Digital Profits Podcast – Episode 11: Treatment Center Search Engine Marketing Playbook
Welcome, digital marketers! With the steady increase of competition in almost every industry, it’s becoming more and more important to make data-driven decisions when constructing your marketing techniques. In the landscape of healthcare and treatment centers specifically, the need for a comprehensive approach that integrates both SEO and PPC is essential–this entails understanding all regulatory compliance requirements as well as leveraging tactics such as hypertargeting to acquire optimal results. Learn about effective methods to utilize these two components today!
How to Use Data-driven Decisions in Your Digital Marketing Strategy
When it comes to digital marketing, there’s no doubt that the abundance of data can be overwhelming. But with the right tools and approach, you can turn that sea of information into targeted and effective marketing strategies. Utilizing data-driven decisions means taking the guesswork out of your marketing plan and relying on insights gathered from your audience’s behavior. This is where you can create targeted campaigns that cater to their specific needs and desires.
By adopting this approach, you will be able to make every marketing dollar count, creating a measurable return on investment that you can use to evaluate and refine your approach. Ultimately, using data-driven insights in your digital marketing strategy will help you stand out from the crowd and deliver the right message to the right people at the right time.
Making the Most of Hypertargeting
Hypertargeting can take your marketing to a whole new level. With the ability to reach specific audience segments with tailored messages, you can create a laser-focused campaign that speaks directly to your customers’ needs and desires. But how can you make the most of this powerful tool?
Start by diving deep into your audience data to identify the right targets. Then, craft personalized messaging that speaks to their pain points and interests. Finally, use dynamic ad creative to deliver a personalized experience that truly resonates. By following these steps, you’ll be well on your way to hypertargeting success!
Navigating Regulatory Challenges with SEO & PPC
This can be a daunting task. However, you don’t need to go at it alone. Let us help guide you through the nuances of regulations to ensure that your SEO and PPC strategies remain compliant. It’s important to stay up-to-date on the latest regulations and compliance requirements, but don’t let it discourage you from utilizing these powerful marketing strategies.
With careful planning and execution, you can successfully navigate the regulatory landscape and see positive results in your business. Let’s work together to ensure your SEO and PPC campaigns are both effective and compliant.
The Power of Automation for Hypertargeting & Tracking Results
As you delve into the world of digital marketing, you quickly realize just how important it is to target your audience with laser precision. That’s where automation comes in. By embracing the power of automation, you can hypertarget your ideal customer and track your results with ease. Say goodbye to the days of manually sifting through data and hello to a more efficient and effective marketing strategy.
With automation, you can focus on crafting the perfect message for your audience while the technology handles the rest. Plus, tracking your results has never been easier. You’ll receive real-time data that allows you to fine-tune your strategy and adjust your targets to ensure you’re hitting the mark every time. So, why wait? Start harnessing the power of automation today and watch your marketing efforts reach new heights.
Tools & Tactics for Improving Digital Performance
When it comes to improving your digital performance, having the right tools and tactics in your arsenal can make all the difference. We’re here to guide you through some of our favorite options. From using analytics to track website traffic and identify areas for improvement, to optimizing your content for search engines and social media algorithms, every step you take can have a big impact on your success.
Don’t forget to prioritize user experience, test everything rigorously, and stay up-to-date on the latest developments in the world of digital marketing. With a little effort and the right tools, you’ll be well on your way to digital domination.
In summary, data-driven decisions, smart hypertargeting, and effective automation are all great ways to leverage the power of digital marketing. While SEO and PPC can be instrumental in helping you navigate regulatory challenges, it’s also important to remember that integrating offline approaches with online strategies can help maximize conversions. To make sure you’re getting the most out of your digital strategy, tune in to the latest episode of the Digital Profits Podcast. With the right plan and creativity, you can create an impactful digital marketing strategy.
Welcome to the Digital Profits podcast, where you’ll learn how to grow your business faster using paid traffic and SEO. Each episode will feature a breakdown of digital marketing trends and answers to your burning questions that will provide actionable takeaways to make your marketing better. So join us, Ben Page, Ray Sawvell, and Blake John, as we guide you on your journey to higher profits. Remember to join the profit squad@joinprofitsquad.com and get ready to profit in three, two, one.
