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What Are the Goals of Attending Addiction Conferences?
Addiction conferences preparation has benefits for addiction treatment centers, detox’s, sober livings and ancillary service providers. As behavioral health industry professionals, we are experiencing moments of change in how we operate. However, when attending mental health conferences there are several key areas to focus on to get much-needed business and marketing tools.
There are several goals to bear in mind when attending addiction conferences and networking events. These goals vary depending on the position you have with your behavioral health organization. CEO’s, Executives, Directors and Outreach professionals, by design of their role, have different objectives. However, getting out of your comfort zone can pay great dividends if done strategically.
Addiction Conferences Preparation Generates ROI in 2020
How to perform addiction conferences preparation?
In 2020 the addiction treatment industry is experiencing many different changes in the business and marketing side. It is vital that you walk away with new business strategies, marketing plan ideas, and drug rehab lead generation sources. The behavioral health industry has several critical pain points that CEO’s and Owners are experiencing.
New operational and marketing laws as spreading across the nation thanks to the new “Florida Model” paving the road with their new patient brokering and operational laws as of July 1, 2017. Getting educated on ethical business and marketing strategies at addiction conferences is paramount at this critical time to survive. Some centers that continued with laissez-faire strategies, resisted change or did not seek the proper education and tools have not survived the red ocean. It is paramount for behavioral health organizations addiction conferences preparation to get specific and strategic intelligence.
CEO’s and Executives Focus on the Big Picture at Addiction Conferences
Drug and alcohol addiction treatment centers, detox’s and sober homes owners have a difficult job. They need to focus on the business, marketing and clinical side of their organization. Many addiction executives are strong on the clinical aspects and addiction treatment in general. Most have started their addiction treatment center because of their strength in this area and their passion to help others struggling with addiction. However, this is only 1/3 of what it takes to run a successful center.
When CEO’s and addiction Executives attend addiction conferences their conversations are much different than the conversation of let’s say Outreach professionals. According to the Harvard Business Review article, “Sales People Need a Strategy for Selling to CEOs,” CEO’s are focused on business outcomes, how decisions affect the entire organization and maximizing their time. The upper management Executives have a much wider business education.
They are looking for business and marketing solutions to their pain points:
- effective drug rehab SEO marketing strategies
- substance abuse billing procedures
- collections
- a decent EMR (electronic medical records system)
- admissions processes
- accreditation
- legal aspects
- new revenue sources
- aftercare opportunities
- and many more
They generally are not there to network but to find proven and ethical solutions. They are relying on particular presenters, drug rehab marketing consultants and finding the business and marketing expert leaders attending these addiction professional conferences. They are particularly interested in drug rehab marketing strategies and billing as these are two key areas that generate revenue for the organization.
Directors are Guided by CEO’s and Executives Vision
Directors are also focused on the same areas as the CEO’s and Executives. The difference being is that they put the CEO’s and Executives vision into play. It is vital that they get better educated by the conference presenters, exhibitors a few select attendees that are specialists in whatever is on their plate at that time.
While most Directors in the behavioral health industry have in-depth knowledge in many areas, they need to be experts when leading the company in new areas. They also should be evaluating current procedures and ancillary providers on a regular basis (at the very least every year) to save or generate new revenue. All of these carries great responsibility and consume great amounts of time.
Addiction conferences preparation can provide knowledge and experience from proven thought leaders, This assists drug and alcohol addiction treatment centers, detoxes, sober livings. However, this can be difficult at times because at many mental health conferences there are several presentations going on at the same time. It is impossible for the Directors to be in two places at the same time. Directors need to pick and choose based on their priorities or rely on another employee to attend the other presentation.
Outreach Professionals and Business Development; Obtaining Tools is Critical
Outreach professionals for addiction treatment centers, detox’s, sober homes and service organizations have an extremely stressful position. Unfortunately, the average Outreach position lasts for about 6-12 months. They can no longer just rely on their personal connections. We have seen this on LinkedIn with our 30,000 addiction and behavioral health level one connections. Viewing these LinkedIn profiles while we are growing our tribes it is very concerning. One of the main reasons is this role has traditionally lacked in gaining useful tools to assist them in their daily jobs.
