Mental Health Marketing Ideas Worth Noting
More than 50 million people in the U.S. have a mental illness, but only about half of them receive treatment. Encouraging people to seek the treatment they need and deserve is a huge goal of mental health marketing. But marketing mental health services isn’t simple. How do you attract people’s attention with a sensitive and persuasive message that doesn’t reinforce stigma?
Content Journey specializes in mental health marketing. We know how to connect you with the people who need your treatment services most, and our track record in mental health marketing proves it.
This post provides some mental health marketing ideas to help you get creative and consider what might work well for your treatment center.
Digital Marketing for Mental Health Services
Your expertise in your treatment center and clients is critical when determining the digital marketing tactics you’ll want to use for your mental health treatment center. Each tactic has its own benefits, so the best approach is what’s most likely to appeal to your audience.
At Content Journey, our original research tells us that the best approach to digital marketing is a mix of tactics. So, consider the options below and how they might best apply to your ideal audience.
Helpful Service Pages
You can’t compromise when it comes to having a helpful website. You must have an online home base where people can learn more about your center and your services. Having helpful service pages on a well-optimized website means it will be easier for people to find when they’re searching online for treatment options.
If you want to know more about optimizing your site, check out our post on simple SEO solutions to propel your website traffic.
Shadow Mountain Recovery Centers in New Mexico have an attractive website that’s easy to navigate and learn about their programs, treatment centers, the types of therapies they offer, and how to start treatment. They also provide open, transparent information about insurance coverage and payment, which may be a barrier for some people needing treatment.
Informative Blog Posts
Thousands of people search online for mental health-related information, which makes mental health blogs worth the effort. Your blog is where you cover topics relevant to your audience and help provide them with the accurate information they need. While serving their information needs, you become a trusted resource to them, making them more likely to return to your site to learn more about your center.
While not a treatment center site, Verywell Mind is likely to pop up in just about any mental health or wellness topic search you do online. Why? Because they cover a ton of topics related to trends in mental health and serve their audience in a casual, informative way.
Your treatment center probably won’t want to cover some of the topics Verywell Mind chooses to address, and that’s OK. The most important thing is to display depth and expertise in the areas related to the treatment you provide.
Establishing expertise and authority is something Verywell Mind excels at. Notice that they have a review board of professionals that vet every post. They list them with photos and bios on their website.
They also tell the reader on every post who the writer was and what mental health professional reviewed the content. This approach helps the reader feel more confident in the accuracy of the material and establishes expertise and authority with search engines.
Think about it… what topics should you delve into more for your treatment center? Even if you don’t have a huge staff or they don’t have the time to dedicate to writing, could you outsource content writing to get more depth on your site?
Also, what could you do to get the mental health professionals at your center on your website more? Could you include photos and bios? Photos of them working with clients (whose identity is protected in the visuals)? Have them write or review blog posts with a byline? What about quoting them in blog posts or featuring them in video messages on your site?
Helping potential clients feel connected with the professionals at your center and see them as experts worthy of their trust is a win. How could you help build that relationship in advance?
A Relationship-Building Newsletter
Speaking of building relationships, there’s no better way to stay at the top of your audience’s mind and in regular contact with them than an email newsletter.
More than 91% of adults want emails in their inbox from companies they spend their money at – including their mental health treatment center.
And research shows that email marketing has a high conversion rate of 66% and is 40 times more effective in gaining new customers than social media.
In short, email is worth the effort.
Check out our post on the topic if you want to know more about why you should use email marketing for your mental health treatment center. Then think about how an email newsletter or other email marketing approaches might benefit your treatment center.
You can use your email newsletter for various purposes. The All Counseling newsletter starts with a tidbit on mental health or wellness in the introduction. Then the newsletter often promotes a speaker, webinar, or other training opportunity, followed by sharing the most recent content on the All Counseling blog. This type of content can apply to a wide range of people with various mental health concerns, although you may want to be more targeted with your messages, depending on your treatment center’s focus.
Speaking of All Counseling, they offer one of the most impressive therapist directories out there. It lets you search by location, specialty, treatment modalities, therapy types, insurance accepted, communities served, and a ton of other specific needs.
While a directory like this might not work for your treatment center, think of interactivity. People like to be able to participate online, not just read. Consider whether you could provide a checklist, quiz, fill-in-the-blank, or other interactive feature on your site that might help lead visitors to the answers they need.
Images that Inspire Comfort
People want to know what treatment might look like if they take the next step. Seeing what they will experience helps lessen the risk of commitment. They can rest assured that when they arrive at your treatment center, it won’t look like some stereotype of a mental hospital from the movies, which is a fear they likely have in the back of their mind.
Integrative Life Center in Nashville does an excellent job of using professional photography on their website to show what various aspects of residential treatment look like at their center. Even if you can’t hire a professional photographer to take photos with models, simply showing people what your facility and counselors look like will help ease their concerns.
Lead Magnets for Value
Don’t sleep on lead magnets when marketing for your mental health treatment center. Lead magnets are powerful tools to help educate your audience, gather addresses for your email list, and build your treatment center’s authority.
A mistake people make with lead magnets is assuming they must be e-books. E-books are just one (substantial) example of a lead magnet. They don’t all have to be that in-depth or take as many resources.
Instead, think about worksheets, quizzes, checklists, and handouts. What could help potential clients work through some of their concerns or lead them to understand whether they should seek professional help? Remember that the knowledge you find common isn’t to them. How can you helpfully unpack your expertise?
This emotional wellness checklist from the National Institutes of Health is an example of the type of lead magnet you could provide your audience online.
Let Content Journey Enact Your Mental Health Marketing Ideas
Chances are there are many more mental health marketing ideas available to you than you’re aware of, and implementing a mixture of them will help grow your mental health treatment center. Content Journey understands the importance of mental health marketing and doing it right to reduce stigma and encourage treatment. That’s why we follow our guiding principles and apply our educational expertise in all our mental health marketing. When you’re ready to make your mental health marketing ideas a reality, we’re here to help. Contact us, and let’s chat