Ben Page: Hey, squad. Today’s episode is experimental in nature, and I say that because we are going to focus it entirely on a specific industry. So if you like this and you want more of it, or you even want to propose another industry that we deep dive into, let us know on social. You could hit us up on LinkedIn and we’ll be happy to look at that request. So today’s episode is about addiction treatment centers. So treatment center marketing is the topic. It’s something that we’re passionate about, something that we work on quite a bit here at 2100 digital. And so let’s dive right in. And like always, I’ve got Ray and Blake here with me. Hey, guys.
Blake John: Hello. How’s it going?
Ben Page: Good and happy Friday. How important is digital marketing within the context of this industry, specifically?
Ray Sawvell: I mean, it’s just like most industries, I would say digital marketing is pretty important. Specifically, in this industry, people are looking for issues to either like theirs or a loved one’s, problems or issues that they may be facing. And being number one in digital, whether it comes paid or organic, is extremely important. So digital is a big one for addiction marketing. Yeah.
Ben Page: And as it pertains to patient acquisition within this industry, it’s not uncommon that digital marketing is the leading pipeline of new admits, secondary or rivaled only by referrals, typically from other professionals and so on. So digital marketing, super important, big picture, very competitive, fraught landscape, lots of issues, lots of thorny issues to kind of navigate. Now, within digital marketing, let’s double click on that. As a channel pipeline, what are the most important digital marketing channels or tactics as far as driving admissions to treatment centers?
Ray Sawvell: Yeah, I mean, I’ll jump in first here. I think we’re going to dive in deeper into this, but it really is going to depend if you’re one location versus multi-site, but local SEO in either instance or local, like PPC, just local strategies in general is going to be extremely important. Along with having presence when it comes to paid ads, organic, everything is pretty important. But I would say focusing on local is really big.
Blake John: Yeah, absolutely. You want to be able to kind of dominate your region and kind of spread your name whenever someone’s searching for a specific treatment type or use case relevant to them and you want to be in their space and specifically targeting their regions, and it’s absolutely crucial to success.
Ben Page: Yeah, right on. And when I think about the digital channels, I’m thinking, okay, it’s organic and paid search are the leading two. And you might say, well, that’s ironic because you happen to provide organic and paid search services. Well, sure, but I think there’s some kind of proof or reasons why that’s the case in this industry, because of some of the regulatory and compliance challenges of social, other forms of advertising, et cetera. Probably email marketing isn’t a leading driver of patient acquisition nor direct mail campaigns or something else. Like, it super important. Let’s talk about, well, and maybe we should define terms here, because when I talk about in this episode, or when we’re discussing treatment centers and treatment center marketing, we’re really using that term kind of broadly, because we do work on both inpatient or residential and outpatient treatment centers. And as far as services and so on, they could be various or I guess conditions, right. So it’s like behavioral health kind of broadly, but addiction treatment as well as mental health treatment. So we’ve got experience in kind of all those areas. But generally we’re talking about here a brick and mortar location that’s serving patients anyhow, and it could be a single location, it could be multi site. Guys, what are some of the big picture before we deep dive into paid and organic search, specifically, some of the challenges that you see in the search engine results, or just for organizations offering these services in doing their digital marketing? What are some of those challenges?
Blake John: I think one thing that I’ve seen, and truthfully, I see this in a lot of competitor research that we do with companies that we work with their competitors, is kind of a lack of prioritization in terms of really making the effort into digital marketing and spending, specifically like SEO. I can see in a lot of areas where SEO kind of feels like an afterthought. And I think it’s a lot of these treatment centers are either just spread too thin and they don’t have the resources necessary to really make it a priority, or they don’t know how to build a business case, truthfully. But overall, a lot of times I’m seeing like, when I look at competitors, it’s like, oh, this could be a quick win if this competitor. I wouldn’t tell them that, of course, but just they’re close, but they’re not quite getting it right, and a lot of improvements. And I think that comes from a place where either they don’t have the budget or they’re just read too thin. So that’s a pain point, I think, for a lot of addiction treatment centers.
Ray Sawvell: Yeah, I mean, for me it has to do with your data primarily. I mean, when you think about this space specifically, the cycle from a lead to an admin can be months, it can be up to 90 days. So really being able to understand what your flow of data looks like all the way from maybe not first touch point, but first contact all the way down to the Admin, and then understanding what that ratio is from lead to Admin is really important across all channels. As you understand, where do you put your time and effort to really scale that?