It’s obvious that Outreach professionals are constantly obtaining new clinical knowledge. However, many are not getting the tools on the business and marketing side of behavioral health that are now paramount in their success. They need customer relationship management (CRM’s,) networking tools and strategies, call center training, overall marketing, branding, social media, email marketing, closing techniques and more. Behavioral Health Network Resources provides LinkedIn training for industry professionals. This training grows targeted connection and teaches how to maximize LinkedIn.
Tools for Preparing for Addiction Conferences
Addiction conferences preparation should be providing some of these tools. These tools are essential in their role in generating drug rehab leads. Many owners and operators do not realize that one employee turnover costs about $20,000. Owners and Outreach professionals should aggressively be seeking these tools. Two of the biggest areas are drug rehab marketing and establishing new referral sources.
Addiction treatment center marketing is such a vast area that there are always new strategies and techniques to be learned. One of many examples is business development professionals need to intimately understand the power of social media. How they portray themselves and what they put on social media is a direct reflection of their organization’s brand. It also affects establishing new referral sources. Many are ineffectively, or not using at all the #1 business networking site in the world. They are wasting valuable drug rehab marketing time, or not utilizing their time on LinkedIn.
What is Addiction Conferences Preparation?
In any job, position or role getting out of your comfort zone enables you to grow personally and professionally. This can be difficult because human nature gravitates us towards our comfortable circles. At many substance abuse conferences, you see the same professionals forming in the same groups. Yes, it’s wonderful to chat with our familiar circles, however, it should not dominate your time at these events. Getting outside of the comfort zone, obtaining new tools, business education and forcing yourself to meet everyone in the room is paramount in the state of our industry.
This can be an overwhelming experience and non-productive if you are not prepared. Preparation, maximizing time and follow-up can make the real difference when attending substance abuse conferences. To truly get all the benefits the preparation begins far before the event.
Effective Addiction Networking Starts Weeks Before the Addiction Symposium
With addiction conferences preparation, you should be visiting the conference website. For most, you can get an idea of what organizations will be there. Some event websites only list the sponsors and exhibitors, while others will provide a list of everyone including the attendees.
Examine the list on the event website and write a list putting them into categories like A, B, C, and D. The A’s are the organizations that are new start-ups, organizations that you have been targeting, or ones you must chat with at the event. The B’s are your second tier and so forth. Prepare before you attend the conference. By writing the list and bringing it with you to the event you will not miss any opportunities.
One of the best ways for addiction conferences preparation is to connect prior to the event. Most professionals in our industry do not do this. You should at least reach out to your A’s and B’s through LinkedIn prior to the event. Say you want to visit their booth or meet with them at the conference. This soft introduction says you are a professional and you are interested in meeting them. You will also get an idea of who this new potential referral source is and have some background information to reference when you chat at the event.
Before Attending Addiction Conferences Get Marketing Materials Updated
The above 2020 addiction conferences teaches needed drug rehab marketing ans SEO techniques. Make sure your organization’s brochures, business cards, and exhibitor materials are up to date. Many addiction treatment centers, Detox’s, Sober homes and ancillary service providers do a poor job of keeping these items up to date. The products and services often change, and the marketing materials do not reflect those changes. We see this all the time at the addiction Executive conferences that we hold in our industry. It was an issue until we found a promotional products vendor to work with providing these services for our sponsors and exhibitors. They also offer discounts to our participants.
Prepare for Addiction Conferences They Are Valuable
With addiction conferences preparation, drug and alcohol addiction treatment centers, opiate detox’s, inpatient rehabs, intensive outpatient treatment centers, sober livings, and ancillary service providers reap benefits. This article explains how to prepare for addiction conferences before, during and after. Constantly trying to find drug rehab marketing solutions is the key. Get the most out of attending addiction conferences and networking events. Be strategic, maximize your time and follow-up immediately following the addiction conference.
