As with anything there are trade offs. In baseball you can trade for a power hitter who hits 40 home runs per year but he also strikes out 200 times per year. So do you want 40 home runs at the expense of 200 KO’s? Same happens in marketing. For example, we want users to fill out forms on our website. At the same time we don’t want to get a lot of SPAM. We can put a CAPTCHA on the web form but that sometimes can stop a well qualified lead or inquiry from coming in. Deleting a few extra spam comments is a small price to pay.

Tracking is so important in addiction treatment lead generation and web marketing. In the drug rehab industry tracking can be time consuming. We use software to track the calls and web forms. It is called Call Tracking Metrics. Here’s the challenge when we do call tracking. It requires someone to go in and score the calls. Usually this is the busy admissions person. It is time consuming. It breaks workflow. It can be labor intensive to some but the benefits are enormous.

Many centers think they do call tracking by “counting the calls.” But there is much more to it than that. If you are not doing call tracking correctly then be prepared to see a lot of your marketing dollars leak out the back door quickly.

Web design is another area where there are trade offs. If you are spending upwards of $20K per month on PPC traffic in addiction treatment marketing then you want to make sure you have a website that converts. You can save an extra $5K by putting up a great website that will get found but if it were me I would not only want to b e found I also what the people that come to my website to CALL ME! What makes them call? T-R-U-S-T. (One word) TRUST. It better look great! The logo and identity better look like there was some though and effort put into it. Do you have trust icons on the home page? Do you have insurance icons on the home page? Are the testimonials credible?

So the bottom line is we have trade off’s in pretty much everything in life…..and that is OK. 🙂

While we are all passionate about our businesses there are times when we can hyperventilate over some of the smallest things. Keep in mind that in our drug rehab business we do not typically have people on ventilators or on life support systems. So if something goes wrong and you let us know it will get fixed. The problem is sometimes it does not get fixed as fast as we want.

I’ll share a little story on the importance of priorities and marketing. A long long time ago sometime back in the 1980’s I was a printing sales person for a Chicago based printer and I was based in NYC. I had just broken into a huge account. One of the big record club companies. I sold a project back then that was about $20,000. Not really big but it was a start of what I thought could have been a career making account.

The company printed the project and I flew to Chicago and did the press check to make sure that everything went well which it did until we shipped the project. It was shipped on a Monday and was supposed to be in NYC on that Friday. Friday came and went. Client calls looking for his project. I start sweating. Monday rolls around and no delivery. We call and call the shipping company. No answer on their end, meaning, they did not have an answer for us. By Wed we knew something was really wrong, meanwhile this was probably going to be my last project for this huge client…..and he made sure to let me know.

What had happened was the driver of the truck was arrested by the cops for an outstanding warrant. The truck was parked in the New Jersey Turnpike at one of the rest stops with the printed materials in the truck.

So if you have a graphic that needs to be changed, a few bad phone calling coming in from a wrong number please take a deep breath. We will get to it and we will fix it….it is only drug rehab marketing.