Ben Page: Yeah, and when I look at the search engine results pages for common keywords that you’d expect or you’d maybe want to be visible for within your industry here, there are some issues, right? It’s like there are lead aggregator sites that are because they’re running the SEO hustle in some markets quite well. They’ve kind of dominated or they get a lot of the click share and then they’re trying to resell leads or place leads like a paper lead type thing. And some of the tactics involved there are a little bit questionable. I see a lot of deceptive advertising take place and it’s unfortunate. Misleading messaging or discrepancies. Know, the ad says this brand or this center, but you click it, it’s actually not. It’s a different thing. Those kinds of things happen. And there are some protections. Know, in this case, the ad platforms like Google Ads has some protections, but this stuff can appear in the wild and then it’s a waiting game to get it taken down and investigated. And so you can see that from time to time, we already kind of hinted at and we’ll get more into some of the regulatory compliance issues that are within the space. Right. They’re growing. Those are some of the challenges that you might face just trying to get something off the ground and see traction. To your point, Blake, before we get into the disciplines too, talk a little bit more about this. Activating your data. Because I think beginning with the end in mind, you’d want to to your point, Blake? You want to make, like, a business case for well, here’s why we should invest precious resources internally, externally, in creating content for these level of care pages or building an audience specific a location specific landing page on our website and optimizing that or, well, Ray, I mean, cost per clicks are $50 a click. No way. So it’s like, hey, we need to begin with that business case in mind. But how do you sort of justify it, I guess, or measure and have the analytics to kind of follow along and improve progress? What do you guys think?
Ray Sawvell: Yeah, I mean, going back to the data point that I was mentioning earlier, I think treatment centers need to spend it’s worth it to spend the time on a CRM, whether it’s like a salesforce or a HubSpot, to really understand all of these touch bases, to understand, like I was mentioning earlier, the lead to admin ratio. Because at the end of the day, you’re most likely trying to fill beds and trying to get people to treat. So investing into a CRM and really making sure that’s buttoned up is important yeah, 100%.
Ben Page: And what comes to mind for me is the better you can sort of operationalize your data. As far as looking at the census in your treatment center, looking at getting down to the level of admits and understanding the connection between we put this kind of resources into SEO, into PPC, it drove this many leads. And then this many were qualified and this many admitted. And here’s how long it took them to admit and starting to understand some of those dynamics. That’s how you can improve your intelligence and your decision making around budgeting allocation of marketing budgets and just really improving the return on that investment, which is, in my view, leagues beyond talking only about leads and cost per lead, aka how many people filled out the form on my website or called right.
Ray Sawvell: And to expand on that, like understanding the lead to admin rate for a phone call versus a form fill versus a chat, versus this part of the funnel, you know what I mean? So there’s so many different pieces to understand where if somebody comes in on a blog or a piece of content that is more mid high funnel understanding, it’s probably going to take longer for that person to turn into an admin versus somebody who is a little bit further down the funnel searching for addiction treatment or even your brand name, things like that. So ensuring that you understand what that ratio is for closing.
Ben Page: Yeah, and maybe, let’s suppose maybe you’re in a smaller treatment center or you’re working on getting that CRM component that can help you bridge the gap that currently exists in your data. It’s like maybe a starting point would be looking at your total marketing investment, advertising investment, looking at your average daily census and as you move that investment up and down, probably a little bit more relevant blake to paid than organic, though you could look at that on a longer time horizon and try to make some informed decisions. But by looking at it in that way, almost like a mer way, this is like adapting like a mer or like a cost of advertising model from ecom to lead gen. That could be a starting point. Super interesting. Maybe we should talk about important considerations for SEO and PPC within treatment center marketing. Who wants to start?
Blake John: I mean, we can talk about SEO and I think really at the forefront of that. And Ray, you mentioned it, it’s local, really. It’s sending those strong location signals. It’s having location pages in your regions, supporting content with levels of care and the types of people you treat, whether know if it’s young adult, maybe it’s an age group, whatever it might be. But your organic search strategy has to revolve around building a strong local presence. And again, it starts with like location pages. Google my Business or Google Business profile now, which I’ll never get right on the first try.
Ben Page: GBP?
Blake John: Yeah, GBP.
Ben Page: Great British pounds.
Blake John: But that’s kind of the forefront of that should be the forefront of every SEO strategy for these addiction treatment centers, is getting strong location signals and doing that the right way.
Ben Page: Why?