Behavioral Health Network resources have been an addiction conferences provider for the last four years. In that time we have put on over 14 conferences attracting 150-200 at each event. They have gained the attention of CEO’s and Executives with over 150-200 attending each conference. This unique talk show host, town hall forum has become extremely popular. These addiction professional conferences cover “HOT” topics and provide attendees a chance to “ask the experts” any questions on better business practices, billing, drug testing, licensing, DCF, Accreditation, treatment, sales, marketing, and any other aspect of the addiction and behavioral health industry.
Marketing Package with Sponsorship
We are seeking sponsors for our next addiction conferences EMP events in Florida and California. These sponsorship’s come with a 30-day marketing package. This can be tailored for a treatment center or sales/service organization. The benefits include;
- 15-minute special presentation
- 1 thought leader panelist spot
- exhibitor booth
- email marketing to 25,000 addiction professionals
- 5 VIP passes into the event
- Linked profile makeover
- SEO consultation
- marketing to our 210,000 audiences
- LinkedIn posts to our 30,000 addiction and behavioral health level one connection
- Facebook marketing to our 150,000 group members
- national exposure for 60 days prior to the event
- some literature pieces placed on attendee tables
- inclusion in the conference brochure
You can contact Charles Davis at 561-235-6195 to get more information.
Are there other ways to prepare for addiction conferences? We welcome your comments!
If your 
There are several reasons why addiction treatment centers do not understand or utilize drug rehab social media marketing correctly for rehab advertising. It is partly due to the many marketing companies that say they offer drug rehab social media marketing. Many just take your marketing dollars and do very little. This is often done by the large 
With 
Behavioral Health Network Resources does more than say we do social media. We have dominated Facebook and LinkedIn by example for over four years. We founded our company because of social media. We took the time to intimately learn Facebook and LinkedIn. On Facebook, we have five profiles with 25,000 addiction-related friends and own over 60 addiction-related groups with over 200,000 members. This is the best resources for 
It is not enough to have an addiction treatment center marketing specialist, you need to research them and get behind the smoke and mirrors. You need tracking metrics on the back-end of your website. These show you exactly where your recovery leads are being generated and what is producing the treatment calls. We’ve had many drug rehab leads marketing clients that buy into exclusive listings on high gloss websites with a ton of listings and banner ads of their competitors. Some sites have heavy traffic and some have very little. Also, be aware of 
Your drug rehab leads should not only include targeting clients needing treatment, but also professional referral sources of front-line clinicians, private clinicians, EAP’s, Interventionists, LMHC, CAP’s, etc… The best way to achieve this is through the largest professional website in the world LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a definite must in the drug rehab marketing strategy.
If someone is trying to tell you they can perform drug rehab leads for your organization on social media, then you should be seeing them everywhere and know them. After all, you are their target audience. If they have not been in front of you already chances are they don’t have the audience and do not know how to utilize this medium.
Drug and alcohol addiction treatment centers expect instant results that they are used to getting from pay per click and call center lead generation. Their addiction center treatment marketing is dependent on the instant calls from these two short-term solutions that they have to pay for over and over again. Before the Google restrictions in our industry, there were about 75 big time players spending $500,000-$1,500,000 a month in that big boy sandbox.
Treatment centers eventually realize the large cookie cutter 
Our addiction conferences provide drug rehab marketing strategies. These events have five executive thought leader panelists providing business and marketing solutions. The addiction treatment industry has undergone drastic changes in California. New laws, regulation and insurance companies playing games 
These accreditation’s are extremely important for the treatment centers allowing them for better overall treatment for their clients, assists in gaining clients and makes them authority over their competition. Consultants charge $30,000 or more to get them through the accreditation processes. Drug and alcohol addiction treatment centers owners know that these are an absolute necessity for their behavioral health organizations. The second reason drug rehab owners hire consultants is that at some point they all realize the importance of marketing. Then, they quickly realize they are competing against big dollars being spent by the larger addiction treatment centers every month. They also start to realize they need an internet of things (IoT) electronic footprint driving targeted traffic to their website for their addiction treatment center marketing.
