How to Successfully Transition Your Addiction Treatment Marketing, as We Move From “Pandemic” to “Endemic”*

* Transcript below was machine generated by Adobe Premiere Pro’s speech-to-text feature, and is not 100% accurate.

Stewart Gandolf:
Hi everyone. Stewart Gandolf, welcome to our webinar today where I’m pleased to have a couple of my very esteemed colleagues in addiction marketing speaking with me as well. The topic today is how to successfully transition your addiction shooting and marketing as we move away from the pandemic to epidemic phase. And this is an important topic. We know we’ve been through a lot the last couple of years as I think most people would agree.

Stewart Gandolf:
And so now it’s time to you know, one of the things about this COVID pandemic is when is it really over? Right. We thought it was over last June and then it maybe was over, you know, after that. And it looks like according to most epidemiologists that we’re going to be and then that contracted to some other announcement that this is official.

Stewart Gandolf:
What does that mean for our marketing? And so the idea with the pandemic as you know, it’s an emergency and dynamic is at this phase is how do we live with this? And really, at this point, it’s time to move on from reactionary marketing to marketing proactively what should we be thinking about as we go to our new future?

Stewart Gandolf:
Hopefully a lot healthier and so many ways, not just from COVID, but, you know, all the tragedy and the stress and the addiction that’s come from this pandemic. So how do we move forward so today the agenda is going to be first of all, introduce the presenters in just a moment. We’ll talk about some observations and some data.

Stewart Gandolf:
I want to talk about a lot of things today. I touch on some of the most important things that we speak to all the time with the flavor of, OK, what does that mean for right now? So we’re talking about digital marketing for sure. Traditional marketing, call centers, business development, attribution. So we have a really deep agenda today.

Stewart Gandolf:
And please feel free to ask any questions that you may have. So the speakers today include well, I just realized that I’m so visually muted. I’m sorry, I’m not hiding so I’m Stewart, I’m Chief Executive Officer. That’s what I look like. And real life. That actually was an Instagram photo a moment ago. Anyway, so I’ve been doing marketing and health care almost my whole career.

Stewart Gandolf:
Started off with very big agencies, stumbled into health care a couple of decades ago and have been doing it ever since working with providers in the hospitals and health systems and all kinds of different applications. Also speaking with me today is Kathy Jackson, which is a former well.

Kathy Gaughran:
Yeah. Hi, I’m Kathy Gaughran. I’m a senior strategist at Health Care Success and excited to share some good info with you today. I’ve been in the health care space about 25 years and very deeply in the addiction space at least the last ten. So we’re excited to share some of our observations recommendations and thanks for attending today.

Stewart Gandolf:
All right, good. And Josh.

Josh Weum:
My name’s Josh Weum. I have been in the addiction industry for six or seven years now, and I come from Google, where I was essentially a pariah for the diligence script certification process.

Stewart Gandolf:
Must have been empire so the and then Jacob is another one of our addiction team members who’s not on a call. We couldn’t have the whole company anyway. So Jacob’s also extremely skilled and experienced in the addiction marketplace. So I thought this was a relevant slide to start with. I still remember in high school learning about the Kubler-Ross model, about death and essentially if you’re not familiar with this, but it’s serious.

Stewart Gandolf:
I remember this folks both cringe for some reason, but the idea here was they studied this and you know, this is a debated model surgical say this is 100% true. And so there’s no data back it up. But it’s a good context to think about essentially the observation was when people first found out they’re going to die from a terminal illness, they go through these predictable stages and the first stage is denial where this can’t be happened.

Stewart Gandolf:
To me. Then there is anger and then eventually there becomes depression, which makes sense. You can imagine you’re upset that you’re dying and you’re angry. Then you feel depressed. And then at some point we begin bargaining. Bargaining means, you know, whether it’s talking about or trying to find meaning or praying or whatever, that eventually there’s exhaustion, acceptance and, you know, coming to grips with the new reality.

Stewart Gandolf:
And this model, you know, to me the COVID pandemic, we were talking about this at the very beginning, actually, of the Kubler-Ross model, where people were in denial, anger, depression, bargaining, acceptance, and, you know, we noted even back and I was it April or May when we did webinars in 20, 20 that their problem people stuck around did not anger stage.

Stewart Gandolf:
And you know, it turned out to be more prophetic than we realized. And but I think now I would argue most people have moved beyond and we’re really kind of in the acceptance phase. So it’s taken a while anybody’s had their own personal journey and it has not been easy but that what that means though is it’s a huge impact on marketing we have to recognize just the incredible disruption in the marketplace.

Stewart Gandolf:
And so now as we move forward again, it’s time for us to think about, OK, we’re in a new reality. What’s amazing is there certainly were a lot of casualties businesswise, especially the weaker players in every part of the business. Right. The other day, my wife was looking for a surefire place in both worlds. We used to go to a golf course.

Stewart Gandolf:
There are a lot of casualties and industry after industry to industry. But today we’re at a new reality where we have to accept the new reality. There is a consolidation in almost every marketplace restaurants, shoe repair, addiction treatment and word of mouth reality or consumers are beginning to dust themselves off and move forward and unfortunately covered. I must say, before I turn this back over to Cathy, you know, it’s not over.

Stewart Gandolf:
I have in the last week people that I know personally, I have covered multiple people, including family members of the people I know who have been in the hospital, including a baby. So it’s not over, clearly. And but I think that we’re at the stage now where, again, it’s endemic. So I’m not saying we’re we’re done with it.

Stewart Gandolf:
We’re clearly not. But we’re at a point where people are beginning to move on and accept it. So, Cathy, yeah, I’m here.

Kathy Gaughran:
But it was interesting my son brought to me when we actually contracted COVID over the holiday the Kubler-Ross model, we were going through that in our little two week quarantine in denial and didn’t want to admit we had it. So the market’s been disrupted for sure. And we’re also starting to establish new standards, you know, new ways of communication, new ways of commerce.

Kathy Gaughran:
It’s it’s just very different. And we need to make sure that we’re aware of all of these different table setting efforts. What we saw through the shutdown, as Stuart mentioned in the beginning, I’ve been working the addiction space for many, many years, as has Josh as has Stuart, as has Jacob. And this is just a list of things that we saw.

Kathy Gaughran:
We heard, we observed and then worked through residential, became local people were less willing to get on a plane and fly to a remote location. So we found a lot bigger push for local draw when it came to residential properties. And in the addiction space, there was issues with quarantine worrying about staff spread. We had staff spread in and out once the quarantine was patient.