Blake John: Well, because proximity is king for these types of searches. So if I need addiction treatment of any kind, I’m probably going to want an addiction treatment center that is within a reasonable amount of distance.
Ray Sawvell: So what are you going to type.
Ben Page: Into Google to find one within a reasonable addiction treatment?
Blake John: Either addiction treatment near me or addiction treatment city. Right. Like addiction treatment. Milwaukee.
Ben Page: Right. Or rehab near me.
Blake John: Rehab, whatever it might be. Right. Detox near me. Inpatient near me. Whatever.
Ray Sawvell: And take note, too, because these are all the terms you want to have coverage for on Paid, as well as you’re getting within that 15 miles radius. So this is going to make sense for both paid and organic traffic.
Blake John: Yeah, it absolutely does. And that’s why, again, it’s got to be place number one, really, where you start because proximity is king and you want to dominate probably 15 to 20 miles. Yeah, approximately. It depends really, on your head density.
Ray Sawvell: Yeah, I like to think about driving distance, typically. Yeah, that’s like, hey, how long does it take me to get to this center? Is it 45 minutes?
Blake John: Is it an hour?
Ray Sawvell: And then proximity may differ.
Blake John: Right. And so that’s really why it’s so important. Because when you search for something, the results that are going to show for these types of searches that are relevant to an addiction treatment center, there’s going to be a local pack and then there’s going to be google is going to prioritize addiction treatment centers that are within a specific radius from the user where they are in the world geographically.
Ben Page: Yeah, that’s key. I was going to ask that follow up. So, Blake, what do you expect to see in the search engine results when someone types a near me search?
Blake John: A lot of ads.
Ben Page: Right? Well, I mean, that too. Right? But seriously, the local pack is going to show up and it’s like if you think about this from Big Picture, again, zooming out, it’s like so if Digital is your number one acquisition channel and then it’s SEO and paid within, that great. So you’re really playing the game of how visible am I within the Google search engine result pages for the most relevant keywords to me? And we’re positing here that any near me or service plus location search, those are your most important keywords. It’s like how visible are you for those? Visible in terms of organic results, your Google business profile, visible in terms of the blue links, visible in terms of the paid results, and even visible in terms of having a sponsored ad within the local pack, within the map pack via Pmax. These days, performance max campaigns in Google ads because 80, 2080, 2080. You’re trying to maximize your click share for these important keywords. And the more times you’re visible in that search engine result page, the higher your click share is going to be. And you’re going to stack the deck in your favor and you need to do SEO and you need to do PPC because you need a cost per admit that’s actually sustainable.
Blake John: Yeah.
Ray Sawvell: And I think going back to the multi site versus single site, your competition is going to be going to vary by market. So really understanding who the top players are by market is going to be important when it comes to who am I competing with? When it comes to organic SERPs, along with from an auction insight standpoint with Paid, your results are going to differ based on who the different players are by market. Yeah.
Ben Page: And you know why this is so gnarly. Let’s say you’re a single location treatment center somewhere in some even like a top 50 US. Metro region, like any of them, right? And it’s like, okay, well, not only for the near me searches. Not only are you likely to be fighting air quotes like fighting in the search engine results, like your local competitors, like other treatment centers around you, you’re going to be fighting the national treatment centers, the national residential treatment centers, the large ones that are advertising nationally, they’re going to be there. You’re going to be fighting other regional competitors. You might be fighting a level up some of the virtual providers, depending on the space. There’s so much competition. And then you throw in the lead aggregators and it can get challenging and very competitive in some of these search engine results to the point like Ray, we’ll see average cost per clicks starting at $10 probably, and all the way up to 100 plus in some cases.
Blake John: Yeah.
Ray Sawvell: It truly varies by market. So based on what that competitive landscape looks like, it can vary drastically.
Blake John: Yeah, and I’ve even seen too, I’ll just throw this on as another little tidbit that can make it even more complex is sometimes Google does a either Google just truly doesn’t know or Google’s just doing a bad job of providing relevant results based on the user search. Because sometimes if you search for rehab centers, milwaukee or whatever the metro area is, you’ll get like occupational rehab type things or physical, physical therapy, things of that nature.
Ben Page: Short term care. If it’s like surgical rehab, the intent is murky with that word itself is wrought with different meaning contexts.
