Because behavioral health marketing helps you reach patients who need care, it’s a critical aspect of your organization. Good marketing makes people aware of the services you offer and tells them, without stigma or judgment, how to access these services. The right business development tools can increase the volume of people you reach through your marketing and help you measure behavioral health marketing responses. Just as importantly, these tools ensure you’ll find patients looking for the help you can provide.
A robust behavioral health marketing strategy includes a combination of tactics, such as social media, high-quality content, targeted information geared towards search demand, and engagement with the public.
Sunwave Health can help you reach your target market with our data-driven software tailored to the behavioral health industry. Contact us online today to learn more.
Do You Know Your Target Audience?
Before you begin measuring behavioral health marketing, it’s essential to understand your target market. People have various mental health needs, and not everyone needs the same support. Think about the patients your facility is designed to treat—their ages, their demographics, and their particular needs—and market toward them. Your target audience may also include families and friends seeking care for their loved ones, so keep that in mind.
What’s Your Mission Statement and Brand?
Your facility most likely has a mission statement and a list of values. The mission statement is a good place to start if you haven’t thought about your brand before. Think of branding as how others see you and what they will remember about your organization. Maybe you want a strong, concise customer-facing slogan that summarizes your organizational priorities. Or your facility prides itself on its role in the local community, and you want to highlight that role. Whatever the features of your brand are, they’ll help you stand out from the competition.
How Welcoming Is Your Organizational Website?
For many potential patients and their loved ones, your website is the first point of contact they will have. An effective website should be current and easy to navigate, and data analytics make it especially important in measuring behavioral health marketing.
Site design should have an appealing visual theme that gives clients a solid first impression. Part of branding is considering aspects of site design, from the fonts, colors, and logo you’ll use to the pictures you put on display. A coherent visual theme also makes your logo and brand instantly visually recognizable.
Marketing also requires a functional website that readily provides pertinent information to users. A strong and functional website will:
- Load easily on web browsers and mobile devices
- Display your specialties clearly
- Explain the details of your services and what patients can expect when they visit
- Be simple and intuitive to navigate
- Offer an easy way to contact your facility or book an appointment
The website should indicate what action you want your audience to take—known as a call to action or CTA. If you want people to schedule appointments, for instance, use headings and/or clearly visible buttons guiding people to begin the scheduling process.
Are Your Campaigns Optimized for Best Results?
Using paid search campaigns can be a concrete, cost-effective way of measuring behavioral health marketing results. These search campaigns include keyword research, which discovers phrases people use when they search for behavioral health services in your area. Including these phrases in your marketing ensures that people find you when searching. You can use search engine optimization (SEO) to rank higher in online searches by tweaking the language, links, descriptions, and other features of your website and the content you produce.
Are People Engaging With Your Content Marketing?
Content marketing is one of the best ways to connect with potential clients. Content is at its best when it focuses on the needs of the people your organization serves, provides the information they can use, and invites them to engage. Below are some common methods of content marketing.
Blog Posts
Blogs provide relevant, reader-friendly content about behavioral health issues. Your blog can tackle answers to questions you frequently receive from patients, for instance.
Social Media Posts
Social media allows you a lot of flexibility but must be updated regularly. Posts could inform people about changes to your practice, introduce new staff members, offer mental health tips, share mental health-related events in your area, or raise awareness about behavioral health conditions.
Engagement with Followers on Social Media
If people reach out to you via a social media channel, you can answer their questions and address their concerns. This form of engagement keeps you connected to the needs of potential patients.
Emails and Newsletters
These target current, former, and prospective patients. Regular emails and newsletters are a great way to build community by staying in touch with people who use your services. They also provide a convenient method of updating patients on new services you offer.
You can pursue every avenue of content marketing or stick with one or two strategies that work well for you. Either way, you’re getting the word out about your facility.
Deliver Quality Results With Sunwave Health
With Sunwave Health’s software platform, you can see how your behavioral health marketing translates into healthy results. As new patients enter your practice, our software platforms capture their information on a single, integrated platform where you can observe the process and measure the outcomes.
Measurable marketing is an essential feature of our platform. You can track your marketing campaigns and referral sources and see how much revenue is coming from each source. This way, you have evidence to analyze how your campaigns are working for you and proof of return on investment. Get started with our behavioral health software by contacting us online or calling 561.576.6037.
