Principles of trust, transparency, and expertise are of the utmost importance in the field of behavioral health marketing. While these values are always beneficial for businesses working on SEO or content marketing, behavioral health businesses must go beyond basic marketing best practices.
These higher standards call for the help of qualified experts, more rigorous research processes, and placing client care at the center of everything.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to market your behavioral health practice, this page covers:
Behavioral and mental health marketing is inherently different from other forms, as it requires an empathetic approach that encourages trust before conversion. Rather than creating a “buzz,” the aim is to facilitate support. So with this in mind, let’s look at some of the ways that behavioral health marketing is unique from other approaches.
Any content that a behavioral health service puts online comes under what Google calls “Your Money or Your Life” or “YMYL” content.1 This category encompasses all the sensitive topics, like health and finances, which could significantly impact readers’ lives. As such, they are scrutinized more heavily by search engine bots.1
Google wants all content, but especially YMYL content, to meet “E-E-A-T” guidelines. This stands for “Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.”1 In other words, behavioral health content must be reliable, well-informed, and safe for readers.
As your content might discuss things like addiction, medication, mental health conditions, and health insurance, it must be up to date, backed by science, and handled sensitively.
So, marketing for behavioral health services must take special care to be trustworthy and sensitive to readers, ensuring they are genuinely helped and not misled. This may require the help of a behavioral health digital marketing agency, specializing in meeting these standards. At the end of this article, we’ll discuss how an agency can help in more detail.
As well as being trustworthy and sensitive, marketing strategies for behavioral health must also be backed by scientific and therapeutic expertise. Google’s guidelines outline how businesses can demonstrate expertise and authoritativeness, highlighting the importance of citations and well-qualified authors.1
So, any behavioral health content must be well-researched, thoroughly referenced, and written and reviewed by professionals with the appropriate authority. While behavioral health companies likely have a variety of qualified professionals available to write for them, businesses can also hire medical or mental health writers to support their strategies. Additionally, professional writers with mental health expertise understand how to disseminate information in ways that build trust rather than alienate.
You can choose a variety of strategies for your digital marketing efforts, each with its own benefits for your business’s goals and resources.
Here are the three main approaches in digital marketing and how they can be tailored to the behavioral health field:
SEO is a broad field of digital marketing that encompasses creative written content, outreach to other businesses, and technical website optimizations.
The details of these elements include:
These efforts can be initially resource-intensive as you may require multiple SEO professionals to implement necessary website changes. Furthermore, there is an ongoing demand to continually publish authoritative content that doesn’t necessarily attract audiences in the short-term. However, the SEO long game should be played by businesses that need online authority to attract their target audiences.
As mentioned, healthcare marketing and behavioral health call for sensitivity and trust. In SEO, this means:2
While a part of SEO, content marketing is a defined digital marketing strategy in itself, involving blog content, email newsletters, social media, videos, and more. Content marketing should adhere to SEO best practices, but its goals go beyond good visibility in search engines.
Content marketing is a highly effective way of increasing brand awareness, educating audiences about complex topics, nurturing leads over long sales cycles, and establishing brand trustworthiness. Over time, businesses can build up a wealth of informative and expert content that supports their online authority and reputation.
Like with SEO, content marketing demands regular, ongoing efforts to produce content. However, results can be highly beneficial. If you choose this approach, behavior health content marketing should:2,3
While SEO and content are organic strategies (with audiences finding business content naturally via search engines), paid advertising is more precise, direct, and measurable.
Paid advertising involves bidding for the placement of ads on search engines, social media, websites, or short video clips. This approach is more immediate than organic marketing methods, generating instant traffic and clicks. Plus, paid ads can be specifically sent to certain audiences, based on their internet behavior, interests, or demographics.
One significant incentive to use paid advertising is how precisely it can be measured. Often known as “pay-per-click” ads, businesses can figure out exactly how much each ad costs and their return on investment.
However, paid advertising can drain budgets, and businesses must overcome things like ad fatigue and competition to keep standing out. Yet, when done effectively, paid ads in the behavioral health sector will:4
Embarking on new marketing efforts can be daunting if you’re not sure what to expect or what resources you’ll need to employ. That’s why the support of a behavioral health digital marketing agency can be so useful.
At PsychWrite, our specialties include creating mental health marketing content and search engine optimization strategies. We can support you with:
Get in touch today to start crafting your digital marketing strategy with us at PsychWrite.