Blake John: Exactly. And so Google just shows all of the above sometimes, which makes it really challenging because you might feel like, hey, this is exactly where I need to be. This is where it has the most search volume, which is probably the case because it’s being searched by two different audiences, potentially. That’s why the search volume is maybe higher than another search term. But there’s just so many things to kind of navigate through and make sense of. But it’s kind of key, again, just kind of getting to the point you kind of have to do all these things to make sure you have coverage where your users are and what they’re searching for. Because if you’re not, then you’re going to miss out on essentially meeting your audience in a SERP.
Ben Page: Yeah, and maybe to double click on something you said there. It’s like, it’s how important it is on both sides of the fence to be in tune with how users are searching because you want to talk about the different categories of search intent that we see. Because in my mind, I’m thinking, all right, no brainer. You’ve got to win the near me. You’ve got to play the local SEO game and dominate that. It’s like after you do that and maybe after you build out some service pages and optimize them. Blake right. Like detox near me or drug rehab near me, whatever. Once you do that, it’s like, wow. But the way that users are searching on Google for these services, for this treatment, it’s so varied. It’s like super long, get help with drinking, how long do withdrawals last? And blah, blah. There’s such varied ways in which people might find you and different inroads into your organization. How do we make sense of this? Or how do you sort of think about targeting and reaching people based on how they’re searching?
Blake John: I guess from an organic perspective, I feel like maybe this is more of an organic play. I think it’s still relevant because you could have send it’s better user experience. But you’re right, there’s so many questions and unknowns and a lot of times truthfully too. Like users are searching for something, but maybe they need a different level of care and they don’t really know. They just want help or whatever it is. There’s a couple of things that you can do to try to bridge the gaps a little bit. And one is to look at people also ask that’s also commonly within a lot of these search engine result pages, the SERPs, and on specific service pages or even location pages, whatever it might be, you can just have an FAQ section, like how long does withdrawal last, how long is inpatient rehab? Or whatever it might be. You know what I mean? Like specific questions that might be asked in the people also ask. There’s a few tools that you can use to do that, but you can also just do it manually and quite literally Google something and you’ll see the questions and start answering them on your page. If you’re a smaller operation, like a single site, this is maybe a lower priority, kind of a down the road future opportunity. But start blogging about really detailed things related to alcohol withdrawal or mental health, like depression, like therapy and whatever it might be. Because that type of content, while it might not directly drive traffic, it kind of has an indirect positive impact on your overall search, like overall domain authority and your presence. And you can see lifts on location pages and service pages as a result of the content that you’re kind of supporting your overall brand presence with.
Ray Sawvell: Yeah, I think something that’s also interesting, like going back to the intent side of things because there’s so many different types of questions and it’s really hard to establish what a user’s intent is. When you think about paid search, getting too broad with your keyword targeting here could be extremely bad for the account because if you get too broad, whether it’s broad match, Pmax, DSAs, you’re going to start pulling in a ton of different terms. And because the CPCs, the cost per click is so high, you could be paying an arm and a leg for terms that either don’t make sense for what you do or it could be so far up the funnel where you may not want to target it. So sticking to things like exact and phrase match and getting as targeted as possible when you think about paid, that’s like going to likely take your cost per admins or cost per leads and improve them pretty quickly.
Ben Page: Yeah. And to define terms a little bit or help unpack that for listeners who may not be Google Ads managers in their day to day roles, totally expect that to be the case. For many of you listening, what we’re really saying know within Google Ads and within paid search, you have the ability to sort of steer how broadly the keywords you’re targeting can match with the kinds of different searches that users are conducting. And we know from experience there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of ways that people are searching for these services. And so in the beginning, you want to start with a more targeted, more precise, more exact kind of targeting, going after the near me or the specific services plus city kind of approach and you want to get that dialed in. And I would say you want to establish a strong conversion rate on both sides of the fence. That is possibly the most important thing. I think it’s really the unlock for especially Paid is achieving a certain conversion rate allows you to compete effectively when cost per clicks are so high. Because for every 100 clicks to your website, if you have a 1% conversion rate, you’re turning one of 100 visitors whom you just paid ten to $100 apiece for into a lead. And then you have to factor in, well, lead qualification, admission and et cetera. So the point is, if you’re converting ten out of 100 versus one or even three or five out of 100 instead of one, it’s a game changer. Sorry, that was a little bit of a tangent mode, but yeah, blogging that is interesting. We’ve seen it work spectacularly well for one of our clients. They’re really good at staying on top of search trends and emerging trends and things like emerging drugs of concern and sort of bringing the clinical lens to their blog in a way that users can understand in straightforward language that actually is valuable to the end user, which is the whole point. Right. Blake, other considerations within this vertical from an SEO standpoint?