Kathy Gaughran:
So it was just a mess throughout the last couple of years. Increase in standalone add on EOP and mental health as well as detox programs. I’m seeing a number of addiction centers really expand into other areas with the adoption of service lines, trying to reach consumers on different levels, and then also innovative rises of telehealth and a lot more mental health primary.

Kathy Gaughran:
We’re noticing some of our addiction centers are seeing, you know, a higher percentage of outreach for mental health primary than for addiction. So it’s just important that we’re recognizing the need in the market around mental health. There’s alternative advertising channels that rose and prominence due to logit script. And Josh is going to talk about this a little bit more.

Kathy Gaughran:
SAMHSA, erotic competition people, you know, really not knowing what to do in and around the pandemic. Some of them doubled down, but many of them just went quiet Native Ads page, social, programmatic, YouTube, and then also a pendulum swing back to traditional media. Since everyone is online now, it’s important that you have visibility in the push strategies. And we’re going to talk about that a little bit later as well.

Kathy Gaughran:
Everyone froze at first. Businesses and economies froze. Smart players invested in long term strategies. So the big players that we’ve seen that have really sustained through this time period are ones that invested in CEO branding efforts, internal staff training and staff recruitment and staff recruitment is a massive issue right now. We’re finding a lot of our clients that are reaching out to us are less about patient volume and more about staff to serve the volume that they have.

Kathy Gaughran:
So we’re we’re engaged in a number of those campaigns as well. Many providers recovered well, and those are the ones that really reinforce their infrastructure and look towards the future. Still, a thousand treatment centers closed in the United States last year. Now we see the space to be even more competitive with larger players and private equity backed consolidating efforts going on.

Kathy Gaughran:
Many moved to become national players and took market share away from the weaker regional ones. And many CEOs retired. So next sort of to do either. Do you have any comments on that, Stewart or Josh, in terms of your observations during this time period? I think we collaborated on this list a little bit.

Josh Weum:
Correct? Yeah.

Kathy Gaughran:
So and.

Stewart Gandolf:
Yes.

Kathy Gaughran:
That’s what we saw from the business perspective. And then this slide talks a little bit about what we saw from the from the health care consumers.

Stewart Gandolf:
So start with the aside. Let’s go.

Kathy Gaughran:
Back. I was just introducing that, I think beginning at 20, 20, addiction treatment was solid growing with 15,000 providers, 42 billion in yearly revenue with a projected 5.2 annual growth, then COVID hit by the summer they lost 4 billion in revenue, about a thousand providers. 54% of organizations had closed programs and 65% have had to turn away patients as a result, nearly half of decreased hours and had massive layoffs.

Kathy Gaughran:
So the pandemic has really caused a fear of a lot of things. There’s been a lot of isolation with the addicts. We’re trying to reach them in different delivery networks, trying to make sure that we’re reaching the addicts as well as the influencers. But it’s really caused a lot of isolation, increase in alcohol consumption, increase in the need for rehab, depression and suicide.

Kathy Gaughran:
As I’m sure you’ve all seen I pulled some quotes from some different publications. Pandemic stress and loneliness are making addiction more common from Yahoo News. Excessive drinking increased by 21% from the Harvard Gazette. And then scientists estimate for long term planning, for lack of a better term there, that this increase in alcohol consumption during the pandemic will resonate and have a wake for many years to come.

Kathy Gaughran:
So we just need to be aware that these people are going to need help and we need to be providing that bridge to get them into quality recovery centers so that they get the help they need. So. Right. And then, Josh, you want to speak to this one?

Josh Weum:
Yeah, this is an example of the acuteness of the of the need for treatment right now. This is a search trend for Google for alcohol rehab on Google scan. And as you can see, the last few months have been the most prevalent and for several years now that that line has been going unfortunately north and to the right.

Stewart Gandolf:
Yeah. And in retrospect, you know, it’s funny how during the pandemic, it is so hard to predict things, you know, because this is such a crazy time at the beginning months but now in retrospect, it is that, of course, that makes sense, right? You know, you could see that now in hindsight, everything’s fine. So I think you want to talk about granular.

Stewart Gandolf:
Yeah.

Kathy Gaughran:
And then I did want to really set the stage for the importance of branding and messaging. We’ve got everybody online advertising and searching in this space. So it’s critical that you have some point of uniqueness or differentiation that breeds through your online properties. So as prospects are searching, they’re able to connect with a residential center or with an institution that’s going to provide them with what they need.

Kathy Gaughran:
We don’t want people choosing us just based on location and pricing. We really want them. Some do, but we really want them choosing us based upon the quality care that we provide in the facilities. So it’s really critical that you have a strong branded message and voice in your online property to provide you that uniqueness that gives you the click and ultimately the call.

Stewart Gandolf:
So I want to add to that the you know, we talk about when we’re doing our seminars, though, we haven’t done one. Cath, you know, I know I got a sort of half year Kathmandu, a lot of seminars together that’s for sure. We talked a lot about why you don’t invest in a brand, you know, this year, the scope of today’s call, we don’t have time to get into this too much.

Stewart Gandolf:
But you know, the brand in some ways is your most important marketing investment. And really why do you own a brand? And the key is, is that in a highly competitive market, number one, how do you stand out? That’s the first thing it’s a way of standing out. And two, people are willing to pay more for a brand.

Stewart Gandolf:
They trust the brand. They become loyal to a brand. So if you look at any endeavor, right, there are premium brands and there are lower brands. There are brands that are well defined and not so much brands. And really in the addiction space, as it’s become more and more competitive, just we think it can’t get any more competitive.

Stewart Gandolf:
It becomes more competitive. Having a strong brand is the foundation. And so a lot of times what we look at as an agency for clients is, you know, is it time to refresh the brand? Is it time to get our brand messaging straight? Is it time to get our brands you know, when was the last time we did that?

Stewart Gandolf:
Is it a bunch of words on a web page? Are we truly branded? We really have our mission, vision and values reflected in the brand. So if you haven’t done this, then might be a good time to think through this as we pivot during COVID, to look at everything and to dust yourself off and say, OK, where do we go from here?

