Marketing Psychology 101 – Pain of Discipline or the Pain of Regret?

This principle could be applied in almost anything in life. The pain of getting an education early in life or the regret later in life of not getting an education, the pain of staying clean and sober or the regret of being addicted or in our case the pain of addiction treatment marketing the regret of having to “double down” on a marketing effort to fill the beds back up.

When you were in high school or college did you ever wait until the last minute to study for the exam? I know I did many times. The pain of discipline of studying a few weeks in advance for the exam was too much to bear, so what did we do? We waited until the night before, talk about the pain of regret! I was the classic student of using this failed strategy year in and year out.

We are now in the 2010 summer and the “party” is on, (addicts are using) meaning treatment center web traffic slows down as it does in December, I know this because I review scores of industry web site analytics every day. While I was at the NAATP annual conference and the West Coast Symposium a couple of months ago business was fairly brisk for many treatment centers even in a very tough economy and this was great to see.

I had several conversations with clients and recommend to them to continue their marketing (pain of discipline) during the flush times to keep the pipeline full. (Better yet create a waiting list). Now, two months later I’m getting stressed clients looking for leads to fill their beds, in some cases it is pure panic. When the beds are empty it becomes even more uncomfortable to spend the money to develop the inquiries that was when thing were flush. This becomes a classic case of pain of regret. Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda.

So instead of waiting until you have beds to fill to do something it is much more effective to put a plan in place and execute on it on a monthly basis. At least 10-20% of your annual revenue MUST go into marketing, online and offline.
For the Pain of Regret Folks – Fastest Immediate Results in Addiction Marketing
Here is the recipe of getting inquiries into beds immediately.

This is might be a little uncomfortable:
Step # 1 Crack open the wallet
Step # 2 Prepare your admissions staff for “incoming”
Step # 3 Set up Google PPC and run ads on Google Adwords (You want traffic, Google has it but it ain’t cheap and it requires professional skills to get it right, while you can get the traffic immediately sometimes it takes months to fine tune PPC campaigns)
Step # 4 Send out an e-mail to your list (if you don’t have a list talk to Josie Ramirez-Herndon of Recovery View who seems to have the addiction treatment’s largest e-mail list of well over 100,000 names) one of the most important marketing concepts you can do is build a list of prospective clients as well as past alumni and target mailings to each. (More on that in another blog post).
Step #5 Get a featured listing on 11,000 + pages of TreatmentCenters .Net and About Drug Rehab (These are addiction treatment pages that are the most relevant to your business)
Step # 6 Buy banner ads on Sober Recovery (probably the most heavily trafficked site in addiction treatment)
Step # 7 Buy Traffic on Google’s Content Network (You can see an example of this on the Google Ads on Treatment Centers.Net .
Step # 8 Call people in your rolodex
Step # 9 Write for Addiction Treatment Publications like http://www.behavioralhealthcentral.com/ and Recovery View to boost your visibility among professionals for possible referrals

There are several more ways to market immediately however these are the first few that come to mind and you can get some immediate results/inquiries over the next 24-72 hours.

In a perfect world we would like a steady flow of clients coming into the treatment center and better yet a waiting list. The way to do this is to build a strong foundation first. I talk about a lot of these techniques in my blog on click the link below in my bio. If you are still stuck in generating leads give me a call and we can come up with ideas together that might fit for your situation. So, I guess the pain of marketing discipline is what needs to be considered so that we have the steady results. Another way to look at it is the more people we can assist in recovery the more people we are actually helping and making the world a better place as well and helping our businesses grow.

Here is a short video from a regular automobile professional guy, Jim Kristoff talking about the Pain of Discipline and the Pain of Regret. A quote from the infamous Jim Rohn, “We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.”