The Treatment Marketing Podcast

9/17/17 hit most treatment providers hard.

9/17 was the day last year that Google Adwords (now Google Ads) went away.

But one treatment network not only survived, but thrived in the absence of Google.

That network was Foundations Recovery Network, and today, one of the architects of its marketing success, Sandra Nikolic, is here to talk all about it.

In this wide-ranging interview we cover:

• How Foundations was able to use the Adwords ban as a catalyst to cement a change in their approach
• Why the unorthodox way they were approaching marketing already set Foundations up to be able to adapt quickly
• How to earn enduring trust online; not just spam people
• The fine line between using emotional appeals to motivate positive behavior and outright manipulation, and how to be effective in your marketing messages, but also ethical

...and much more.

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Continued-money-wastage on social media campaigns that don't work is a dead-horse by now, as far as this podcast is concerned.

But how about call center operators taking calls from the grocery store?

Or "treatment center" owners booking on-site meetings with marketers in locations that end up being fake.

Or the possibility that the high-margins upon which many centers have predicated their businesses are set to go away.

Such anecdotes are just another day-in-the-life of fellow treatment marketer Nick Jaworski.

Nick owns Circle Social Inc, who does multi-channel marketing for ethical treatment centers. I've been wanting to pick his brain about marketing and the state of the industry ever since I read his very smart blog article last year about what most marketers are doing wrong on Facebook.

Facebook is only scratching the surface for Nick, though.

In this wide-ranging conversation, we cover:

• How to (really) run a call center
• How Nick decides if he wants to work with a center (he turns many down)
• The big changes looming over the whole industry, and how to adapt
• His top "pet peeves" that are reliably putting centers out-of-business

If you're an ethical center own who wants to be in business in 2028, this is a must-listen.

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If you're subscribed to this podcast, it's a fair bet you're a business owner.

So, question for you: if you knew for sure something was a complete waste-of-money, would you continue to spend on it?

It defies logic, but that's exactly what 99% of treatment marketers who advertise on social media are doing.

This week's guest is Jan Roos, whose official title around the halls of Admit Scout is VP of Marketing.

In reality, he's a direct-response "black belt", and the co-architect of the system of social ads we now offer to treatment centers.

Things we'll cover in this episode:

• The difference between direct response and brand marketing, and why quite a few small businesses are using the wrong strategy
• The reason the two primary social strategies treatment marketers are using don't work to generate admits
• A breakdown of some real treatment ads we've seen on Facebook, complete with an explanation for why they probably don't work
• The only metric that matters when you're marketing your treatment center

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In treatment circles, Facebook marketing is thought not to work.

It's no wonder.

Ever since Zuckerberg testified in front of congress last April, Facebook has been rolling out a series of "reforms" designed to make the platform more transparent.

The LegitScript requirement is the one getting the most press, but another minor reform was the fact that anyone who navigates to a business' Facebook page can now see all the ads that business is running.

Upshot? We've seen close to 100% of the ads any treatment center or agency in the US is running.

And it's no wonder they don't work. The campaigns most centers are using didn't work for us either, when we tried them.

Sure, they produced Medicare and Medicaid calls. But they produced zero qualified leads.

Then we made some tweaks to our campaigns, and they started producing quality, not just quantity. The thing is, nobody else has changed anything.

To learn more about what everybody else is doing, why it doesn't work, and what to do instead, just listen.

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Before we even talk about what's working to reach treatment clients ethically, we have to remember it's not the same market it was a year ago. It's not even the same field it was a month ago...

In this episode, I catalogue all the changes that shaped what we're seeing today - beginning with the abuses that caused them...

...talk about what's still working in treatment marketing, from a variety of sources...

...and, finally, preview some additional changes coming in the near future.

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"Marketing" is now a four-letter-word in the addiction treatment field:

On one side, you've got the disreputable practices that got the attention of Google, The New York Times, Facebook, and now Congress.

On the other, you've got an industry of marketers not delivering real results.

But it's not like there aren't people out there who need help, or reputable centers ready to give it.

We want to close the gap - to help reputable centers learn to market better, so they can help more people, ethically.

And we'll get there.

But first, we want to dispense with two pet peeves of mine: they're two gigantic misconceptions that are incentivizing all the shady practices, and keeping centers from getting more admits.

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