Kathy Gaughran:
All right. And does your staff thank you. Does your staff know what your brand is? Do they carry that forward in their interface with your referral sources? And patients and influencers each and every day? Often they don’t know what it is. So it’s it’s really important that it’s foundational and it becomes part of your culture. That’s something that we’ve been doing a lot more of now throughout COVID is actual culture training, where we’re identifying the culture for the organization, and then our trainers are going in and working with the staff on how to best exude that how to let people know what that brand is without just verbally telling them.

Kathy Gaughran:
And then this is a list. This will be in the deck. If you want to download the deck later with some of the links to some of our recent branding blogs, some really great information in here, but we just wanted to have this in here for your use and reference later.

Stewart Gandolf:
Very good. By the way, on that note, the caveat, as sad as well so often when they open in stages of onboarding a new client, you know, I’ll ask so tell me quick. 30 seconds elevators are closing what makes you special. And I usually get our often get very confused looks and that’s a problem if we can adapt our brand message and really why us in the same way maybe you have a two minute slow closing on here we can figure out what to say that’s a challenge ahead to get out and.

Kathy Gaughran:
Then important to diversify. We never want to put all of our eggs in one basket. So it’s important that you recognize where your prospects are, what they do, what they’re buying patterns, are there behavioral patterns? And we’ve got such great targeting capabilities that Josh is going to walk through here in just a minute. So you want to make sure you understand your market.

Kathy Gaughran:
If you try to be all things to all people, you become essential to no one. So it’s really important that they understand your foundation and you know who they are. You also need to know who your competitors are and what that messaging is in the market. Most addiction centers do. But it’s critical that you keep a file on competition, really, and you reference that you understand what they’re up to, what their offers are, what their uniqueness is.

Kathy Gaughran:
So you can compete. You want to articulate that brand message across as many touch points with an integrated approach. So you’re in the right place at the right time with the right message to capture that lead. You want that strong differentiating property, whether it’s a website or a landing page or just an internal location page you’re using for one of your facilities, strong strategic SEO and optimize your local.

Kathy Gaughran:
A lot of searches are still local. Even with addiction being so widespread, in terms of your draw and your radius, they start local. So we want to make sure that all of your SEO local, your GMB, everything is cleaned up. And again, Josh is going to speak to that in a minute. Page search and page social. Tell Your Story.

Kathy Gaughran:
This is an opportunity to really push your message as to why you are the best candidate for them to choose and then drive up your response just by as much as three to 5%. With layering in traditional media, you want a level of push and pull marketing, optimize lead conversion with phone training this is one thing that I do quite a bit of, and it’s important that the nuances in their voices are heard.

Kathy Gaughran:
I’ve done some observations. We actually listen to a lot of calls to determine success and tracking capabilities and attributions, and it’s amazing what we hear on both sides of the fence. You know, the types of questions that these prospects are asking staff is unable to answer, or even just a vocal intonation change when it comes to talking about the price of treatment for a month.

Kathy Gaughran:
I’ve heard just a very significant audible change and voice, which would make me concerned if I was a potential prospect. Secure referrals. Make sure you’re BD team is all in alignment around your brand and your strategy, and also leverage your alumni. So this is this is a smart strategy approach to make sure that you’re firing on all cylinders and that each of these strategies and tactics and channels is leveraging off the others.

Kathy Gaughran:
So good.

Kathy Gaughran:
And we wanted to share some examples of our recent landing pages with a number of our addiction groups. Stuart, if you want to talk to this a little bit, and I think you segway into social for Josh.

Stewart Gandolf:
Sure. Well, the the creative is always important. And I think the key thing is when you’re looking at whether it’s a landing page or Web site, you know, the key factors are always, you know, having a benefit and a emotional PR you want to make sure that copy I flow works to convert patients to or convert people into inquiries.

Stewart Gandolf:
They’re designed for all of the right things and there’s a lot to getting a landing page. Right. But that’s oftentimes the center point of the marketing. One of the things that, you know, we talk about a lot with our clients and particularly addiction space is that there is about three or four factors that are all equally important. So the first thing is number one is how many people are actually searching for care and make it more in the marketplace.

Stewart Gandolf:
That is absolutely critical. What’s the one thing that we cannot and should not try to influence? Right. People are looking for care and the it’s that’s out of our control. It’s the exception of first marketing, which we’ll talk about the minute and a turn to search. There’s only so many people searching for results on the goal for addiction treatment at any one time.

Stewart Gandolf:
And then the second thing that’s important is how well is that campaign design? How was it engineered? How was it optimized? So our digital team know spending hours and nights and we are watching results come in on a daily basis. Hourly basis. So how was that manage the landing page is the third critical factor. So it’s equally important to the house the campaign managed and it’s equally important on a basis the results are going to be more searching.

Stewart Gandolf:
The final thing that matter is equally important is some of those calls are handled. And one of the things we talk about a lot is that’s a multiplicative effect. In other words, if you can do a 20% better chance, if we can get the landing page 20% better to convert through conversion rate optimization techniques, that immediately increases results by 20%.

Stewart Gandolf:
It’s just like that. And another way of looking at it is, is your staff or your team answering the phones can convert 20% better on their calls. You can consistently increase your results by 20%. Likewise if we have a great you know there’s huge demand, we have a great campaign and we have a great landing page and we’re sending thousands of calls but your you can only convert a zero that means the whole thing does convert zero right it’s multiplicative.

Stewart Gandolf:
So these are really important factors to think through all of them are we generating demand through social media or whatever are we looking at? Certainly optimizing the campaign is crucial because the landing page experiences person on the phones. These are all part of an integrated system. So with that set up sort of a bump bucket, a set for charge that you can spike in.

Josh Weum:
Line and that Segways. Well, to what I wanted to mention, add rank because when Google is looking to rank your ad among competitors, they’re looking at a few factors. And one of those factors is the landing page quality. So if we are attuned with what they’re looking for and building pages to suit Google’s needs than we are mitigating the cost of the bid that we have to pay the other cost to the clicks there.

Josh Weum:
And that’s what we’re looking to do. If we can improve ad copy and improve the landing pages, then we’ll rank highly with Google without having to spend too much to do so. So four years old this summer, Google ads transitioned from Google AdWords about four years ago, which is almost a decade. I mean, in tech, if you if, you know, five years is ten years, it’s not quite Moore’s Law, but it moves very quickly.

Stewart Gandolf:
So if you.

