Suicide Marketing – Drug Rehabs That Take the All or Nothing Approach
We are starting to see a lot of this lately, suicide marketing. (Actually it has been in the works for many months or years but just coming to light now). Drug rehabs that have had their lead generation source dry up are in big big trouble. At the same time we are also seeing an amazing amount of ineptitude that rivals our politicians ability to execute and get things done as far as drug rehab website marketing is concerned.
When Drug Rehab Leads Dry Up
We got a call yesterday from a group that is finding their census at a paltry 16%. The problem was they bet big on referral marketing. Right now the referral marketing business is under a lot of scrutiny and the guys that are left are charging north of $10K per admit. So what do you do now? They invested $0 in their website operations. They are getting ZERO phone calls from the web. I’m not sure if their reputation is good enough to survive on word of mouth or alumni marketing.
So what should they do now? Buy calls. Buy PPC advertising. But first they have to fix their website! If their website looks like crap the bought callers might balk on admitting after researching the website and the PPC visitors from PPC calls aren’t going to persuaded to take the plunge and call. Why? Because the website lacks TRUST.
Outreach Sales Efforts
On the other hand there are some addiction treatment centers who are successfully using a 100% outreach/sales effort for all of their sales. But that too is risky because your business can literally walk right out the door if those rock star sales employees move on to greener pastures.
In another scenario we are seeing rehabs go with 100% online marketing. OMG! Don ‘t do this! It is insane to be 100% dependent on Google. At Google’s discretion you can instantly wind up in the back pages of the internet when it comes to organic marketing. We haven’t seen this with our clients because we “think” we know what we are doing but with Google they have done a great job at keeping us paranoid. If you are going to go with a 100% internet strategy make sure you have several websites splitting up the lead generation duty.
Back to the guy who has the 16% census. If he had listened to us in 2015 and let us manage his website and SEO he would have had a platform that he could have scaled up in tougher times. Now he is going to have to dig deep, really deep into his pockets and have us fix his website so we can run Google PPC traffic at it. There is no telling if it will work since we are only as good as his admissions team. We can make his phone ring but he has to close the callers.
The solution is not to engage in drug rehab suicide marketing and blend your lead generation sources with Internet and On Ground Marketing or Sales/Outreach.
