How to Measure Marketing ROI in Behavioral Health: From Click to Admit

I initially started my career in digital marketing, and I was doing marketing for a company that sold used cars to people with bad credit. Let’s just say it wasn’t a passion of mine. I learned a lot in that space but really wanted to do something that I felt like I could make a difference on.

I have several close friends and family members that are affected by mental health and addiction issues. So that’s initially where it started. I then became the chief marketing officer for a treatment center here in Colorado, and I guess you could say that the rest is history.

I ultimately became a fractional CMO doing chief marketing officer work for behavioral health companies, and I just kept referring out work for digital marketing. In that process, I got exposed to several different marketing agencies in this space.

A lot of the companies were getting up on stage talking about how they could help grow census, or lower costs, or help people grow. But then they weren’t reporting on that. They aren’t saying, “You’re spending a dollar in marketing and seeing X number of clients start.” They were just able to say, “We got your ad in front of this many people,” or “this many people clicked,” or maybe even as far as “this many people picked up the phone.” But they didn’t have the data to really show: this is working, and this is making a significant impact on your business.

I thought, I’m already kind of doing this. So why not create my own agency and use it for good.

What I see most is, honestly, they’ve been burned by other marketing companies. It’s more like, “We’ve been doing marketing, and I don’t feel like it’s working, or I don’t know if it’s working.” They come to me and say, “Can you take a look at this?”

Analytics is the foundation of everything we do. It’s the first step in working with us: we set up a foundation of understanding not just who’s clicking to your website or clicking on your ads, but who’s calling you and what sources they’re calling from.

Which means that we can say (I’ll keep using a dollar) we spent a dollar on marketing last month and we had ten people admit. So we know that, on average, it costs us this much to attract a customer. And therefore we know what we’re getting reimbursed by insurance, and we understand the true return on that investment.

That’s where we go the extra mile. We’re pretty agnostic. We’re not going to come in and make you use our systems. There’s a few that we’re super familiar with and that are super common in the behavioral space.

What sets us apart is we do work closely with admissions teams, or internal CMOs, or marketing directors to say, “What’s going on with these clients?” Usually agencies are just like, “We can make the phone ring, but we’re not going to give you any coaching in that direction.” We go the extra mile to work with folks on creating better conversion rates and really understanding how we can grow as a team.

I see a lot of waste in both ads and SEO, which is kind of why we got into this space. There’s a lot of people spending a lot of money on ads, but they don’t know what the return is, and they don’t know what is working for them and what isn’t.

Same thing to say about SEO. There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors around what’s actually happening and the result of marketing efforts.

We don’t want to be talking about people as numbers or talking about people as money, but there is a business side to behavioral health. If we are helping people grow, and we can prove that with data, which we can and do, then we can serve more people.

That’s where the actual brand and the experts come into play. We like to help good people do great things. We do a full intake where we get mission, vision, values, their clinical services, straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. And then we’re interviewing experts on detailed topics. So we’ve got the performance side, and they have the culture and brand side.

We’ve helped an autism clinic grow from one clinic to five clinics in the past 24 months, and have really seen revenue growth that in turn creates more ability to grow and serve more kids. That’s about 2.7x of revenue in 24 months with an ABA clinic.

We’ve helped a luxury treatment center in Arizona that wasn’t even on the map grow into new markets and new services and new levels of care. Even in the first six months, we’ve seen two, three X growth with them.