Josh Weum:
Have a vendor or if you’ve seen references to AdWords in the recent communications, recent reporting, that’s a red flag. Just because Google changed that name for a lot of reasons. You know, AdWords was initially a means for focusing on keyword strategy to to market online since then that platform has grown to include YouTube, display advertising, Gmail, Google, my business, all kinds of other things.

Josh Weum:
So AdWords is sort of a limiting thing when you’re when you’re looking at that full ecosystem and, you know, what does that include? Well, so AdWords started in 2000 and last year they made 257 billion in profit just with ads. You know people add so critical factor there that that’s still Alphabet’s number one source of revenue right now Google Maps, Google Reviews, Google business profiles which used to be called Google My Business.

Josh Weum:
I’ll touch on that a bit later. YouTube and Gmail all these things work together so that ecosystem and this is intentional right? Google wants us to interact with their products that use all of them and spend money with them. So if we’re aware that maps work very closely with Google Ads, and the only way to show maps ads is to is to have an ad extension working in Google.

Josh Weum:
And the only way to show ads you know, on that SERP is additionally to have that Google misses profile linked up with your ads account. It’s important to notice that that’s what Google’s moving towards. They want you to be using each of these things and they have a lot of value to each other. So it’s easy to see why that old name had to go.

Josh Weum:
Google Ads is a lot more all encompassing with what they’re able to offer so this is a jargony sentence that I put in here on purpose. I can’t stand business jargon and most people can’t, but I wanted to talk through this sentence specifically. So catalyzes brand growth nimbly and effectively. While SEO grows, probes Google Ads, catalyzes brand growth by allowing you to be seen immediately and often as often as you like.

Josh Weum:
You know, typically a lot of these longer term plays, which are critical, do take time. And if you’re up against, you know, a competitive situation, or time, window ads are a great way to catalyze that brand growth. When you’re running ads in the beginning of a campaign, your SEO profile is growing. You know, all that work is being done.

Josh Weum:
Ads tends to support that work intrinsically and very strongly. So catalyzing brand growth is important, not grow nimbly. We could have ads running on Monday at 8 a.m. and bid twice as often as we do when we run ads on Friday evening. Right. We know some of the patterns of addiction and so we want to be able to be very nimble with our targeting and our settings and what we’re able to do with that.

Josh Weum:
And that gives us very effective performance and metrics the targeting controls that Google ads allows have improved, the settings have improved. We’re able to really filter who we’re targeting and where we’re showing ads. So we want to be able to take advantage of all that and, you know, get the most out of that. So Google wants more control.

Josh Weum:
This has been the case for quite some time right now, but essentially they’re looking to automate the Google ad system to to make the decisions on when an ad should show and how much it should cost. We want to take these things with a grain of salt. Google will give recommendations within the platform and through email and every other means that they have.

Josh Weum:
We analyzed those recommendations, but it’s important to recognize that for the most part, if Google is giving you a recommendation on your campaign, it’s probably based on spending more money with them. So we want to make sure that you aren’t auto accepting bad advice from Google that might cost you money. These accounts currently are set as a default to auto accept recommendations after two weeks of inactivity.

Josh Weum:
So if you are managing your own ads or you have someone that’s doing that and it’s not monitoring that automatic recommendation spot, you’re going to have some trouble there because a lot of those actually hurt performance and can cost you more. So I’d say a key takeaway from this slide from Google is to make sure that you’re not opting into these auto suggestions, which are getting more and more aggressive and less and less relevant.

Stewart Gandolf:
Right.

Josh Weum:
And then lastly on this slide, I just wanted to say that it requires proper management. You know, these these automated settings and things like that are a great way to show activity, but not real management of a campaign. So important to notice. Now.

Stewart Gandolf:
I just had, Josh, that one of the things we talk a lot about internally is taking advantage of Google’s I managed by humans, not just defaulting to A.I. That’s exactly the same. Our objective is, you know, to be successful with our clients. And when patients, our objective is to make Google happy. Thank you very much. And you brought up something I talk about a lot about 80% of the revenue.

Stewart Gandolf:
So Google ads it’s like that. All the money is there. I mean all those phones and all those little home of the Google at home and all those things are part of the ecosystem. But it’s still in advertising.

Josh Weum:
It pales in comparison to the.

Stewart Gandolf:
Nothing that market share and the ad so and people I often bring that out and people say, oh, nobody looks at those ads really well. There is many, many billions of dollars to prove that’s not the case.

Josh Weum:
I’m with you. Yeah. I don’t know how it happens, but it really is. So logistic group, we all know this this word, this company, September 17 is the night of in 2017 was the day the music died for fraudsters in the addiction space. I was at a conference for the and 80 in Austin where this actually happened. I was speaking as a Google employee for on the topic of ethics and there was obvious concern about patient brokering shortly after that a legit script was brought into the mix.

Josh Weum:
Google and I went through the audio for that conference and essentially the ad shut down for about a year for this industry. And then most of us know about that a year later it did come back. So it’s been about four years now since that that dark day and we’ve all adjusted since then. But legit scripts changed a little bit too.

Josh Weum:
You know, since the beginning costs have gone up. Most of us have seen that happen, and that’s most of most things but policies have also changed a little bit. You know, the blinking that you can do in the first year has changed from from what you can do today. So they do annual reviews on this. So any time that they’re reviewing sites, reviewing assets that.

Stewart Gandolf:
You’ve submitted.

Josh Weum:
For approval, they’re it’s important to to be aware of the current status of their criteria there because a few things have changed a bit. And one example of that Kathy alluded to earlier was when telehealth became very prominent in, you know, April and May of 20, 20, and then exception was granted by Google in logic script to allow telehealth promotion without the standard licensure for that.

Josh Weum:
So there are always caveats and potentially unexplained expected things that can happen with login scripts. It’s good to be monitoring the current status of that it’s also used for a few other industries. It started actually as a means to regulate pharma and pharmacies and since then has moved into the CBD realm as well. So but just script as a a large oversight entity that covers a few different verticals.

Josh Weum:
A lot of folks don’t realize. I mean, the certification initially came from Google and was tied to Google, but it quickly spread to Microsoft ads, also known as Bing and Facebook ads as well. So if you are paying legit script and you look for that certification, it’s usually best to be getting the most out of it by doing something on each of these platforms.

Josh Weum:
Facebook, I’d say is secondary to the other two. It does require annual renewal, as I mentioned, and regular reassessments. So if your clinical situation has changed, if your licensure is changed, if your location you know, there are a lot of specifics there that they’re going to analyze, it’s important to be ready for that. Our team is very well versed in how to work through those changes and those, you know, criteria that they’re going to ask for.

