
Your addiction recovery center does good work for the community. Does it reach that level of excellence in your own digital marketing? Today’s digital marketing best practices, along with an insightful strategy born of deep marketing experience in this niche, can together bridge the gap between you and your prospective in-patients. Knowing how to market a drug rehab center best depends upon connecting what you do with an automated drug rehab leads generation system utilizing 100% targeted organic traffic to your most appropriate site funnel landing page. It also lowers the staggering overhead cost of paid drug rehab leads over time, whether you offer addiction rehab services in a competitive California county or any other part of the country.
Your website is the marketing hub of your business. The goal here is to get authentic candidates for your programs onto your site on a frequent enough basis to allow them to see how you can help them. Today’s internet technologies and protocols already hold all the required potential to create a stronger and wider outreach to your ideal audience for your own addiction recovery center, and in far less time than you probably think! All you need are the right ideas and a little guidance and help in execution.
Learn more by reading our handy marketing checklist below.
A Digital+Offline Marketing Approach Checklist for Addiction Recovery Centers

Optimize your Google My Business listing
Optimize your Google My Business listing (or create a listing first and then optimize it if you don’t already have one)
- The rehab listing needs to be maximized in terms of the entries available. This means filling out visiting schedules and business hours, providing ample photos and videos of your facilities, and using the right niche-relevant, research and transactional keywords in key areas, etc.
Consider running GMB local map ads
2.Consider running GMB local map ads to extend the visibility of your Google My Business map listing in search engine results pages.
- You could duplicate this technique to your other popular search engine map-based drug rehab center lead generation sources as well.
Get listed (and optimized) on the major addiction rehab (or “recovery”) directories
3.Get listed (and optimized) on the major addiction rehab (or “recovery”) directories that offer free listings. Make sure your listings there are optimized for SEO and social media.
Turn your blog into a print magazine for your addiction recovery services
4.Turn your blog into a print magazine for your addiction recovery services
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- Perfect for handing out to local doctors and specialist office lobbies, pharmacies, dentist office lobbies, orthodontist office lobbies, etc. – anywhere health services are provided and free health-oriented magazines are welcome
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SEO-optimize the existing blog for search engines
5.SEO-optimize the existing blog for search engines to drive more targeted traffic to your website. For larger blogs, it’s possible to have a database optimization performed so that minimal cost is expended and maximum shorter-term lead generation value can be achieved (and measured via analytics – more on that further below). You might consider separating out categories for drug rehab center and alcohol rehab center to better build out separate keyword-based lead funnels for better measurement, clearer analysis and more exacting optimization.
Use the most popular B2C and B2C social media platforms
6.Use the most popular B2C and B2C social media platforms to help create instant visibility and drive social signals for your site’s magazine/blog articles. Keep in mind the diverging categories trick just mentioned.
Create the conditions for a lively social media following
7.Create the conditions for a lively social media following so that your articles get noticed easier with likes, comments and shares.
Create click-bait via useful sharing-ready image content
8.Create click-bait via useful sharing-ready image content such as inspirational or helpful memes and infographics that are of value to your ideal audience, those affected by substance abuse and addiction
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- Did you know that infographics are curated more quickly than other forms of content?
- Embedding the infographic or meme into your blog / online magazine content, you’re creating the ideal conditions that encourage curators such as influencers and other online journals and blogs to comment upon and reference (backlink to) your original post/article for better magnification of your existing post’s keyword relevance.
- YouTube videos are a highly-effective example of offsite content that can drive drug and alcohol rehab leads directly into your funnel just by including the page link in the video description.
- One of the biggest mistakes is to use a generic homepage link to your website for funnel-specific materials as in this case. Use a landing page URL as the link to your website and segue it into being relevant to the video, rather than carelessly sending them to the home page to find their own way.
Coordinate your drug rehab PPC lead-gen campaigns with your SEO
9.Coordinate your drug rehab PPC lead-gen campaigns with your SEO keyword optimization efforts. If your analytics is set up correctly, you can have it all go to the same landing page without significant obscuring of the source data.
Cross-pollinate your digital channel campaigns and content
10.Cross-pollinate your digital channel campaigns and content to help them become more effective and gain views and greater overall search engine visibility for research queries on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.
Use Google Analytics conversion dashboards
11.Use Google Analytics conversion dashboards to help you to envision and track your funnel steps towards meaningful conversions like interactive drug rehab lead checklists or PDF downloads, personalized online survey completions, email list opt-ins, click-to-call interactions.
Use Google Data Studio to connect all of your marketing and sales data to your marketing cost data
12.Use Google Data Studio to connect all of your marketing and sales data to your marketing cost data, thus automating how you track costs and marketing campaigns and giving you a better handle on actual ROI. This simple trick allows you to complete the circle with respect to how you understand your marketing over the long tem, rather than getting stuck in magical thinking about “instant leads/sales” or “what worked” by selective memory and other subjective factors.
Use QR codes to connect offline visitors directly into your funnel.
13.Use QR codes to connect offline visitors directly into your funnel. This includes inviting a QR display scan for physical rehab visitors, or a page QR scan for printed article readers, direct mailer recipients and brochure recipients. This ties the lead instantly into your website’s analytics so that they not only register on your Google Analytics as offline consumers of your service but also can establish them as concrete leads via opt-in for your newsletter/blog and CRM. Many rehab centers do not cross-fertilize their computer systems with their website analytics. This is a mistake as most seasoned digital marketing experts will readily explain. It could also be the missing link to your awakening to the power of website analytics for your business!
Action Steps
- Discuss with your rehab center business team and other key stakeholders how your budget and resources could be utilized to materialize the steps to marketing success listed above.
- Review each item for the potential resources you already have that could be called into play.
- Contact Flip180 to discuss how to use a customized application of this article’s marketing strategy to become more visible to the rehab center leads in your local niche so that they can come to you as already relevant, “targeted” conversion-ready leads.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this article on how to leverage your content to gain better overall visibility for your addiction / drug rehab leads funnel. Bookmark this post for future updates! And of course…
Contact Flip180 to learn more about how to best utilize your own content or to create a strategy to create more leads internally, reliably, and measurably.
Related FAQS on Addiction Treatment Center Marketing
How do I deal with drug rehab center marketing restrictions enforced by Google?
For PPC marketing, it’s true there are active restrictions put in place to limit the ways you can advertise services as well as blog in your niche.
- Get LegitScript certified to establish the culture required to avoid Google and other industry penalties from false advertising and related claims in this industry.
- Research or consult a marketing consultant familiar with the niche and the LegitScript policy regulations and the cautious guardrails currently in play for organic and paid digital marketing channels.
- Eliminate all references to opinions on your landing pages for PPC and other paid online campaigns.
- Eliminate any endoresemts, implied or otherwise on said landing pages.
- Do not conflate your blog post articles with your landing pages and vice versa.
- Keep your landing pages focused on the brass tax of your service features and amenities. Ski[ the “benefits” as these can be construed as unenforceable, liability-prone claims.
- Consider Bing and Yahoo for your campaigns as an alternative to Google, as they have been slow to move into policing LegitScript. FOr example,Siri defaults to Bing search results, not Google.
- Realize that even Bing and Yahoo may succumb quickly to LegitScript policy policing due to the recent opioid crisis in the US and elsewhere, and similar emerging crises of drug abuse.