Being a mental health specialist means looking out for people who are suffering from a mental disorder or are on a verge of derailed mental health. While catering to the needs of your patients is your topmost priority, the only way your potential patients can trust you enough to reach out to you is if, your practice religiously follows advanced mental health marketing strategies.
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As shocking as it may appear, almost one in five young-adult Americans suffers from one or more mental health disorders that are likely to cause havoc to not only their own lives but also to their loved ones as well.
The history of mental illness goes back to the 1840s, and up until now let’s just say that technology is not the only thing that advanced. While our everyday life is headfast deteriorating our mental sanity with stubborn crises, pandemics, and personal struggles, the need for mental illness awareness campaigns is now greater than ever.
While only a minority of people feel okay with getting help from mental health therapists, there is still a vast majority that either doesn’t know that they need help, feels reluctant to see a therapist, or even worse, gives into the cultural stigma for not wanting to be shamed or labeled as being a patient.
So being a mental healthcare professional, the responsibility to help each one of these individuals falls onto your shoulders & that requires your practice to make its mark.
The following mental health marketing strategies are carefully designed for you to reach out to your potential patients keeping in mind the current and approaching consumer behaviors and technological advancements.
1. The Need For New Mental Health Marketing Ideas
The reason your business needs to resort to new mental health marketing ideas is that everything is advancing at an astounding rate which also means that the methods that worked in the past are no longer functional or practical.
Nowadays when someone goes through something they do not call their friends or bring it up with their partners, instead, they prefer asking Alexa or Siri, or often end up self-diagnosing themselves due to vague symptoms & lack of understanding.
This is precisely why your practice needs to make its way to these people.
Your mental health practice needs an edge to be recognized, and it needs to have an upper hand to stand out and look trustworthy enough. For that to happen you need to showcase your abilities and unique selling points that no one else is offering.
This includes things like
- Telehealth services
- Online consultations
- Teletherapy
- Time flexibility
- Support groups
- Pre-recorded video consultations, etc.
2. Maximizing Consumer Engagement
One of the best & most constructive mental health marketing strategies is to maximize your engagement with your current and potential patients. This means extending your reach to all available platforms.
You can achieve this through content marketing for mental health & visual marketing for mental health services.
Here’s how:
- Be consistent with publishing blog posts on your website.
- Keep your social media updated with new engaging posts.
- Take questions from people through a poll, twitter space, or live Instagram sessions.
- Pre-recorded or live sessions with other healthcare professionals.
- Create an open group on Facebook where people can anonymously post their questions.
Bonus tip for content marketing for mental health:
- Write about things people are most interested in. This can include the most searched mental health questions on google or high-volume niche-related keywords, the most discussed hashtags, or something new that you came across while a session that you think others might be interested in.
3. Optimizing Your Digital Presence with the Powerful 8
The major part of your mental health marketing strategies should be devoted to creating an exquisite, functional, and enticing digital presence and keeping it fully optimized.
Since 90% of the population is deeply invested in their cell phones, that is where you need to create and inhabit your practice.
Rest assured if you adhere to these strategies, you will help your patients find you quicker & gain the desired visibility, credibility & reputation!
- Determine your target audience. Are you directly calling out the patients? Or are you reaching out to someone who wants to help their loved one?
- Create inspiring & helpful content catered to all ethnicities of your targeted age group.
- Update your website content with blogs, podcasts, webinars, e-books & success stories.
- Stay active on the most used social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn & Twitter.
- Religiously reply to all consumer queries.
- Keep an open channel for communication with your current patients.
- Utilize mental health advertising
- Connect with other mental health professionals for joint ventures & awareness campaigns.
4. Taking Charge of Social Media Marketing For Mental Health
There’s hardly anyone left who doesn’t use social media anymore. In fact, nowadays even infants have social media accounts (operated by their parents, of course). So, social media marketing is one of the best ways that you can market your mental health practice.
In addition to the above-mentioned ‘maximizing consumer engagement’ ideas, you can run mental health awareness campaigns.
These campaigns will not only help you create a visible difference but also increase your brand awareness, credibility & resourcefulness.
- To give things a more personal touch, you can introduce your staff, give your personal/professional backstory or go live with healed patients (with their consent of course).
You can also incorporate the latest events & address their effects on mental health. This is one of the mental health marketing strategies where you never run out of things to talk about & are always up to date.
5. Optimizations For Higher Search Visibility
So while you’re hell-bent on making a statement with these killer mental health marketing strategies, you also need to make sure that your website is optimized for all sorts of search engines.
This means that your website should secure top ranks when a user mentions anything related to the mental health services you serve.
You can do this by focusing on
Content Optimization, which means creating updated, informative content or power pages with targeted keywords, utilizing authority links, and producing exceptional visuals, videos, images, and metadata.
- Voice Search Optimization, which means utilizing your content for your consumer’s voice searches/queries/concerns, etc. You can do this by using FAQs, conversational keywords, schema markup & improving domain authority.
- Website Optimization, which will allow your patients to easily navigate around your website without facing an issue with speed, jargon, or UI/UX. Do make sure that your website is user-friendly for mobile phones and tablets as well.
- Local Search Engine Optimization, which means targeting the ‘near me’ searches. The intent behind Local SEO is to cater to the needs of people in your area. Targeting the mental health issues that impact your local community can grab you more concentrated, quality leads.
Read More: 3 Ways to Advance Your Organic Search Visibility in 2023
6. Mental Health Pay-Per-Click Ads
Mental health PPC works best if you have a budget to support it. Since Google and Facebook are the largest platforms to collect user data, you can utilize these platforms to reach highly targeted audiences.
7. Hold onto Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the mental health marketing strategies that give you a great way to stay connected to your patients even after they’re healthy & healed. It allows you to directly communicate with your patients whilst being cost-effective!
You can send them the latest updates about your practice, newsletters, updates regarding live sessions/conferences/campaigns, health pamphlets, etc.
8. Advance Your Traditional Marketing Approach
Even when the majority of consumers are accustomed to using mobile phones, the traditional marketing approach will only do you more good. This is why your mental health ads should also find their way onto print media and brochures.
Depending on your target audience, you can disperse these prints in educational institutes, workplaces, etc.
Along with this, make sure that your healthcare business can also be found in the online directories, Bing, and/or yellow pages.
Lastly, and more importantly, do not forget to optimize your GMB profile for your potential clients.
9. Ensure Capture & Conversion
A major aspect that becomes a turning point while purchasing a product or service is the power of online reviews.
For this purpose, you need to make sure that you encourage your happy & healed clients to leave positive feedback on either one of your GMB profiles, website, or any other online portals or review sites that they deem fit.
Final Words
Know that it is in your hands to educate your healthcare consumers about their emotional and behavioral health concerns, addiction, and anxiety. And only by doing so, you empower them to make informed healthcare decisions.
Lastly, just like any healing process demands patience and consistency, advertising mental health services will also require the same.
Always remember that the key to running successful mental health marketing campaigns is that you need to be consistent & authentic with your mental health marketing strategies and soon you’ll be able to see a visible difference.
Read More: 6 Remarkable Healthcare Marketing Trends You Can Use To Increase ROI