Josh Weum:
Speed is is the name of the game there. There’s a lot of back and forth with that company in getting these certifications done. We kind of work through that very quickly. And lastly, Login scripts, the only store in town, they don’t have a competitor. I once did a speech for Login script at a conference and used the term necessary evil.

Josh Weum:
And while evil might be a strong word, logistic is a necessary entity in this in this space. As most of us know, you two, I want to talk about YouTube. I don’t think we’re using it enough as an industry addiction can be doing a lot more YouTube. And I’ll give a couple of reasons why. Firstly, YouTube is still free.

Josh Weum:
You know, you can go in there, create a channel with your brand all over it and then start to add video content and, you know, branded with with all kinds of detail about your company and your brand for nothing. It doesn’t cost anything. Again, as I as I mentioned earlier, YouTube ads actually run in the Google Ads platform.

Josh Weum:
So if you have a little video that shows up a walk through of your facility, you could testimonial a note from the owner. Any of that kind of stuff that’s very, very well in a promotional aspect so what we want to know here.

Stewart Gandolf:
Is it ties.

Josh Weum:
In with with these other networks. And there’s one really important and interesting aspect of that. When you search Google for sorry, when you search YouTube for addiction rehab, what you’ll find is that you have a few text ads that show up on top of the same issue. And typically on a search, you know, Google.com, that’s tougher to do.

Josh Weum:
So YouTube is showing some new types of ads. You will see little YouTube bands on you know, in feeds and things like that. But they also have text ads that show up very prominently in the search bar on on YouTube itself. And in fact, YouTube was for a minute, the top search engine in the world. It’s now number two.

Josh Weum:
But a lot of search activity is done on YouTube. And if you have some kind of presence there, you’re going to benefit greatly from having that there. The TV media that we’re seeing come through there is starting to get very expensive and a really good cost on YouTube as well. So I can’t say enough about YouTube really low cost way to promote your brand we talked about this a little bit ago.

Josh Weum:
Google Places initially was the name Google. My business is the name most of us know it lasted for many years, but they have changed it recently and it’s now Google Business profiles. These offer a free kind of like YouTube channel, a free local marketing asset that you can procure and develop that is proven to drive massive amount of traffic.

Josh Weum:
And, you know, we talked about the changes that happened since the pandemic hit. This is one of them. GM, GMB with what’s called GBP profiles tend to get a lot of really high quality traffic for local addiction treatment. So if we’re not leveraging Google ads to promote this the way we can, it’s important that we start doing that you know, they immediately give people directions.

Josh Weum:
Google my business. This is how we show maps ads. You know, when you’re looking locally and you see the maps show up in their little stars and ads next to that, you can’t tell Google, I want an ad on maps. You can work with Google business profiles to show up when Google deems it relevant. This also allows people to show or to leave high profile Google reviews for you.

Josh Weum:
Those are really good for SEO, that there’s some social interaction that can happen on these profiles that keep developing more content there. So you can now have Q&A, video content, photos, all that kind of stuff. And then lastly, we feel like these will be monetized Google’s been indicating for a while now that they’re probably going to have a different tier for this that might be a paid version.

Josh Weum:
So the more you can do while it’s free, the better off you’re going to be down the road.

Josh Weum:
And this is just an allusion to what I mentioned earlier. Samsung is always going to be dominating most of the top spot. There are certain search queries that will allow your ads to show above that. But the fact is, we want Sam to be there. You know, if you’re doing ads properly, Sam is going to show up for the folks that aren’t great targets for you.

Josh Weum:
And, you know, be a good resource for those folks and then you’ll show up when it’s more relevant for the audience that you’re trying to hit. But, you know, local pack map pack map ads all this stuff is now on the top of that page. And if you add Sam in there, it’s tough to get any traction without a Google ad if you’re not showing up till the bottom of a of a page like this.

Josh Weum:
And then just a couple of insights over brand. And one of the things I see in this industry a lot is PPC that is heavily skewed towards the brand term. If you’re a brand new facility, you know, promoting your brand with a branded ad isn’t going to do a lot for you. You’re looking for people who don’t know who you are, who are looking for treatment so if you have you know, if you’re getting great results from your PPC, check out how much of it is branded branded traffic converts.

Josh Weum:
25% of the time, click through rate and clicks cost one third of what normal click that’s. So if you’ve got inordinately low metrics and strong numbers there and sure you’re not doing too much branded traffic the other side of that coin is called conquest thing. So if you don’t do any branded traffic and you’ve been around for a while, people may know that that’s a valuable name, a valuable keyword to use, and that’s allowed Google allows that Coke bids on Pepsi, for example.

Josh Weum:
So if you’re not doing any branded advertising and you were able to search your name and someone else comes up for that, their conquest on you, and that just means that they’re using other facilities names as keywords, you’re allowed to do that. You want to do enough branding to protect your name, not so much that you’re wasting your budget on a meaningless search.

Josh Weum:
Kathy mentioned mental and telehealth search volume that continues to rise acutely the same way alcohol treatment does. So if we haven’t embraced telehealth, you know, there could be another pandemic a year from now. We don’t know. You know, that kind of thing can disrupt the world again. If it does, you want to be leveraged in things like digital marketing and telehealth to help offset losses in the best, you know, best of area.

Josh Weum:
Ad extensions are extremely important. I have to say a lot about that. That gets kind of nerdy landing pages. So we did talk about that key points. We showed a few of those. Google wants people to have relevant experiences. If you send them, you know, I’m looking for alcohol rehab and I send them to my main page that talks about detox and heroin rehab and, you know, aftercare and all that.

Josh Weum:
It’s not going to be good. We’re going to spend more for that click if Google sends a heroin treatment ad to a heroin treatment page, we pay a lot less for that click. So landing pages are critical, but Google wants to make sure they’re giving people the right experience little things like in verification. They’re doing a new thing where they’re checking everyone’s business credentials outside of legit script credentials.

Josh Weum:
So, you know, little admin, things like that are important to keep an eye on. Obviously, things that most vendors do very well that’s included keyword match types and negatives. And that the thing I don’t see enough of is negative keywords things like free discount. You know, if you’re not looking to offer free treatment, it’s a good idea to put a robust slate of negative keywords in place.