Why is it vital for addiction treatment centers, or detox’s staff to be published on high profile industry websites? This positions them as an expert in drug and alcohol addiction treatment. Citing and including them in your websites builds instant trust with potential clients. Also, getting published on other high authority websites increases Google ranking. One of the most difficult areas of drug rehab SEO for addiction treatment centers and ancillary service providers is getting those back-links pointing to their websites.
Spread out your drug and alcohol addiction treatment center marketing budget. Putting all your marketing dollars into one bucket like AdWords spells disaster. Many learned this mistake when Google restricted paid ads, some did not make the learning curve and had to close their doors. The centers that survived had good drug rehab consultants which put into place a diverse marketing strategy. Categorize your marketing into three buckets. This way when one bucket isn’t working you have the other two generating phone calls. Even with three buckets going on at the same time one, two or all three could fail at any given time. The three main buckets should be organic, boots on the ground and a paid advertising strategy.
After structure, you need to look at search engine optimization (SEO.) SEO is a complicated process and impossible to know all there is to know on the subject. Even the best drug rehab consultants only know a fraction of SEO. However, they do know the many best practices that can get you to the first page of Google. Google only reveals a few golden nuggets; the rest is best practices. We get 10-15 calls every week from drug and alcohol addiction treatment centers on marketing and consulting. Almost everyone says their on-page SEO is good. This is rarely the case. I always ask them if they have 
The last part of organic SEO is social media and this is an absolute must. According to Tech Crunch, people are spending over 
Almost every addiction treatment center puts most of their marketing efforts in boots on the ground tactics. While it should be in every drug and alcohol addiction treatment centers marketing mix, it should only be a portion of the marketing mix. All drug rehab consultants should be telling you to have diversity in your drug rehab lead generation. We see many centers using boots on the ground, Google Ad Words and call center lead generation.
Google Ad Words or pay per click (PPC) has paved the road for unprepared drug rehab marketing plans. Addiction treatment centers have notoriously used Ad Words in place of a good organic marketing plan. This is mind-boggling considering the paid Ad Words account for less than 5% of the clicks on Google. The first three organic slots account for a whopping 70%. Bing, Yahoo, and MSN are comparable to these numbers.
Drug rehab consultants should be putting in back-end analytics to measure efficiency. Keeping in mind the end goal is to understand your most elevated ROI. It is imperative to track lead generation sources that are converting into clients. It is critical to gauge the “first contact” when the individual seeking addiction treatment reached out.
The key to maximizing your ROI on marketing dollars is to know what is generating the most drug rehab leads, or calls. Call tracking can tell you where the potential client started and right through to where they called from. This is vital information for the marketing team. You can also assign a dollar value to the services sold to have dollars associated with conversions. It will also record the calls, so you can determine if admissions teams are doing a good job of converting clients. It also gives information on date, time, city, state, and much more. You can check out how this inexpensive valuable drug rehab call tracking tool is for your center.
Google analytics like call tracking provides information on addiction treatment centers websites. All drug rehab consultants should know how to read and utilize this vital information. It tells you real-time traffic, city, state, pages visited, where they came from, interests and more.
As an owner of an addiction treatment center, detox, or ancillary service provider, you are going to spend on the low-end hundreds of thousands of dollars on your marketing. Drug rehab consultants can put a proven marketing plan in place producing the best ROI and reduce waste. Consultants can tell you what works and what does not work. They can tell you how to get your website built with proper structure.
