No one wants to be on the receiving end of a promise not kept. And, if you’re the one breaking your promises, you have to be prepared for the consequences. But that’s in your personal life. What about in your work—especially in your addiction treatment content?
Making promises and keeping them is a poignant theme for addiction treatment. As an addiction treatment provider, you promise your clients a safe place to detox from their substance of choice and a foundation to begin their recovery journey. Your patients make commitments to themselves to focus on their recovery and utilize the tools they’ve learned at your center to support a sober lifestyle when they leave. Delivering on this commitment to stay in recovery is something your patients have to choose every day—sometimes every hour or every minute.
The foundation for effective addiction treatment is trust between the client and the clinician, and that trust begins with setting realistic expectations. With so many searches for substance use disorder treatments beginning online, your program starts setting expectations on your website and in your digital content.
Each piece of marketing you create promises something. Whether you’re guaranteeing well-trained staff, top-notch facilities, or innovative treatment options, you’re making a commitment to the people who interact with your marketing that you’re actually providing that.
Why Do You Need Truth in Addiction Treatment Content Marketing?
With the amount of time and effort required to create quality content, overstating the value of an article is common. So how well are you delivering on the promises you make in your articles? Specifically, what about the assertions you make in the mini advertisements that are your headlines and meta descriptions?
All too often, addiction treatment centers unwittingly misrepresent their content with titles and descriptions that are more focused on getting clicks than accurately describing what a potential patient will learn in the article.
We get it—consistently publishing valuable content is hard. After all, a third of marketers say so!1 But overpromising and underselling your articles hurts your program and contribute to unrealistic expectations. Here are four ways bad addiction treatment content can cost you new patients.
1. Killing Your Credibility
How do you feel after someone breaks a promise? Probably a lot less trusting, right? The same concept applies to your articles.
If you say an article is about one thing, you have to follow through. If the content is really about another topic entirely, your clients and their families will notice. Eventually, they’ll feel they were duped into clicking and trust you less.
What may seem like a micro fabrication can also considerably affect your treatment center’s authenticity. More than 90% of people say authenticity is an important factor when deciding what brands to support.2 This applies to healthcare providers even more so than sneaker retailers and coffee shops. If the public finds your addiction treatment content to be disingenuous, they’ll see you as inauthentic. If your content reads as click-baity or without substance, your expertise comes into question. The result? Prospective patients are less likely to trust you.
The perception of dishonesty is a significant blow to any addiction treatment program. Authenticity and trust has to be the foundation of your relationship with your patients and their families.
2. Hurting Your Brand
Human beings dislike inconsistency in their environment. This applies even more so to your brand messaging. Because what’s more inconsistent than a meta description that doesn’t actually describe the article it’s publicizing?3
Always double-check your headlines, descriptions, social media posts, images, and everything in between to ensure that what you publish accurately reflects the content. Any less, and your addiction treatment center will quickly be subjected to some valid skepticism.
We know consistency isn’t always easy. About a third of marketers say writing articles that resonate with their brand is one of the most significant content marketing struggles.4 But you have to create content that draws in prospective patients to your blog while representing the information you’re sharing accurately.
3. Repelling Quality Leads
When you write misleading headlines and meta descriptions for your content, your addiction treatment center will earn a reputation, and not a good one!
In addition to creating the perception that you’re untrustworthy and undermining your credibility with your current patients, being known as a center that engages in potentially deceptive marketing practices can drive away your ideal audience—who can be difficult to attract as it is. Forty-one percent of marketers say identifying quality leads is their biggest content marketing challenge.5
You’re in the business of helping people achieve meaningful, lasting life change. But with the wrong approach to content marketing, your efforts will most certainly be in vain. If nothing else, inconsistency between your marketing and the reality of your program will make it more difficult for patients to trust their care providers at your center.
4. Wasting Your Time
You spend a lot of time on your content! So when you don’t write honest titles and meta descriptions, all your hard work means nothing.
The average article takes about four hours to complete.6 And if your content is being passed over because your audience thinks the article is inauthentic, you’re wasting your time and effort.
Make sure the content you create pays off by being genuine in your headlines and descriptions. Any less, and you’ll miss the chance to harness the full promotional power of digital marketing.
We help you create content that authentically represents your addiction treatment center and highlights the work that your team does to help those needing care. Call us today at 888.307.7304 to schedule a strategy session and get started.
For a list of references, please contact us.