Josh Weum:
And then lastly, conversion tracking, is this absolutely critical in this industry? Everyone’s worried about cost per admit, admissions, lead, cost. These are all things that are very important to track. We want to track from the click how many of those became leads, calls and forums, how many of the contact forms became actual valid leads. How often are those phone calls converting you mentioned, you know, we have a lot of experience working with call centers and call scripts and things like that to make sure these calls are handled properly.

Josh Weum:
If you’re paying $150 for every call that you bring in from a Google ad for addiction, it’s imperative that the people at, you know, handling those calls are doing so effectively.

Stewart Gandolf:
I don’t know. Can you guys hear? I’m hearing some of the bike thumping or some feedback. I’m not sure what’s happening here there. So I don’t know how that will go. I assume the so one thing I want to add up on this is as well the to Josh’s comments is that are our paid digital team led by Garrett and others that are on that team, they love just cutting the fat and then take on a new client that’s, you know, going back to like keywords matched by apps or on the landing pages or extensions.

Stewart Gandolf:
Usually there is in our opening weeks working with the campaign and opening months. It’s just it’s usually so much fat. It’s really important because money can just blow through. It’s amazing how fast you can blow money by or spending on Google. So for example, like you were saying, free or cheap or jobs and careers. And that’s the simple stuff.

Stewart Gandolf:
But there’s, you know, hundreds or thousands of variations and negatives that we work with all of our different campaigns.

Josh Weum:
You should have no less than 1500.

Stewart Gandolf:
Yeah. Yeah. So over time that we’ve learned they’re just, you know, a loser in terms and going back to the, you know, the conquest and being conquest. So those are really important decisions and it’s really easy. A lot of times, you know, sort of Google ads, amateurs will make themselves look good by just buying in a bunch of branded terms.

Stewart Gandolf:
Anyway, happens all the important you periodically check how you’re showing up and when you should use that ad and when you shouldn’t. It’s really getting actually granular with the tool because sometimes you might be running ads and you know, after you’re showing out another one and it’s really there’s no it’s uncontested. And so there might be some presence there, but other times there might be four or five people competing on your name.

Stewart Gandolf:
It’s like, Well, do you want to be there or not is what I always say. So yeah, I hate it. It’s, you know, annoying, but I want to be there, you know, because everybody else is there. You’re not for your own man. That’s a problem.

Josh Weum:
You’re forced to protect it.

Stewart Gandolf:
Yeah, for sure.

Stewart Gandolf:
Geofencing.

Josh Weum:
Geofencing is a fancy term, but it really just means, you know, targeting a geographic area around a certain point. We’re able to, for example, if we wanted to target a large area around a music festival, for example, we could do that. We could we could say we want to be a mile around this point and we want to show a specific type of ad during a specific time of day for that, you know, concert or ballgame or whatever event or conference or whatever we wanted to target.

Josh Weum:
So you can be very intentional and specific with the area that you’re targeting and the messaging that goes into the ads that hit those people in that small targeted area.

Stewart Gandolf:
So thank you guys. That was awesome. So I’m going to switch and take a little bit of SEO. And by the way, for those of you who don’t know me, I, I love this stuff. I mean, I grew this company was back when we were first founding it back in the day as we built this country on SEO and paid search.

Stewart Gandolf:
And to this day I love I’m still a geek I mean I was long term a brander and a direct response marketer before, but I still love this stuff. So just a quick couple of thoughts about SEO, which we’re already 44 minutes past the hour here. But SEO, as you may know, if you’re in the addiction market there is May 2020 was a huge update to the algorithm and so you have Samsung you have this algorithm updates where they’re taking treatment centers and pushing them down especially the ones that are have a bunch of spam on their website or some of them that did a lot of you know questionable and leaking strategies so for content and

Stewart Gandolf:
for linking for authority, I should say, on the organic side and on the page here, but especially organic that Google takes this very seriously because they feel like misinformation is bad and then they but in health care control people. So they really want to make sure that they’ve got the best possible quality. So it’s there is many, many, many, many different centers took a hit.

Stewart Gandolf:
And if you think about with Samsung being at the top, that immediately took you out to number one position that’s obviously can have an impact on the numbers. Right. And that’s something that we can’t fix. There’s no solution to that. So that way path forward and it’s a thing we talk about a lot is content, content, content I mean, there’s all the technical things we can do for our clients as well you need to do.

Stewart Gandolf:
But it’s and that’s a given. But at the end of the day, strong content and right has the way to go and addictions how to unfortunately you know, sort of on again off again relationship with Google and those reasons why of course. So anyway so that’s the ACLU and addiction is a challenging field. You know when we work with our clients and with your own business as well, whether we’re doing and you’re doing with somebody else or however but it is important to audit the website and to look at from many different points of view.

Stewart Gandolf:
So when we work with our clients who are typically working at, you know, extensive extensive reporting on, you know, all of the things that matter for example, navigation, the content, the linking, the quality internal linking blogs, the more content there is dozens and dozens of factors that matter, and there’s hundreds of other factors that matter a little. So there’s a whole lot to this.

Stewart Gandolf:
This is a very specialized area of Expertize you know, for and this is something that and what’s difficult about this is it’s really hard to know talent unless you’re from this category because there’s a whole bunch of posers sadly in SEO, our team, I was thrilled when I was able to hire some of our really most of our associates came from the leading guy in SEO the leading sort of godfather of snow.

Stewart Gandolf:
But it’s really, really important to make sure whoever you’re working with has the knowledge and real understanding hands off it’s really cheap and it’s some magic tricks you probably have to learn first fit because it’s really just lots of really smart people doing lots of stuff to make it work. The I alluded to a minute ago, there was really some different ways of looking at SEO.

Stewart Gandolf:
Again, there’s a technical set of navigation structure and URL structure internally and externally, duplicate content and the speed and performance of the site, semantic markup and schema. These are all things that are sort of essentials for us here, and that’s just the beginning. But everybody focuses on that. That’s really vital. But then also on the content side. So the content is really at the end of the day, what Google wants is content, and Josh worked there, but I’ve been to the Google campus many times and you know, they’re passionate about content, quality, satisfying the users.

Stewart Gandolf:
If their machine starts serving up content, people don’t want Google loses billions, right? So they really really want good content and a great user experience. So the it’s all about having content. And typically when we work with clients, initiative this as well as we think about both, we’re working on the technical fixes. What’s on a big site can take a year or two.