Blake John: l well, I mean, yeah, that’s part of why the SERPs are so murky and so Your Money, Your Life, ymyl, is because Google sort of realizes that this is very important and they want to get it right. And sometimes they’re trying so hard to please everybody that it almost makes it more difficult, which is actually kind of a theme that addiction treatment centers and sometimes on specific pages you might want to try to be everything to everybody on a single page. But I think it’s also really important to have a good organization on your site and don’t overcomplicate the content on one page and don’t sacrifice the structure and the layout and user experience, which could hurt conversion rates, et cetera. Trying to help everybody do everything on a single page because that can if you’re everything to everyone, you’re really nothing to everyone.
Ben Page: Truthfully, my brain hurt.
Blake John: Tongue twister. So keep that in mind. And I think just understanding that you need to kind of focus in, have a really strong structure and strategy to help build a stronger domain authority and topical relevance for all the things related to your center is going to just help you grow your presence overall, locally and potentially from a blog, potentially nationally as well.
Ben Page: Can you add a value nugget here about having your content reviewed by someone with authority or expertise?
Blake John: You mean like a doctor? Yeah, actually.
Ben Page: Right. You know what I mean? The medically reviewed.
Blake John: Yeah. So it’s actually interesting because I feel like this is I mean, it’s not new, right? Like peer reviewed journals are a thing decades old, but I feel like in the web it’s a relatively new I’ll call it a trend, but it’s the idea that you’re sending this signal to say to Google like, hey, this piece of content or this article is reviewed by a medical professional. And from a Your Money, Your Life perspective, ymyl, I think that can go a long way and just prove I don’t know if you’re proving that it’s more factual necessarily, but you’re really kind of putting a name to it and saying, hey, this is legit. It’s stronger than saying like four and five dentists recommend this. It’s like, no, this is a literal professional. You can probably find in a directory somewhere else who has reviewed this and kind of it has their stamp of approval.
Ben Page: Right? Yeah. And that’s kind of an emerging trend. So the idea would be if yourself or your marketing or content team is producing content for your website about some of these clinical issues, treatment issues, have a credentialed member of your staff review them. And then if you look at popular websites in the space, right, even more content focused sites, you’ll see there’s a mechanism by which there’s essentially like a byline where you can include them in. That cool.
Blake John: And I will say, too, if you’re going to go, that and this might be possible for some and maybe not for others, but the person that you’re choosing to medically review it and you put their stamp of approval on it or whatnot? Try to build a Google business profile for that person, and then if they have other peer reviewed generals and whatnot, or you can maybe have an author page for that specific person, you can kind of really connect the dots. And again, it just helps reinforce the authority of that page and it carries a little bit more weight, essentially. So that’s just a little more, I guess, more advanced. Tip build a Google Business profile for that specific doctor or whoever, if they don’t already have one.
Ben Page: Man, that’s so cool. And I was just reminded, circling back a little bit to that earlier topic or idea of understanding how users are searching and that language and that user need. It reminded me to call out, make sure, because this is a tactic you can use even if you’re like. Ground zero. You have ten beds, you’re a single location, like you’re just getting off the ground or something. Talk to your admissions coordinator team, right? Because if you can understand the language that patients and prospective patients that people are using in those conversations, you might get an insight or a pattern that you would then draw up into your blog posts, social media, your advertising ad copy. Just want to throw that. And as you get more sophisticated, you could bring on a tool like a call tracking solution without naming any specific one you said most of, right? Yeah, two out of three ain’t bad. Ray, do you want to talk about that really quick? Because you’ve done a lot with call tracking solutions.
Ray Sawvell: Yes, with call tracking solutions specifically. This kind of goes back to this data component, right, where you need to make sure that your offline conversions are being measured properly. But going back to the local piece, this allows you to have a local phone number within that area. If you’re a multisite location, it allows you to have that piece, but then it also allows your phone number to dynamically swap on the website as well. So if you’re working in tandem with your admissions team, you’re really able to trace back to every single source where somebody calls your phone number on your site. So if somebody visits from a Google My Business or Google Business place, whatever it’s called nowadays, whatever people are visiting from that’ll show up as the source where people are calling. Same thing for Google ads for Organic. And then you can truly understand, hey, Organic is delivering XYZ phone calls. Paid is delivering this much and it allows you to level up your data component.
