Drug Rehab Marketing Lies – Have You Told Yourself These?

Discussing drug rehab marketing liesThey float around marketing departments and eventually become accepted as true. But they aren’t. We’re talking about drug rehab marketing lies. Left unchallenged, they fester and wreak havoc on your marketing budget and ultimately, your admissions.

In its experience of working with hundreds of addiction treatment facilities across the country, Dreamscape Marketing has observed many facility operators taken in by various drug rehab marketing lies. Here is the most common one we hear:

“Does Anyone Need Professional Web Developers Anymore?”

The temptation to do it yourself with a website can be enormous. After all, web development software is readily available for designing your own website. There’s Hubspot, Wix websites, GoDaddy, free website builders, and even your sister-in-law’s web developer friend who wants to help you out because he’s “in between” jobs right now. All of these options promise to help you save “lots” of money on web development. Unfortunately, this is one of those drug rehab marketing lies that will likely cost you far more in the long run than it could ever save you.

With any addiction treatment website, credibility is paramount… but there’s even more to it than that. It must also be visually dynamic, intuitive in its construction and persuasive in its content. Consider the following components of a professionally designed and created website for your detox or rehab facility… it’s unlikely that your sister-in-law’s web developer friend can deliver all of this:

A customized design from trained web development specialists

Some amateur web designers try to look legitimate by using templates that have been designed by professionals. The trouble is that these templates are often simplified designs that look like many other websites already out there—that’s definitely not going to set you apart from competitors. Professional web designers are highly trained individuals. Most probably have hundreds of websites under their belt. In the best-case scenario, a web designer receives support from the full force of an experienced digital marketing firm.

A marketing firm and its design team work carefully with you, bringing their experience to bear on how your new website should look, or how your existing website needs to be rebuilt. Perhaps you need a more streamlined design, better navigation or more features like video and 360° views of your facility’s campus. In Dreamscape Marketing’s experience, websites also need much more original content than they have now, which isn’t something a web designer can do. Drug rehab marketing lies often involve the idea that websites don’t need to be dynamic, which is certainly untrue.

A do-it-yourself website builder offers only very limited and inflexible options for your website. In addition, if you hire a web developer who has no working knowledge of the complexities of the addiction treatment field, this person brings little to the table. While you can save some money on the design of your website, you will probably lose enormous revenue as a result.

A visually dynamic web design

Nothing—absolutely nothing—can take the place of excellent design and navigation on a website. At the dawn of the internet, you could put up a website with a very basic design and it didn’t matter a great deal. Some drug rehab marketing lies would have you believe this is still the case. It’s not. Now, such a move would be unthinkable.

People searching online for an addiction treatment facility have landed on literally thousands of websites in their lifetimes. Expectations are now extremely high for what a website should look like and what it can deliver. It needs to load extremely fast, have no crowded text or loud, obnoxious colors and it should be pretty obvious how to look for things on the page. A professional web designer knows this and can deliver a website that’s clean in appearance and geared to help individuals navigate through it easily.

Full SEO compliance

A website that doesn’t maximize SEO (search engine optimization) is a website that isn’t even worth keeping online. If your website isn’t SEO-friendly, it’s unlikely anyone will ever even find it. The better your SEO, the higher your website ranks. This means more likely prospective patients will find you when they’re searching for an addiction treatment center.

Full webmaster services & responsibilities

People who have never designed a website often think that once it’s been designed that most of the work is done. Nothing can be further from the truth. In fact, a website is never really done. It’s continually evolving, or it should be. Without constant maintenance, websites grow stale and appear out of date more quickly than many people would imagine. A professional web designer will keep your website current by incorporating the latest technological innovations.

If you aren’t a designer, it’s hard to fully appreciate the importance of excellent website design. Remember, however, that this isn’t a question of aesthetics. A poorly designed website damages your reputation, your image and ultimately your bottom line. Therefore, when it’s time to build (or redesign) your website,  get help. It’s always best to leave it up to web development and SEO professionals.

Drug Rehab Marketing Lies – Don’t Be Taken In

Don’t beat yourself up over being taken in by drug rehab marketing lies. It’s only natural to assume that something is true when it seems somehow logical or some marketing professionals tell you it is. Sometimes they know what they’re saying isn’t true, other times they believe the lie as well… probably just because some marketing professional told it to them. Once ingrained, people stick with it… repeating it to others so that the lie can live on.

This is one tradition your addiction treatment center can do without. Stop buying marketing lies. Like a bad house guest, banish those lies and everything gets better. Contact Dreamscape Marketing at 888.307.7304 to learn how we can help your rehab center thrive.

Read much more on this subject in Dreamscape Marketing’s new whitepaper “4 Marketing Lies You Could Do Without,” available for download here.