Stewart Gandolf:
They can be you know, a lot of our sites these days have hundreds and hundreds or thousands of pages. There’s a lot to be done to clean up messes that are left over and there tends to be website flow. And then on the content side, what we often do is look at other opportunities to leverage what we already have.

Stewart Gandolf:
One of the things is there are some providers out there in the addiction sort of SEO world where it’s all about just writing blogs. And before we start writing blogs, our recommendations up 2001, which talk about how can we get to you know, you may have, you know, dozens or hundreds of blog posts that are showing up. There could be sort of a lot better if we just did a few things to them.

Stewart Gandolf:
So how can we get some quick points? How can we make something from page two to page one? How about some of the bottom page one of the top positions? How can we do a ton of linking to promote our services there’s often an enormous opportunity of the content you already have. And then, of course is creating new content in a very strategic way.

Stewart Gandolf:
And it’s also funnels designed to be converting. So, you know, when it, you know, if you really want, I’m sure you could write every show at number one by writing, you know, Best Addiction Treatment Center on Mars that probably won’t help you. Somebody searching for that, right? So me, it’s really important to think through strategically what your content is, what’s the content strategy as well as the technical for that.

Stewart Gandolf:
And it’s not easy today. You know, most of the people we see in this marketplace have very mature sites. There’s lots to work with. There’s lots of insane amount of competition. But those are the levers you have Josh alluded to GMB, Google Profile, Google Maps, four places, Google, whatever. But the thing here is that the most don’t realize that there’s a whole different algorithm for Google Maps slash profile, slash my business.

Stewart Gandolf:
And it’s really comes down to relevance proximity and prominence. Those are the three things. So how relevant to the searcher, how close to the search are and how prominent are you in your field? So they tend to recognize bigger business more also it’s really, really important to make sure that you have an incredibly robust profile, everything you possibly can put in the profiles to your advantage.

Stewart Gandolf:
You also want to make sure that you have respond to reviews and get more reviews is better, good reviews is better, and responding to reviews is better. So this is a whole area we can do and have done and we’ll do whole webinars and just Google Local. So we’re not going to talk about that right now and more of that, but just recognize it’s a whole different game.

Stewart Gandolf:
Oh, another thing that’s going on now as well, ranking main site will help your local search because. Well, the other thing that’s important to recognize back in May 2015 I think today was May 16. I remember talking about this is in the news if you’re a tech nerd mobile get and that was when Google first came back and said we’re going to prioritize Google mobile and our mobile searches.

Stewart Gandolf:
I remember reading about this the guy who was the head of that was doing it was put his lap top the way that all of us searches on mobile imagine that back in 2015 what an experience that is I was just awful on mobile so now mobile getting turned out to be sort of a tsunami that had a three inch flag.

Stewart Gandolf:
It wasn’t a big deal at first, but it’s been growing and growing and growing. So the changes are minor first. But now mobile first is absolutely where you know and it turns out roughly two thirds 70% of searches we see for addiction treatment are on mobile. So mobile is hugely important every step of the way in terms of showing up on Google, in terms of user experience, in terms of converting, you just have to think through about mobile.

Stewart Gandolf:
It’s essential the you know, again, as I mentioned just a minute ago, the Google Maps or the Google business profile and there to change that again, Josh, and tell where James Mara so the sorry about the Google and your main website work together. Another thing we talk about a lot with the local is getting consistent name, address and phone number across directories you may be familiar with this.

Stewart Gandolf:
So it’s important to the Google my business school profile. Our business profile are vital, but there’s also hundreds of other directors who want to dominate. And this is the kind of stuff that I always joke people on our team. The fact that Sonya is co-leading us as heads up this effort on our team, they’re quietly working in the background, toiling away at our clients, you know, no appreciation.

Stewart Gandolf:
I don’t even understand what she does, but it’s important. This is an important stop to get all this right so thank you to Tony for leading that effort for our clients. Our voice search was on here to one other thing. Voice search is really we’ve been talking about that now for two or three or four years finally. But it’s really becoming a big deal and, you know, it’s one of those things that as people get more used to it, they start using it more.

Stewart Gandolf:
And so designing your website and that they choose and your GMB and all these different profiles to consider local services. And given that most people are underrepresented and thinking path and we’ll talk about advertising. Yeah.

Kathy Gaughran:
So as I mentioned in the beginning, it’s important to have a level of push and pull. And with the Internet being just crammed competitive it’s important that you’re looking at other opportunities to push your message to layer that that opportunity. So media really falls into two categories push and pull and pull marketing as being king of the Hill when people are looking for you.

Kathy Gaughran:
So that’s essentially being having good ranking with your website, having the appropriate search strategy in place. Push is pushing your message when they’re not. So that tends to be your traditional some of the digital content delivery networks that we can use as a push strategy. You want to have a layer of each, so you’re capturing the audience who is looking for you.

Kathy Gaughran:
As Josh said, we do a lot of research on our clients out of the gate, and one of the things I see every single time is 70 to 80% of their traffic is coming from branded searches, which is people who already know who you are. So it’s really important that you’re driving more of a message about what you do and reinforcing that brand.

Kathy Gaughran:
So it’s not just just brand and traffic that you’re getting. And then also your tracking and analytics are critical. It’s important that you don’t have your traditional media and your digital media siloed so that they’re not communicating with each other. Traditional media is a lot harder to track but you can build in attributions that make sense in terms of timing.

Kathy Gaughran:
You can look at spikes in traffic to the website that coincide with the time that the spots aired. There’s devices you can put on the site that bring attention to that visual that they saw that prompted that response in the first place. So look, to have a strong media buyer who knows how to buy media, and we’ve been relying on one that we’ve had for years, and there’s a lot that goes into the research and campaigns set up so that you’re you’re learning off of the experience of others.

Kathy Gaughran:
So. Stuart.

Stewart Gandolf:
Right. So as we swing into the homestretch here, the where to cover very briefly some key topics and obviously we have more webinars we can do in the future. So let’s do this just a couple of quick thoughts. Number one, on B2B. So most addiction treatment centers have business development teams. What I find is they often have this the business development team is responsible for while the larger territory they can ever possibly talk to service.

Stewart Gandolf:
So one of our clients Midwest hires ten people to service the entire Midwest. I mean you’re talking OK we’re like you’re off campus meet every high school counselor, every college counselor, every parole officer, every judge, every LCF, WNYC, you know it’s like you can’t right. The government, the courts, all these different places. So as they share, they tend to focus on the larger opportunities and, you know, but even still, it’s really, really difficult.

