TCIV: Holistic, User-Friendly Approach Will Fuel Digital Marketing Success

With 86% of addiction treatment engagements now starting with a Google search, the field has moved past the point of wondering about the importance and necessity of digital marketing, Dreamscape Marketing President and CEO Dan Gemp told Treatment Center Investment & Valuation Retreat attendees on Saturday.

“We are now in the know,” he said.

In a wide-ranging forecast, Gemp touched on a plethora of marketing topics and best practices for behavioral health organizations heading into 2022. Following his presentation, he spoke with BHE about changes that Google has made to its site ranking algorithm, why targeted advertising is going to be more challenging on social media, what providers should be doing from a marketing perspective in response to the emergence of psychedelics, and how they can make use of real-time medical transportation data that is now available.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Google has made changes to the ways in which its algorithm ranks websites, one example being the way it measures website speed. What should provider organizations be doing with their sites to be more Google-friendly heading into 2022?

Gemp: Their digital strategies as they apply to websites need to be more holistic. Instead of looking at the homepage as one fixed asset, Google is looking at the different pieces—a background image, text files, and how they load as a user scrolls down the page. You need to optimize individual pieces—every picture, every box with text on it on your homepage—to load quickly or to “lazy load” to be delayed until someone scrolls down to that part of the page. That improves the user experience with better navigation and a better search experience overall.

Why is a site’s “About Us” page more important now than it was even a year ago? And what elements should organizations make sure theirs include?

Gemp: People don’t have the option to drive by or talk to someone in person anymore. They only do their research through the Internet. This applies both for staff recruiting and patient recruiting. Users want credibility. They want to see the medical staff. They want to see that you are adequately staffed. It’s a trust issue. Google is also valuing trust-related healthcare publications on the Internet, and your About Us page is a great place to do that. You should add content about your mission and your team, and imagery—actual people, headshots matter now.

Why is social media targeting getting more difficult, and what is the countermeasure?

Gemp: It’s a good news/bad news situation. They can no longer invasively track everything we do just because we have a Facebook app on our phone. Our privacy will increase, but then the ability to target down to the individual level and stalk someone with ads will be limited. Mass marketing is going to have to come back into effect. The concept of banner ads back in the day will be back in play.

What should behavioral health organizations be doing right now from a marketing perspective in response to the emergence of psychedelics? And what should they NOT be doing?

Gemp: For psychedelics, they need to be training their clinical staff extensively. Even if you’re not for psychedelics, they are coming and it will be an option. Some people are looking for that therapy and that model. They need to be able to trust the clinical recommendations of psychiatric providers whether they’re abstinence-based as a preference or MAT. The other thing they will need to do is publish content about psychedelics to be a source of information and be informative for the time being.

One of the last topics covered in your presentation was the development of nationwide, real-time medical transportation data. What marketing applications will this information have?

Gemp: If you can see with a 24-delay in any given city who is coming and going from an SUD-related hospital admission… Were they transported to a treatment center or driven home? Was it an acute stabilization? Do they require detox? If you can see the actual charting of that hospital related to that patient, hospitals do not often admit and keep SUD-related patients long term. It’s a huge risk for them, and it’s a huge opportunity to treatment centers to see, geographically, where those patients are and where they are going. You can use that to know where to place your outreach people. You can’t geographically stalk people on Facebook anymore due to privacy, but you can now at least geographically target them based on a probability of where they would be taken in an acute medical situation.

Reference

Gemp D. Behavioral healthcare marketing future-cast 2022. Presented at: Treatment Center Investment & Valuation Retreat; December 10-12, 2021; Scottsdale, Arizona.Top of Form