The drug and alcohol addiction treatment and behavioral health industry are far behind in web marketing. They are suffering from “Digital Darwinism.” Many have attempted web marketing without an understanding of the foundation needed allowing it to work. Part of the problem is our industry gauges their marketing by a top of funnel results. Social media will provide some instant traceable results, however, it dives much deeper generating clients that stemmed from social media activity, trust, and interaction that are more difficult to track. That is why t is paramount to have social media in their drug rehab lead generation marketing plan.
Drug rehab lead generation is struggling with social media. Many addiction treatment centers are making the same mistakes while on social media. Drug rehabilitation centers need to get up to speed on digital Darwinism. To do this, it has become obvious they need 
The key for sales and service organizations is to generate leads, establish new relationships and be a leader in their niche. This is a difficult challenge due to a lack of marketing knowledge and heavy competition in the various niches. Sales and service organizations tend to rely on industry events and word of mouth for their marketing. Some sales and service organizations additionally rely upon paid marketing on LinkedIn and Facebook. While these are good short-term solutions they should also include growing a targeted audience that they own and ranking on the first page of Google for key search terms.
Facebook is the single largest social media that exists on the planet. This is a must for all sales and service organizations. Two of the biggest obstacles are connecting with the decision-makers for their product or service and understanding where the power of this medium benefits their organization the most in their addiction treatment ancillary services marketing strategy. Organizations must understand the algorithm changes and incorporate those changes. Facebook announced in early 2018 that they are reducing the posts to individual’s boards from business profiles. However, posts from individuals and groups are still being served regularly. This means the power of Facebook’s two billion members lies in personal profiles and groups.
Behavioral Health Network Resources has been building their addiction professional tribes for the last four years. We have built up an impressive audience on LinkedIn, Facebook and our professional email database. We are a recognized leader with addiction professionals on these platforms. You can check out our addiction professional audience by 
Drug rehab marketing and SEO are the most important aspects of generating addiction treatment calls. It requires over 200 different requirements by Google. Drug rehab SEO outperforms all other marketing combined. However, you not only need a robust marketing mix you also need search engine optimization including correctly optimizing every page on your website. This is the starting point where many drug rehabilitation centers fail. We look at many addiction treatment websites every day and 90% of them have poor or no SEO. Not only are the main pages poor, but the blogs are poor at best. This is also true for substance abuse sales and service organizations.
No matter what you have heard link building is still the #1 factor in rankings. And, it’s not the number of links, it’s the authority of the site linking in. However, there are other factors that must be put into place. When link building, there are two areas to look at for ranking. First, look at the keywords you’re already ranking on. These should be on pages 2-50 on google. They will be the easiest to work on.
In this day and age, it can be tough to find solid back-links increasing SEO for your website. As Google continues to make changes so should you. However, the problem is that drug and alcohol addiction treatment centers do not know how to get back links. Everyone in the industry thinks they must come from listing sites or other treatment centers. Behavioral Health Network Resources has spent the last two years in our SEO laboratory. We studied SEO Gods like 
Search engine optimization involves an endless amount of things. Google is looking for a combination of signals and road signs. Many different 
The current behavioral health industry landscape requires that recovery centers learn better addiction treatment marketing practices including the status of the 
Let’s first look at the website. Website structure is the critical starting point for SEO performance. The aesthetics of treatment centers websites are often beautiful, showing pictures of the beach, and amenities. The aesthetics of a website are only a fraction of what is needed for web marketing. When a house is being built, the foundation is the most important aspect. Without a strong foundation, your house will fall. With web marketing, proper structure is the original building block.
The “big boys in the sandbox” understand better drug rehab website development equals higher rankings in search engines and more clicks. These big players use professional and experienced webmasters with experience beyond the addiction treatment industry. Their sites use an efficient, clean and trimmed hierarchy. The small to medium players usually use unskilled individuals with limited knowledge of proper structure. Their hierarchy is generally disorganized, jumbled and not optimized for Google. This is an area that the small to medium size treatment centers can gain ground against the competition (big and small) on the web if they include it in their drug rehab marketing plan.