Stewart Gandolf:
No, by the way, it’s not like you’re alone in Kansas. There’s a whole bunch of other boards out there competing for the same business. So one of the things we talk about is, you know, obviously the most efficient centers are so strongly about a strong teams, but they fail to realize that you can give them air cover with or air support with marketing.

Stewart Gandolf:
And so what we often are recommending to our clients are and helping in that are, for example, marketing automation campaigns, creating specific campaigns by niche, by area, supporting the wraps as though it’s coming from the right part now. Good old fashioned hard. Now, you know, I’ve said back in the beginning of my career, I guess I’m guessing I did about a half a billion pieces and now certainly is a sexy and certainly as a topical.

Stewart Gandolf:
But it still works. In fact, in many ways it works better than ever because nobody’s willing anymore compared to the old days page. Social and problematic or unique and the little ad sign with the fingerprint here. The point of this is we can actually, depending on the client and campaign target people on a one on one basis as they travel on the Internet.

Stewart Gandolf:
So through all these methods, you can actually have a realistic teaching marketing campaign to make your business development reps far more successful. The we’re going to be and not be as we were last time and Cathy wanted us to put the cited because it was the kind of thing where people just to by and just look guys.

Kathy Gaughran:
They started.

Stewart Gandolf:
Doing it. So we are bragging about it. But there’s a point here, right? It not be for example, there’s a whole bunch of other addiction centers that are there and the booth matters. So this is just an example of once you create a brand, communicate this everywhere and we communicate this on our website, which we take this in our presentations, which we mentioned this in our eBooks.

Stewart Gandolf:
So as you start thinking through how to stand out from the BS perspective, we want to Cathy, can you do the two minute version of forum conversions?

Kathy Gaughran:
I absolutely can. Yeah. So this is really the the defining moment. We’ve we’ve built our brand. We have found the right people. We’ve driven the phone call or the inquiry. It’s critical that you have the right people in place to convert the calls. I’ve often said I look at a center like an upside down pyramid, balancing on the end of the finger of the people answering your phone.

Kathy Gaughran:
And a lot of the addictions centers that I have visited have phone teams and a dedicated boiler room, and they’ve got their leaderboard and everything’s focused on conversions and probabilities but you know, when you really listen to the people on the calls and many of these people are addicts themselves in recovery or they are clinical and they’ve got lots of experience, but it’s really important that you get in lockstep with that caller that they feel like you know them, that you’re embracing them, and they feel comfortable enough at that transactional moment to make a decision to choose you.

Kathy Gaughran:
We know if they don’t get into treatment, their only outcome is hospitals, institutions. And so I like to sit very strongly in this position to make sure that if they are in fact trying, that you’re trying as hard as they are to find a way to get them in.

Stewart Gandolf:
Very good subject for another yet another webinar. So I’m going to.

Kathy Gaughran:
Talk about that for a long time.

Stewart Gandolf:
I’ll bring this home. I think, just for the sake of time, the last thing that’s really vital is analytics. And certainly, you know, if you’re working with a professional firm, you should be having a dashboard that you can see the results on a 24 hour basis. You should be able to listen to the actual calls and call traction with appropriate help.

Stewart Gandolf:
And I’d say one thing that’s exciting is we’re seeing more and more clients want to go to the next step and actually integrate with their CRM. So that’s gets more complicated because tracking leads and increase is really vital. Being able to track that back to actual patients. This is not simple. This is difficult, expensive, requires great programing skills, and it’s not 100% accurate, but it’s better than guessing.

Stewart Gandolf:
So there’s two ways of doing this. We can track things on the front end in terms of inquiries, and then what we oftentimes will do with most clients is go back and sample calls and do the best we can to come up with reasonable estimates. So, for example, in addiction having done this multiple times with humans, going back to most of the calls, we usually see around two thirds to 70% army patients.

Stewart Gandolf:
So there’s always going to be, you know, people looking for a job where very few callers or, you know, I don’t know, whatever, but these are around two thirds. 70% are going to be first time they’re followers so then the question becomes, once we do beyond that is, OK, how many commit, convert, or how are we offering it and working closely with clients to make some reasonable estimates to afford integrating with CRM as the gold standard.

Stewart Gandolf:
It’s just harder, but we are seeing more clients interested in that and that’s great news. So we are just about almost exactly at an hour. Jake, Josh and Cathy, any final words? And I know you guys have some questions for people both during and currently. What do you want to cover here?

Kathy Gaughran:
Yeah, I actually have a question that was posted, which is how to determine a digital media budget. Josh, I’ll pass that to you.

Josh Weum:
Yeah. Honestly, in this space there are a number of factors and that’s what anyone’s going to tell you, but I’ll speak specifically to the main ones. The first, the competition in your area. If you’re in Maine and you have a treatment facility versus Florida, that’s going to be a big factor in determining your budget. You know, costs are different in in certain markets and they can be wildly different.

Josh Weum:
So you might pay half what you do in Florida if you if you have a treatment center in Montana, geographic location is obviously critical if you’re in the city and you know, you’re targeting a very heavy populated area, that’s going to be a little tougher competitively. Cost per click can vary wildly. That business development that you might have on the ground is going to be a big factor.

Josh Weum:
If you’ve got good based in one county, you may need to spend less there because you’ve got that attraction the services that you offer as well. Or and if you’re if you’re offering detox, if you’re offering telehealth, you know, your budget can be a lot more robust. So it really depends on the services and the treatment that you want to focus on, the competition that you have in the areas that you want to target and grow in.

Josh Weum:
And the, you know, the costs associated with advertising in those in those markets. So the easy question, I would say, you know, if in addiction a cost per call in a heavily trafficked state like Florida, it’s usually between 150 and $200. So if you’re looking at that as a lead in converting, if you have great phone work, maybe one 10th of those you know you’ve got to extrapolate those costs.

Josh Weum:
If you’re looking for two admits a month it can be five to seven K for a network if you’re looking for out of network governments that that cost.

Stewart Gandolf:
Goes up a little bit.

Kathy Gaughran:
Okay. Thanks for that Josh. I think that’s all the time for questions that should conclude our webinar today. Thank you all so much for attending and we look forward to seeing you in San Diego again.

Stewart Gandolf:
Thanks.