Help My Phone is Not Ringing! – Rehab Lead Generation
We hear this all the time…..”Help my phone is not ringing!” My drug rehab is in big trouble! So the question becomes “why is your phone not ringing?” After a little research we can easily find the problem(s) and it is usually more than one. For example, do you know how many website visitors you got last month or how many visits over the past 7year have you been averaging per month?
If you are getting let’s say 1,000 – 3,000 actual website visits and not “bot visits” from computers how many phone calls do you think you will get? A good marketing team can generate 5% website visits to calls as far as ratio is concerned. So you will be getting between 50 and 150 calls per month. The next question you need to ask yourself is how many of these calls can my admissions team convert into a paying client? Based on this answer you will know your answer “do I have enough website visits coming to my website every month?”
Are you tracking your calls using something like Call Tracking Metrics? If so have recorded your calls and are they actually being answered? I can’t tell you the number of times drug rehabs are not answering their calls! This happens a lot! It either goes into “ring no answer” or into voice mail and there is NOTHING in the voice mail that asks the caller to call someone’s cell phone! Really!!!! Really. I mean you are paying a small fortune for these calls someone better answer them!
At the end of the day you must get impressions of your business in front of potential clients. If you don’t people will not know about you. You can get these impressions via salespeople or outreach people. If you aren’t getting the impressions there you have to be getting them through Google, Facebook, TV, Radio etc….. or other websites like PsychologyToday. Here’s the bad news. All of this stuff costs money. The good news is if you have a smart marketing team that knows what they are doing you will get results.
Competing With Larger Drug Rehabs
Too often I hear “I can’t afford the market like the bigger rehabs.” If this is the case then you need to get investors. You are undercapitalized. You have to have money to get over the proverbial hump. Once you get over the marketing hump you will have more humps like “I need more beds.” Do not buy more beds until you have a waiting list on your existing facility. Too often I have experienced rehabs buying more beds and not expand their marketing budget and they just seem to think if “I get the beds magically the clients will come.” NOT TRUE! This is a hyper-competitive space!
If your rehab’s phones are not ringing then here is a list of the following you can do immediately:
- Increase your SEO budget, change horses hire a new SEO team
- Increase your PPC budget or start doing PPC
- Get PR….it can be (FREE) or you can hire a PR firm
- Speak at high schools and colleges (FREE)
- Get links from other websites like Psychology Today and SoberRecovery
- Hire more sales people
- Train your admissions team to close more sales of existing calls
- Develop relationships with additional rehabs (FREE)
- Attend trade shows
