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Tips & Tricks: Modern Marketing Practices for Behavioral Health Companies

Canadian Healthcare Technology Magazine: Organizations making healthcare more effective with connected tech
Canadian Healthcare Technology Magazine: Organizations making healthcare more effective with connected tech
Canadian Healthcare Technology Magazine: Organizations making healthcare more effective with connected tech

December 15, 2022

Tips & Tricks: Modern Marketing Practices for Behavioral Health Companies

The behavioral health market was estimated to be worth around $41 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow exponentially to $66 billion in the next 10 years. This tremendous growth, coupled with the behavioral health provider shortage and increased patient interest in mental healthcare, means that many companies have the opportunity to capitalize on changes and demand in the market. While over 62% of patients are seeking virtual care services, only a handful of companies continue to offer high-quality virtual care. To meet this demand and in turn grow their company, behavioral health leaders should consider focusing their company’s strategic efforts on marketing to enhance provider recruitment, patient acquisition and retention, and their digital experience. To help behavioral health companies boost their mental health marketing efforts, we’ve put together a list of key marketing tactics you can leverage to grow your business, including: 

  • Increasing your market intelligence to build the best digital experience 
  • Managing and boosting your brand’s online reputation
  • Launching and optimizing paid mental health marketing campaigns 

 

All tactics require research, but can be learned and implemented quite easily with the right tools and team in place. 

Increasing your market intelligence to build the best virtual care experience

Understanding your patient base is essential to building successful virtual care programs and services. To get a better sense of what they want and need, we suggest conducting an in-depth investigation to identify gaps in services, learning what the ideal patient experience might be, and optimizing services and programs as a result. You can start by asking your own patients—through post-appointment surveys or program graduation interviews—what they need from their behavioral health providers. Set up recurring surveys that take only a couple minutes to complete, with direct questions that ask about a specific service or program you’re thinking about delivering. Recurring surveys can be set up using Google Forms if staff have the ability to take on additional work, or using OnCall’s post-appointment email tool. For example, a recent survey suggests that more and more patients have voiced the need for personalized subscription virtual services. Patients like subscriptions because they pay once, have pre-scheduled recurring appointments, and are able to constantly connect with their provider over video, instant messaging, or in a way that benefits them. Based on this data, your company can choose to launch new subscription-based virtual services that focus on patient engagement, consistent connection, and a personalized patient experience. Now that you have the data to back up your strategy, you can begin to focus on mental health marketing tactics that help you launch and advertise new services.

How Telehealth can Help

Managing and boosting your brand’s online reputation

Patient behavior has changed dramatically over the past decade. Interestly, over 40% of patients now use social media to vet a provider’s reputation before scheduling an appointment with them. With this in mind, it’s essential to ensure that your social profiles, like those on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, are filled with positive patient reviews and testimonials to help boost your company’s reputation—and patient acquisition potential. After all, patients who read positive online reviews about your company are more likely to schedule an appointment with your providers over those with less favorable reviews. To help optimize your brand’s online presence, we suggest gathering patient reviews and testimonials that you can use across channels, like your website or social profiles. Just like you did to understand your patient base, we recommend sending post-appointment surveys to patients to gather feedback on their provider and appointment experience. This not only shows that you care about your patient, it also helps you address potential gaps in the experience you’ve built. 

It’s not enough that brands just gather feedback, they actually have to listen and act on what patients want. “Creating empathy is a core part of the patient experience,” and it starts “by analyzing reviews, surveys, chats, call transcripts, social media, and support tickets.” We suggest performing a quarterly business review of all patient reviews and testimonials to not only understand your patient base better, but learn how their needs change over time. Start by leveraging OnCall’s Customer Success Team who can help you track key performance indicators and patient feedback. You can also set up a custom analytics dashboard that helps track and aggregate patient feedback so you can analyze outcomes en-masse. 

Launching and optimizing paid mental health marketing campaigns

A key indicator of success for behavioral health companies is the ability to provide effective, personalized care that increases patient acquisition and retention rates. Your company’s online reputation is not the only tactic that affects acquisition; paid ads can also increase your company’s ability to grow. In fact, “77% of consumers search for healthcare facilities on Google and other search engines before finally booking” their first appointment. 

We suggest starting with simple pay-per-click (PPC) ads to get prospective patients’ attention, especially as you continue to build your brand’s online reputation with testimonials and reviews. PPC ads appear at the top of Google search results above all other websites on the page. You can distinguish between a PPC ad and an organic search result because the PPC ad will say “Ad” beside the page URL. PPC ads are especially effective because they appear at the perfect time; when patients are searching for the services your company offers. Make sure to bid on the PPC keywords that are most applicable to your business to cinch the first ad space on the page. PPC ads are a great first step to optimizing your online presence, helping you rank higher in search engine results, and can increase traffic to your website. Another option is to use product and service specific deep-links—also known as unique URLs—that include your chosen keywords to point patients to specific booking pages for new services and particular providers.

Worklow mapping for your behavoiral health organization | Tips and Tricks

Getting started

Learning about new marketing tactics may sound easier than actually executing them. However, our suggestions are easy first steps that will enhance your company’s mental health marketing efforts overall. Start small, continue researching your patient base and industry, and then begin to add tactics as you and your team become more comfortable with marketing language, processes, and goals. You can also reach out to your telehealth vendor for support to set up surveys, analyze patient outcomes data, and learn new ways of using telehealth tools to gather feedback and make changes.

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