User-Friendly SEO, New Market Entrants, and TikTok: Marketing Trends to Watch in 2023

During the recent Treatment Center Investment & Valuation Retreat in Scottsdale, Arizona, Dan Gemp, president and CEO of Dreamscape Marketing, presented his annual “Future Cast” in which he took stock of the current state of the marketing landscape in behavioral healthcare and offered predictions on trends that could emerge in 2023.

In an interview with Behavioral Healthcare Executive that was conducted on site at TCIV, Gemp touched on a number of topics impacting marketers in the behavioral healthcare space, including the following:

• What organizations need to know about the state of search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising
• The reasons outside entities may struggle with the intricacies of marketing in behavioral health compared to other areas of healthcare
• How TikTok can be a useful way for behavioral healthcare marketers to reach younger audiences
• The complementary (and sometimes adversarial) relationship between behavioral health and primary care providers

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Behavioral Healthcare Executive: While there have been so many developments in marketing that we will touch on shortly, why are the fundamentals of having a good website with strong SEO still so critical to a behavioral healthcare organization’s bottom line?

Dan Gemp: Google still has massive market share—about 92% of searches are done on Google. If you have an optimized website that is pleasing to Google and gives consumers the information they need, it’s still going to be a primary driver of patients. It’s just the best patient acquisition channel that’s available to your marketing dollars.

BHE: What’s going on with SEO and PPC these days?

DG: I like the direction of SEO. The artificial intelligence (AI) technology they’re using is learning, and so it’s much more conversational versus just keyword jargon. It’s evolving. If you’re writing dialogue-style content and question-and-answer format content—it’s called semantic search—Google actually prefers that content now. The old school way of actually writing a good piece of content is now deemed as authentic and relevant, and it’s educational to consumers, so Google will rank it as high as it’s able to.

BHE: Is marketing for behavioral healthcare different from other areas of healthcare? There are some organizations that are getting into the behavioral healthcare space that we might not have been talking about within this sector 5 years ago or even a couple years ago. And maybe they’re having a little bit of a rough go of it. What’s going on there?

DG: It’s really interesting. We keep an eye on emerging technologies as well as overall healthcare marketing. We’re working with some national hospital systems and overall wellness industry. They don’t have the same challenges that this industry has, where a new market entrant can show up with a lot of money, a large marketing budget, and they don’t realize where that will be wasted. Behavioral health is actually a very retail-oriented segment of healthcare. A potential client has already self-assessed a little bit, and if they know they need addiction treatment, they’re going to Google “addiction treatment.” They’re not just looking up the signs and symptoms of withdrawal, for example.

So, the new market entrants—massive telehealth systems with private equity backing, or even groups like CVS and Walmart and Dollar General—are getting into value-based outpatient care, and they’re now becoming indirect competitors. The marketing changes try to compete with indirect competitors and go direct to consumer a little bit more efficiently than these big, new market entrants.

BHE: While a website, SEO, Google Ads are all still dominant marketing channels for behavioral healthcare providers, is there a certain social media platform that might be particularly popular with a younger audience that marketers should be keeping an eye on in 2023 in this space?

DG: Breaking down your audience by age is very, very advisable. You’re going to see a lot of self-aware patients searching for alcohol treatment. You’re going to see a lot of family members searching for a loved one when it comes to opiates. On social media, though, if you break down that audience segment, Gen Z and your younger audience, which is the fastest growing segment in terms of need of mental health treatment—TikTok.

It’s a unique channel. You need a good spokesperson with a following that is applicable to mental health and life coaching and wellness overall. But it’s an entertainment channel that this younger generation is using as a search engine, whereas the older market segments, they don’t use Facebook as a search engine. You don’t really choose a doctor from Facebook.

BHE: Hopefully not.

DG: Hopefully not. I haven’t. We would go to Google for that and Facebook for other things, right?

BHE: Right.

DG: But TikTok is becoming a search-driven platform where, again, relevant content does have impact. And why is an influencer called an influencer? Because they have direct influence over their audience.

BHE: Is it a challenge to try to present material that’s relevant to mental health and addiction treatment on what theoretically is a lighter and more enjoyable platform for entertainment and escapism from your day-to-day life?

DG: You need content that can resonate with a wider audience. The ice bucket challenge that went around, something like that, that can activate a broad audience, get family members involved, get community awareness built out. That’s the type of content that will have the most impact, or actually generate potential admissions, which is the goal.

Whereas historically, again, Facebook, Instagram, those are good channels to brand yourself on, but you’re not going to have direct pull of new patients from those channels as readily. I would also say for this younger generation—the quarantine population where they were just on lockdown for 3 years of their life, no rites of passage, no prom, no friends, no sports, no college recruiters--they’re having a rough go as a generation right now, and they’re in their early 20s. And so, if they’re turning to TikTok for help or as a lifeline compared to suicide, some of that subject matter can be direct and it works really well because it’s the only place they’re going to search for that content.

BHE: That makes sense. Switching gears, are there opportunities for more collaboration between behavioral healthcare providers and primary care organizations? Are they referring or are they competing? What’s the relationship there?

DG: Yes, they’re referring, and yes, they’re competing. We’re seeing multiple things happen at the same time. The landscape on the insurance side is leaning towards value-based care. They would love to have value-based care, outcomes-based reimbursement. That’s their ideal. So you’ll see these bigger retail players—CVS, Walmart, Amazon—moving towards that side of the market. And so there actually is a lot of opportunity, the same way an outpatient treatment center or a detox center might be partners with a residential treatment center. They may refer patients back and forth at different levels of care. You’ll have an opportunity, particularly if you’re getting into value-based care to cross promote, to send your outreach reps and build enterprise-level partnerships with groups as large as CVS and Walmart.

It’s weird to be saying this, that your marketing efforts should work on enterprise partnerships with Walmart. But the general trend is your primary care provider is now asking on your annual wellness checkup multiple mental health indicator questions, and 60% of patients could benefit from direct mental health therapies right now. So, you do have opportunity to market to primary care providers, physician groups, on up through hospitals who often don’t want to deal with the acute nature of addiction, and then partner with these giants of retail.

BHE: Any other trends that we should be keeping an eye on marketing-wise in 2023? Anything else that you wanted to touch on that we haven’t covered yet here?

DG: Pay-per-click ads in particular, because the inflation on Google hasn’t been as bad as it was in years past or before LegitScript came into being, it’s leveled out at about 2% to 3% a year, so your cost per click will go up 3%. But now the dataset that comes with it is much cleaner, much more predictable. We’ve seen some groups operate where they look at the data, and it’s highly efficient, and they’re getting the most bang for their buck, the best cost per admission.

There are other groups who just want to get the most volume, but it’s a very inefficient level of spend. Keep an eye on that. It’s a bell-shaped curve where you can underspend and you can overspend. It’ll be very expensive source of admissions, but try to find that sweet spot from your data.

Reference

Gemp D. Behavioral healthcare marketing future-cast 2022. Presented at: Treatment Center Investment & Valuation Retreat. December 5-7. Scottsdale, Arizona.