Digital Marketing for Behavioral Health Companies
For behavioral health practices, an attractive, responsive website, engaging content like blogs, articles, videos, and SEO strategies like title tags and meta descriptions are key to reaching potential clients online.
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insights from 98,500+ hours of health & wellness marketing experience
Behavioral health has become one of the most important medical niches in the past decade.
But despite its advances, reaching potential clients and showing them that your practice has experience matching the proper care to the unique needs of individual patients can still be challenging.
So how do you reach the people who need your services?
Today, the answer lies in digital marketing.
Digital marketing is made up of several different strategies that allow you to reach and educate the people who need your help.
Whether that means explaining certain concepts related to behavioral health, encouraging them to contact you, or calling a doctor for help, the goal is always the same: Help the people who need it.
1. Web design for mental health practices
If you want to reach people online, you need to have a website.
Your practice’s website serves as your home base for everything you do with digital marketing.
Every strategy we mention after this one will require you to have a website that serves as a marketing tool. As a result, your website needs more than just information — it needs to be attractive, easy to navigate, and helpful.
This is why web design is so important. It creates the framework for the rest of your digital marketing strategies, and is essential for converting visitors into patients.
Modern web design includes a lot of different principles, but the two most important are navigation and responsive design.
Navigation is crucial because visitors to your site need to be able to find what they want, and they should be able to do so easily.
The most common navigation system today is a header bar with drop-down menus. This system has become intuitive since it’s so widely used, and it’s an excellent way to organize your site’s information.
Responsive design matters because it allows your website to adapt to different browsers and screen sizes.
So if someone’s using a smartphone to look at your site, they’ll have the same great experience using it as a desktop visitor.
Responsive design has become even more important since 2015 when Google (and other search engines) made it a ranking factor for search engine optimization (SEO).
We’ll talk about SEO more later, but it’s important to know that responsive design is important for your site to succeed in search engines.
By combining sensible navigation with responsive design, your website is off to a strong start.
Next, you have to add information to it.
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2. Content marketing for mental health practices
Content marketing is the practice of creating text, images, graphics, videos, and interactive elements for your site that inform your target audience.
Content marketing’s biggest strength is versatility.
If you run a business that helps doctors stay up to date on the latest news related to behavioral health, you can use content to do it.
If you’re an industry expert keeping a blog on behavioral health, you can use content to help your visitors.
Content marketing is so vast that it can be a challenge to figure out where you should start, but these three types will help you build a solid foundation.
Blogs
Blogs are the fastest and most efficient way to add new information to your website.
They’re best used for quick, timely updates about news in the behavioral health industry.
These can include text-only posts, but we recommend adding images and customized graphics for good measure. These will engage your readers more, and keep them on your site and interested in your topic.
Blog posts are also great pages to promote on social media, and they make great headway for your site in terms of SEO.
With all of these benefits wrapped into one strategy, it’s no wonder most major companies make blogging a part of their marketing strategies today.
It’s a fast, effective, and affordable way to promote your business online.
Articles
Articles are similar to blogs in that you use them to inform your target audience about issues that may be relevant to them.
Their main difference is that articles are meant to be evergreen. So no matter when someone reads an article on your site, it’ll provide just as much value as it did the day you wrote it.
Articles are also prime real estate for images, graphics, and data visualizations. These visual elements serve the same purposes on an article as they do in a blog — keeping your visitors engaged.
Engaged visitors spend more time on your page, which Google notices. Then, Google ranks your pages higher in search results so more people can go to them.
After all, if people stay on one of your pages for an average of 10 minutes at a time, you must be providing a really great experience to them.
Or at least that’s what Google thinks — and most often, they’re right. People stay on high-quality websites much longer than low-quality ones. And with well-written, informative articles, you embrace that potential to the fullest.
Videos
Videos are the third format we recommend for content marketing.
Videos can cover just about anything you want, but for behavioral health companies, your best bet is typically to cover topics similar to those on your article pages.
Adding them to your site encourages users to stay on your pages longer, which in turn boosts those pages’ rankings in search results.
Plus, many Internet users prefer to get information in video format over text, since it’s more engaging. Show your users that you’re a modern, tech-savvy company. Essentially, It’s the most user-friendly approach to content you can take.
Who would want to read a page when they could watch a video instead.
3. Search engine optimization for mental health practices
SEO is the process of improving your site, so Google can understand it more easily, and as a result, rank it higher in their search results for searches related to your services.
SEO includes hundreds of different strategies that can all help you beat competitors in search engine results pages, but we’ll cover the three most impactful here.
Title tags
Title tags (<title>, </title>) are the bits of HTML code that tell Google the topic of your page.
For example, our title tag for this page is “Top 3 Digital Marketing Strategies for Behavioral Health Companies.” That’s what shows up in Google and the tab of your web browser.
Then, everything we’ve written under that title adheres to that topic. As a result, this page will most likely rank for searches related to digital marketing and behavioral health.
If we used this page to talk about something completely different — like elephant longevity — Google would penalize this page by pushing it further down in search results.
In fact, they may even choose not to rank it at all, because it could be viewed as deceptive.
Why?
Because the body text of this page wouldn’t match the title tags.
As a result, it’s in our best interest to stick to our title tag as closely as possible. That provides a better user experience, which means Google will rank us better in search results.
Meta descriptions
Meta descriptions are short accounts of a page that show up in Google search results beneath the page’s title.
These descriptions are often in gray text, and they don’t have a direct impact on your search engine rankings.
But they do influence how many people click your page.
If you have an accurate and concise meta description, you increase the chances that someone will click on your site in search results.
That means more traffic, more qualified visitors, and more revenue for your business.
To learn more about meta descriptions, check out this short video!
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WebFX is your digital marketing connection
WebFX is the #1 performance-driven digital marketing agency in the United States.
That means we have more results-driven services than anyone else, and we get the best possible results for each of our clients.
We understand that you need to reach new patients on a regular basis, and we want to help you achieve this goal with digital marketing.
Your success is our success — and with our team of award-winning digital marketers, we’ll help you succeed like never before.
Are you ready to launch your digital marketing strategy?
Contact us today to start!
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Our website isn’t driving enough traffic
Our expert SEO specialists, copywriters, and digital advertisers will help you increase your website’s rankings when your target audience searches for your treatments online, so you can continuously drive traffic and revenue for your practice, hospital, or business.
We’re opening a new location
Set your new hospital, brand, or practice up for future success with a range of digital marketing strategies that get your new practice in front of potential patients or B2B buyers.
We’re not attracting enough patients
Get a steady flow of new patients to your practice, hospital, or brand with expertly crafted strategies that provide a seamless, engaging user experience for your website visitors, encouraging them to become patients.
We have high patient turnover
Offer new treatments or services and need to get them in front of your potential client’s eyes? Our range of revenue-driving digital advertising and marketing services have you covered and reach the people who need your facility the most.
