‘Mad Men’ advice for marketing your treatment center

In season seven of the television series “Mad Men,” the iconic character Don Draper is cornered by a young, ambitious entrepreneur who happens to be installing a mainframe computer in the ad agency’s Manhattan offices. “Advertising…does it work?” he asks Draper. His question is as complex as it is simple. The installer goes on to say that he started his small computer business with two friends, but six months later he has 19 employees and 10 new competitors.

Draper takes a long drag of his Lucky Strike and delivers one of his trademark pearls of wisdom, “Well, they don’t have you. And they don’t advertise.”

In today’s marketing speak, Don Draper may have been telling us that, while the competitive set may be ever expanding, they do not have your center’s unique collective experience, your approach to treating addiction or your special passion for helping to release people from the grasp of addiction.

It’s puzzling why a great many treatment centers take Draper’s second piece of advice and, indeed, advertise, while failing to first carefully consider and articulate what makes them special, different or potentially better. Consequently, a lot of centers spend a small fortune on advertising tactics without first developing a carefully crafted brand position, only to find that it simply doesn’t work. So, why is that?

Best impressions

There’s a popular myth being propagated around the treatment center marketing watercooler that awareness is directly proportional to census. There are marketing “experts” springing up seemingly everywhere who will tell you that the more raw impressions your treatment center creates, the more patients you’ll welcome into your center’s beds. And they’ll tell you that those impressions can be quickly generated by way of search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click advertising (PPC), useless infographics, memes and pins that no one would ever need, or even articles written in India for 5 cents a word.

Now, don’t misunderstand me: Impressions are the lifeblood of awareness. And you must have awareness before you can have consumer consideration. But if those impressions result in click-throughs or phone calls to a treatment center that has no meaningful brand position, point of differentiation or consistent story to share, then a lot of money will have been wasted, beds will remain empty and a hard lesson will have been learned. You see, impressions without a message that is meaningful, differentiated and true may create awareness. But they will fall far short of creating conversion. 

Here’s an example. A real estate investment group—let’s say from Nebraska—asked us if we could guarantee 50 patients per month for the treatment center they had just acquired, and how much that would cost. They were primarily interested in organic SEO and link building. They had “tried” PPC, and it didn’t “work.”

On the brand’s website, the home page featured cliché images of Zen rock towers and footprints in the sand. Remember, this is Nebraska not Nantucket. There was a big, fat, glaring typo in the very first line of the very first page and at least one on nearly every page after that, which explained, at least in part, the “didn’t work” assessment of their PPC program.

 While they offered gender-specific treatment, the text of the men’s treatment page was identical to that on the women’s treatment page except for the word “women” instead of “men.” Beyond that, the language they used read like that of hundreds of other sites:

A comprehensive continuum of care delivered by a multidisciplinary staff of addiction professionals…

There was not a single sentence about what might make this center special, different or better than the two dozen other centers within a 100-mile radius of them.

What they needed was a website renovation, implementation of on-page SEO best practices and a marketing communications plan. But none of that could start without a thoughtful exploration of what makes their brand a compelling choice for someone in the throes of addiction, for their family or for a referent with a reputation to uphold. We never heard from them again. To date, the typos are still there.

Before the internet, before social media, before SEO, PPC, etc., there was print, direct mail, radio and television. Period. And I’m talking 1994 not 1964.

Can anyone imagine an addiction treatment center back then investing the time and money into developing and running content for any of those media without obsessing over the message in order to get that 30-second TV spot or 60-second radio spot exactly right? In this social-media saturated age where there are infinitely more ways to deliver a message, so many marketers have forgotten that you actually need a message to deliver.

And it has to be meaningful and uniquely yours. And compelling. And, God knows, truthful. Beautifully written wouldn’t hurt either. So how do you go about crafting a brand story that will matter to your consumer? Here are five tips that will give you a running start.

Five tips on messaging

1.      Look Within Yourself. Call time out right now and carefully consider what it is that makes your center special to each of your key constituencies. What is your purpose? Why are you here? And how does your brand of treatment fit into the bigger picture of addiction treatment today? Does it at all resemble the story you are telling today? It should.

2.      Tell the Truth.  There are liars out there. And the liars are not only lying about their centers, they’re lying about yours too. In some cases, they are actually pretending to be your center. And they aren’t small players, mind you. As you craft your brand story, you can rise above this red tide of deception by committing to a truthful articulation of your treatment protocol, success rates, insurance disposition, even your location. The truth always wins.

3.      Write for Humans Not Algorithms. You just know when a website has been written for search engines rather than people. The text sounds clunky and contrived. Oftentimes, if there was a message, it was likely lost in the pursuit of keyword density. The best minds in search will tell you that Google is becoming increasingly humanistic and can sense when a brand is trying to game the system. It can even detect English as a foreign language. So write the way you would write a business letter. Better yet, write like you were writing to your mother. Google will reward credibility and authenticity and penalize those who fake it.

4.      One Size Fits One. Generally speaking, your prospects are potential patients, family members, professional referents and alumni. It’s critical that you know not only who they are, but also what they need, want and expect. Try to envision what day-in-the-life of each looks like. Because this differs for each audience, you’ll need to develop a segmentation strategy as you send your message into the market so that you speak to each audience in a way that will resonate.

5.      Listen and Learn. Once you think you have developed your unique brand position, share it. Get reaction and feedback from those in your organization that you trust, whether they be clinicians, medical staff, marketing and admissions folks, or even your techs. Listen closely to their feedback and take from it what you believe will strengthen what you already have. Gaining buy-in from those who will be customer-facing is invaluable.

Now that you have your beautifully crafted brand positioning in hand, you can begin your website renovation paying attention to on- and off-page organic SEO ethical best practices. You can create your stunning brochure and start driving interest and awareness with carefully crafted and beautifully designed email programs segmented by target audience. Ask your clinicians and medical staff for topics that they believe would make for meaningful articles for your website or even a leading behavioral healthcare publication or website and then have them written by the best writers you can afford in order to build your credibility and authority. In time, you’ll be rewarded for your diligence and commitment to creating a meaningful brand that is entirely yours.

Don Draper, if he had your ear, would tell you that only you can tell your story.