Ben Page: So cool.
Blake John: Honestly, if you can find a call tracking solution, just Google it.
Ray Sawvell: Yeah.
Ben Page: That is compliant and that checks the bot, which there are out there.
Blake John: Because calls are king in this.
Ben Page: I thought proximity was king.
Blake John: There’s a lot of different regions and many kings, kingdoms and castles.
Ray Sawvell: Monarchy is confusing.
Ben Page: Yeah.
Blake John: But calls are like, generally speaking, that’s the goal or the action that treatment centers want their users to take after.
Ben Page: VOBs verification of benefits.
Blake John: Sure. They want them to get them on the phone, though, because then they can really talk to them and figure out what they need and
help them and move them down the path.
Ben Page: Right.
Blake John: And so if you have better data to say, hey, this source Paid or this campaign or whatever it is, if you can do that, like you said, you’re just really leveling up your data and going so much further.
Ray Sawvell: Yeah.
Blake John: Your decision making, you have so many more levers to pull and you have so much more information to work on, and you can drill down into something that’s working and just go further and further. So it’s really beneficial.
Ray Sawvell: Yeah. If you’re looking at your data as a whole, we talked about CRM earlier. I would say, like, key takeaways, all of this is so important, but CRM making sure that’s buttoned up along with your data and specifically phone calls, if you can understand that connection, it’ll be a big level up for moving your treatment center forward.
Ben Page: Yep. Awesome. Ray, within PPC, what are some of the biggest challenges that we face? Day to day running campaigns and limitations.
Ray Sawvell: Right, there are several, but I think one of the first things to call out know, in order to advertise these types of services, you need to be verified in some way, specifically on Google and Meta. Correct. So to ensure that there’s no charlatans in the space and you’re legit and you know exactly you can advertise your services. There’s programs out there called Legit Script, for example, to ensure that you get a certification. You get it on your site, it’s reviewed by someone and then that’s telling Google, Meta, these other platforms that you can actually advertise. So I would say this can be like a barrier to entry depending on the size of your operation. So this can be a big one. So ensuring that you have that first is really important. The other really big one is that there’s no remarketing in this space across most channels. I know it’s crazy, but there are some solutions to that where you can create things like custom intent, audiences. And to double click on that, you can tell Google different signals where you’re not going to be able to do typical remarketing, but you can tell Google and you can say, these are the type of people I want to target. They are roughly this age or they search these things or they browse these websites and it’s kind of like hacking together like an attempt where it’s trying to get as close as you can to remarketing, but it’s not going to be as good. But it’s kind of the best we have.
Ben Page: Right, because we can’t activate first party data in this niche like we can elsewhere. Right. For obvious reasons. It’s like we’ve got to have a firewall basically between your EMR and marketing. And this is an area specifically where there have been some incidents of cases and lawsuits emerging right. Because of personally identifiable information or sensitive health information sort of leaking or getting pixeled for lack of a better term. So you have to be really careful and right, like retargeting not being able to retarget even against a pixel, that is a challenge. But like Ray said, there are clever ways that we can build audiences based on online behavior in aggregate that are not dependent upon modeling from individuals, which seems like the best way forward in addition to just really focusing all of your energy and attention on the paid search component which is a really huge one.
Ray Sawvell: Yeah, and I mean we talked about these keywords to focus on earlier and it’s relatively similar between paid and organic. I would say the key thing though is truly understanding and I’ve talked about this several times, search terms are ultimately driving admits. If you can get to that data and if you can solve that, that’s where you’re truly going to be able to scale because then you can understand like, hey, I think I have an idea that these keywords are really going to influence phone calls or they’re going to influence form fills, something like that. But is it truly impacting getting people in bed? So at the end of the day, if you have that connection between your CRM and your ad platform, that’s how you’re going to be able to scale.
Ben Page: Yeah, or even cut right. If it’s like you’re at census or approaching or you have a strong pipeline and you’re concerned about patient experience or quality of care, it’s like, why let’s pull back on acquisition a little bit for a week because we’re good. We need to take care of the people that are here now. And so thereby you save some money, which is fantastic thing if you can do it. What about challenges with ad copy? I’m thinking about every single ad in the whole account is restricted medicals, please.
