Active Marketing | Editorial

Marketing in Behavioral Health: Lifting the Veil with CEO, Michael Myles Written by Melanie Vann

What a boon for us to interview Michael Myles, CEO of Active Marketing. His

firm is the only strategic marketing firm that caters exclusively to Behavioral Health.

It’s our pleasure to work directly with his organization. Michael and our host, Kristin Walker, could have talked for hours. The intel given on this show is invaluable.

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WHY BEHAVIORAL HEALTH?

WHICH SECTORS OF BEHAVIORAL

WHY IS MARKETING

the Addiction Treatment Industry.

Addiction Treatment- all levels of care and

SECTOR OF HEALTHCARE

I was referred by a client to someone in I immediately realized that there was a

lack of marketing acumen in the industry.

That was a void I knew we could fill.

There was no really smart, professional marketing agency in the space. They were creating commodity websites,

buying links and using old SEO tricks

to try to trick Google into ranking them

higher. I believed that with well-conceived and planned marketing strategies I could give clients a competitive edge.

By taking marketing to the next level, we are able to be successful without compromising on ethics.

HEALTH DO YOU FOCUS ON?

eating disorder treatment. We also focus on business services in the BH industry

like EHR, billing companies, revenue cycle management, outcomes tracking and toxicology laboratories.

WHAT SERVICES DO YOU

PROVIDE TO THE BEHAVIORAL HEALTH MARKET?

We are a full service marketing agency that focuses on creating great brands and great messaging. We produce

creative pieces like print ads, brochures, trade show exhibits, and websites. We

also negotiate and manage advertising campaigns that drive new business for our clients.

OVERLOOKED BY THIS (ESPECIALLY EHR)?

This industry has really matured quickly over the last couple of years. Until very

recently there was not very much outside

interest in Addition Treatment, and people

didn’t need to focus on marketing for their program very much to fill their programs.

In the last few years there has been a

proliferation of new treatment centers

and business services that work for these programs. In order to stand out from the crowd you all of a sudden need a well-

defined brand and a user-friendly website that speaks to your target audience.

AS THE MARKET MATURES,

WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THE

HOW DO YOU MEASURE SUCCESS

OTHER BEHAVIORAL HEALTH

TO MARKET FOR COMPANIES

It all comes down to the numbers that

WHAT CAN EHR VENDORS AND BUSINESS SERVICE PROVIDERS DO TO KEEP UP?

Be agile, and test your marketing. Find out what is working and what isn’t, then make changes. Make decisions quickly, and then test them.

WHAT CHANNELS OFFER THE BIGGEST GROWTH

MOST EFFECTIVE CHANNELS MARKETING TO BEHAVIORAL HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS?

No question the most effective way

is through conventions, trade shows, and other networking events. This is

where they all are, it allows you to create

relationships with the market and also get to know your audience.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR

WHAT ARE THE MOST

BEHAVIORAL HEALTH?

COMPANIES MAKING WHEN

disorder programs. Smaller start up EHR’s

HEALTH CATEGORY?

EHR COMPANIES IN

Addiction treatment programs and eating should go after the smaller private pay

programs. There is less competition for these programs business and the sales velocity is much higher, allowing new

companies to get paid much more quickly

COMMON MISTAKES YOU SEE MARKETING TO THE BEHAVIORAL The biggest mistakes we see are companies that have no defined brand, and we see companies that have no marketing strategy.

so they can turn around and reinvest

It’s my opinion that clearly defining your

businesses. These treatment programs

makes that process of creating brand

those dollars to continue to grow their can be reached by event marketing at

conferences for addiction treatment or eating disorder treatment such as the

iaedp conference for eating disorders

and the Foundations addiction treatment conference.

To get to the next level, or for larger companies, the biggest growth opportunities lie with in network treatment programs that are generally much larger with a lot more users, (and thus bigger accounts), but with the accompanying longer sales cycle.

brand, for instance in a Brand Style Guide, awareness much more effective. It allows an organization to more quickly, and with

WHEN MARKETING AN EHR?

matter, which for an EHR are pretty

straightforward. We want to manage the

Customer Acquisition Cost, but also make sure that new clients are engaged and

loyal. The most meaningful single metric we use to judge the effectiveness of our

marketing strategies and the health of the business is Net New Revenue. This is the

sum of revenue from new clients, revenue expansion from existing clients, and the loss of revenue from churned clients.

ARE THERE ANY

BENCHMARKS THAT YOU USE AS A RULE-OF-THUMB TO

DETERMINE IF A MARKETING PLAN FOR A SOFTWARE

COMPANY IS WORKING?

We use the following two important rules:

1. Lifetime Value should be more than 3x Customer Acquisition Cost

they are and what they’re about.

2. It should take less than 12 months to recover the Customer Acquisition Cost

of healthcare companies, both the

These measure both the profitability

business services. In all but a handful

speed to profitability in the short run.

less exposure, really show the market who Over the years we have dealt with dozens healthcare providers and their supporting of cases there was no strategic plan in writing, or plan at all for that matter. All

they had were tactics, like pay-per-click,

or event marketing. This leads to a lack of

focus that dilutes all the marketing efforts of the business, drastically increasing the cost of acquiring new business.

Event marketing can be extremely useful for this market as well, but conferences

like NATCON or NCAD are a better fit here.

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of the business in the long run, and the If EHR companies just follow those two

rules, they can have confidence that their marketing is working for their business.