short, SEO is the best digital marketing strategy around. It should be a priority for your brand.
How to Earn a Higher Search Engine Ranking
A lot of factors play into which websites will rank higher than others. Among them:
Social media marketing is another digital approach offering a ton of promise in the drug detox marketing space. As mentioned before, detox and rehab marketing relies on connections with clients. And there’s no better way to make connections with potential clients than social media: Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and the like.
After all, the average person spends just under two and a half hours on social media every day. And among social media platforms, Facebook is by far the largest and most-used platform. This of course means there’s a huge audience that can be reached through Facebook.
Social media allows brands to establish an identity and build a community. The community, in turn, shares the content that the brand posts, increasing its reach for potential clients. Also, all social media platforms also sell ads, which can be a cost-effective marketing method for collecting more leads.
Specific to drug detox marketing, though, is the fact that social media is the perfect way to stay connected with those who have completed detox at your facility. By reaching out to them and continuing to offer resources for ongoing recovery, or even announcing alumni events, your organization’s reach can grow exponentially.
By maintaining engagement with them, they’re more likely to leave positive reviews online, share your content, and even give word-of-mouth referrals. Social media can also be a key driver of traffic to your website since that’s where you can promote content from the organization’s blog. Keep in mind, social media ads rely on targeting and keywords. Having a strong understanding of how targeting and keywords work is crucial to match your message to the right audience.
Nothing builds trust for an audience like content that is straightforward, informative, and honest. Therefore, you need to create quality content, and you need to create it consistently and regularly. Of course, creating and maintaining quality content takes time, maybe more time than you have.
By hiring a good writer, or with the help of our content marketing team, you can more easily establish yourself as a worthwhile and trustworthy information resource. Remember, each blog post on your site adds to your total count of indexed pages, and organizations with more indexed pages receive more than three times as many leads.
With a blog on your website, your organization can speak insightfully on a number of topics:
By creating quality content, you amplify your brand’s online visibility in way that you can control. Meanwhile, by sharing content from your site’s blog on social media, you can widen your organization’s exposure and draw more traffic to your website. And if that content is truly informative and insightful, it will be shared by your followers, and their followers, and so on.
As the name suggests, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a digital marketing model in which advertisers pay for every time a user clicks on one of their online ads. While there are different types of PPC ads, the most common type is the paid search ad, which appears when people search for things online. Organizations running these ads are charged only when a user clicks on their ad.
For instance, someone looking for seafood restaurants in Columbus, Ohio might type “seafood” and “Columbus” into Google. This would trigger a PPC ad from a specific seafood restaurant in Columbus. Then, if the person clicks on the ad, that restaurant will be charged.
So far we’ve covered how organic search should be your organization’s top priority, but that doesn’t mean PPC ads have zero value. Detox clinics with little money to spend may benefit from investing in PPC ads, provided they’ve chosen the right keywords.
Still, as successful as PPC ads can be, they are pricey. In a PPC ad campaign, organizations bid on specific keywords that dictate when and where their ads will appear when the keyword is entered into the search engine. Of course, some keywords are more competitive than others, and so it costs more to put an ad on the page.
Then again, PPC ads are only the one half of the equation. After all, the PPC ad needs to direct the user somewhere. This makes the converting landing page the other, no less important, half of the equation. Landing pages take these visitors and attempt to turn them into paying clients through quality content and effective marketing.
One of the most powerful marketing channels in existence remains word-of-mouth. Also known as referral marketing, word-of-mouth occurs when someone suggests a specific business to solve a problem. That’s why 98% of people say they read online reviews when making a decision about a local business, according to BrightLocal’s 2023 Local Consumer Review Survey. They want to know about others’ experiences to inform their own choice.
In drug detox marketing, the people in the best position to make a referral are those who have been through the program before. Alumni can be a valuable source of referral marketing, but only if they stay connected to the organization. This is where email marketing comes in.
By developing an email newsletter and sending it out on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis, a detox center can leverage the word-of-mouth power of these alumni. Sure, people often ignore or delete emails without reading past the subject line, but just about everyone at least checks their email on a daily basis. Give that email newsletter some quality content and you’ve got another direct line of communication with potential future clients.
The business of a detox clinic is not to sell someone on a product. It’s to help people get better. That said, utilizing some of the most effective strategies and technologies of digital marketing is the best way to reach people who want to get better.
The old days of advertising often cost businesses a lot to get noticed. Today, with digital marketing media, it’s much more manageable. In drug detox marketing, connections are king, and digital marketing can create, find, and reinforce those connections like nothing else.
One of the big mistakes that detox clinics make is putting all their eggs in one basket—pursuing one marketing strategy. Expanding and diversifying your marketing efforts, and combining quality blog content with superior SEO can be a great focal point. Then, by creating an email newsletter while regularly updating your social media accounts, you will find your organization covering more ground and reaching a larger yet more targeted audience.
Yes, you want your detox and addiction treatment business to thrive. The beauty of this industry is that you can only do so by helping people. Effective marketing campaigns not only bring in new treatment leads—they let people know which drug detox clinics they can access and that your help is available.
At Stodzy Internet Marketing, we bring treatment centers to a new level. For the past ten years, we have increased the web traffic, leads, and income of our clients by providing ROI-based campaigns. Plus, our knowledge of the industry matches our services and our data-driven results. Get a free SEO audit today.
Contact us today to learn how you can boost your leads and help more people.
