With extreme pressure to fill beds within addiction and mental health treatment centers, today’s direct response marketing efforts require a level of marketing expertise that extends far beyond classic lead generation. Where lead generation focuses on the life cycle point at which patients are ready to enter an addiction treatment program, demand generation begins at a much early stage of nurturing, first attracting, then interacting, managing, closing, and finally retaining. An argument could be made that this sounds a great deal like lead generation. The difference is that demand generation applies strategy and tactics to each stage of generation. Further, demand generation involves sales touch points much earlier in the generation cycle, though such touch points are usually automated, thereby minimizing human resource costs.

As the addiction and mental health industry matures, demand generation stages of nurturing have become paramount to competing successfully within the industry. Marketing directors today are under extreme pressure to meet management’s ROI requirements for every marketing dollar spent. Maximizing marketing spends requires identifying and bifurcating suspects, prospects, leads, and opportunities as well as communicating with each contact type with specialized marketing techniques. As to how opportunities fit within the addiction and mental health industry, we must consider how re-admits would be managed with a CRM. Addiction marketing specialists have to create proprietary systems to properly handle the complex nature of our industry’s sales cycle. Unique workflow systems must be implemented to handling the same patient coming in and out of treatment. With average relapse rates exceeding 60%, retaining patients within an alumni program is essential.

Marketing automation platforms provide the support foundation for demand generation. Platforms like Marketo.com, Hubspot.com, and CallidusCloud.com are paving the way for the future of addiction marketing. Visitor identification and intent, email marketing, channel level campaign management, lead management and scoring, along with CRM integration all support the demand generation funnel. Couple demand generation with lead generation, media buying, and campaign management and you have the foundation for driving and scaling addiction and mental health admissions.

Recovery Marketing Consultants provide complete demand generation services for larger scale recovery operations. For smaller growing addiction and mental health treatment centers, lead generation will be the primary focus, until you have the beds to accommodate a larger influx of admits. In both cases, we have the expertise and experience to help recovery operations meet their growth initiatives.