Ray Sawvell: Yeah, I mean, if you’re not a Google Ads manager and if you do hop into your account someday and you see all these red flags and it looks like everything’s on fire, things probably aren’t on fire. But Google as a result says your ads are restricted, approved, stuff like that. So due to the space you’re not going to be able to deliver on every single search term due to all these compliance issues. That we’re discussing, but it’s just ensuring that Google’s trying to make sure that all of the bad people in the space might stay out of the searches. So I think that’s just one thing to keep in mind. If you do hop in the account and you’re like, oh, my gosh, what’s happened here? That’s just kind of how Google flags.
Ben Page: Things within the and, you know, just one trend or one kind of pro tip that I’ve seen time and again in healthcare and medical practices, certainly for treatment centers, it’s like you want to steer clear of using the word you in your ad copy, right? We can’t imply that an individual searcher has a condition. I believe the policy, the official policy, reads something like that. And so I’ve seen many ads get flagged for that reason. And also just another hurdle, right? Like, let’s say you haven’t run pay per click previously. Just know that many times you have to request exceptions, or your ads may get randomly flagged and paused and so on. You have to say, this is restricted verbiage or targeting, and you have to request an exception to advertise on detox or drug addiction or rehab and so on. And so that can actually add there’s a time component and an effort component of applying for the exception, getting re enabled, running again, ramping back up, adjusting the bids again, the whole thing.
Ray Sawvell: I think one more interesting thing to call out, and both Ben and I have mentioned Pmax or Performance Max a couple of times in this call, and to summarize, it’s a rather broad targeting component within Google Ads campaigns. My recommendation would be, if you are a treatment center and if your data isn’t to the level where you would want it to be, and a majority of your spend is going towards Performance Max, you may want to take, like, a second look at that, because your targeting may be too broad. So if that’s too specific for you, I’d recommend getting in touch with somebody who knows Google Ads a bunch, because there’s a chance that you could be wasting a majority of your spend inside the specific campaign type on Google if it’s not set up properly, it has a tendency to waste a lot of dollars, right?
Ben Page: And there are certain approaches you can use to try to encourage it to deliver more Google Business Places ads and so on. But to your point, right, if you don’t have quality conversion tracking, you don’t have the confidence yet in your data. Do not recommend placing dollars there and trying to scale it at the outset. It’s important, I mean, guys, to start to kind of wind this thing down top, takeaway value. If we’re talking to a marketing director at a treatment center or even an executive, what’s a takeaway? Something they can put into practice tomorrow that would be beneficial.
Ray Sawvell: Yeah, I’ll kick us off quick. I’ve kind of done two or three recaps. So I’ll kind of do like a tiered list here. Quick. So I would say, like, CRM. Is that bundled up? If yes, call tracking solution, I think is what we were calling it earlier. Make sure your call tracking solution is in a good spot. And then after that, for Google, specifically, if a majority of your dollars are going towards performance max, check that out. So I would say, like three tiered.
Ben Page: Takeaways and yours are really focused on data. It’s like close the loop on the data so you can make better decisions later. Before you start investing significant time, you’re going to have a bad time. It’s going to be sad. Yeah.
Blake John: Blake I would say, I mean, local strategy and getting that right, having local landing pages that really send strong signals with name, address, phone number, other relevant information, making sure your Google business profile is up to date, optimized, and you’re constantly refreshing that thing. And then lastly, this is key. We kind of talked about it, but I didn’t say it in this way. But don’t forget to say what you do. Really dive into specific services that you offer, the levels of care, all those things. I didn’t say it in that way. We did talk about it, but don’t forget to say what you do.
Ben Page: Literally spell it out.
Blake John: Yeah. Sometimes you’re so close to your own business that it’s like, oh, yeah, we do this and we do this and we do this. And then you go on the website and you’d have no idea because none of it’s there. Don’t forget those things are that type of information is just so important. So build that out. All those relevant, tangentially important landing pages are key.
Ben Page: That’s cool. Well, like I said at the outset, this is an industry, a focus for us, something that we care a lot about, super passionate about it. We’re going to keep producing more content about it. So please let us know if you have specific questions relevant to your treatment center and digital marketing. We’d be happy to answer that for you. And just know the work you’re doing is super important and impactful and keep doing it. And our belief is if you can get this acquisition, this marketing piece right in a way that is good for users and it’s good for you as well, and kind of creates a virtuous cycle where then you can help more people and it has a positive impact. So keep doing good and thanks for listening.
Outro:
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