Executive Overview: Increasing Treatment Center Lead Volume in Addiction & Mental Health

You’ve built a strong treatment business that helps people recover from addiction, substance abuse, and other behavioral health challenges. Congratulations—you’ve already accomplished the hardest step in this guide.

So why read on?

Well, if you’re like one of the hundreds of treatment center executives we’ve helped, you’re stuck. You know you need to grow, but you don’t want to cut back on the high-quality services you provide and become yet another cookie-cutter treatment provider. At the same time, if you continue with the status quo, larger and better-funded providers will quickly overwhelm your market.

Take a deep breath, we’re here to help. Let’s dive in with a series of actionable steps you can put into place in the next few weeks alone.

Stuck at any point? Just drop us a line.

Here’s a quick index of what we’ll be covering:

1. Assess the playing field
2. Beware of the volume trap
3. Set clear goals and budgets
4. Make sure your tactics fit your clients’ path
5. Take a look at your existing tactics
6. Try new marketing tactics safely
7. Build a repeatable financial model
8. Understand Pay-Per-Click ads
9. Understand Facebook & Instagram advertising
10. Understand SEO and blogging
11. Understand analytics and measurement tools
12. Understand marketing “speak”

1. Assess the playing field

Like any good leader, you can’t make impactful decisions until you’ve taken a long, hard look at the playing field in front of you. This first step will help you determine what’s working and what’s not in the addiction treatment or mental health industries, your specific recovery business, and your existing marketing strategy.

Once we have that locked down, we can begin to build a strong foundation for trying out new tactics.

Why go through a little bit of introspection before we get to the rewarding part?

We know you’re a compassionate executive who wants to see big change in behavioral health care. If you didn’t care about your clients and their wellbeing, you wouldn’t be taking valuable time out to read this.

But running an ethical business isn’t always easy, especially in the addiction treatment and mental health industries. We’ve seen too many behavioral health executives and entrepreneurs with good intentions who are forced to take shortcuts as their businesses falter, simply because there doesn’t seem to be any other way to compete with the big players.

You don’t want to go that route. Taking a realistic, pragmatic look at where you and your industry are today can help you avoid the kind of surprises that lead to unethical avenues later.

Get started by answering the five questions below.

Question 1: Are you struggling to keep the lights on?

In any business, the most urgent and merciless distractions are payroll and rent. Miss any of these month after month and you’re sunk.

There’s an added wrinkle for many treatment centers: unlike other industries, much of your monthly revenue may come from insurance reimbursements.

And let’s face it: insurance reimbursements suck.

You’ve probably had the experience of going to battle with insurance companies for payment each month, or wondering why insurance providers require you to jump through seemingly endless hoops just to get paid.

Whatever your experience, there’s a good chance that, at some point in your career, you’ve broken out into a sweat worried over when—or whether—insurance reimbursements will arrive.

And rest assured you’re not alone. Most legitimate treatment businesses experience a cash flow shortfall at least once from slow or neglected insurance reimbursements. Many times they have even hired a seemingly competent billing company that didn’t deliver.

So what’s the solution? It’s not realistic for most programs to expect most of your clients to pay entirely out of pocket, and insurance companies certainly aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

The answer is volume. If you answered yes to the question above and are struggling month-to-month to keep the lights on, the most effective way to stabilize your business is to bring in more customers.

Keep reading and find out how.

Question 2: Have you recently had your heart broken?

No, we’re not trying to pry into your personal life. We want to know about your relationship with marketing.

If you’re like a lot of behavioral health CEOs we talk with, you’ve probably been burned by marketing firms that overpromise and underdeliver before.

After all, most marketing in the behavioral health industry is antiquated, unfocused, and unspecialized, which means that the only surefire way to win is to spend obscene amounts of money each month on anemic ad campaigns.

Look at much of the marketing produced by your competitors and you’ll probably sense a theme: all of it looks, reads, and feels the same. When one business finds an approach that works, others quickly follow.

If you answered yes to this question, it’s time to go in a different direction. Stop copying what competitors are doing and seek advice from marketers who know the treatment industry but aren’t from the treatment industry.

While it’s important to understand the quirks of behavioral health businesses, it’s also important to bring in fresh perspectives that work elsewhere. (For example, there are proven techniques that work in other industries that probably make sense for your business, too.)

Above all, realize that, just like you experience in your personal life, it may take time—and a few heartbreaks—before you find a meaningful and lasting marketing relationship.

So remember to learn from your past experiences and refuse to settle until you’ve found a way to make marketing work for your treatment program.

Question 3: Are you using the same tactic as everyone else?

Most articles focusing on behavioral health marketing are going to focus, first and foremost, on marketing tactics, that is, the steps you can take to drive leads and create interest in your brand.

The reason tactics are so appealing is that they can create results, often quite quickly. But many of these articles overlook an obvious but key point: any given tactic is only as good as the strategy in which it is used.

Think of a marketing tactic like a basketball: you can learn to dribble or shoot three-point shots, but those skills won’t help you much if you don’t know which basket to aim for.

So we’re going to take a moment to talk through the tactics you might be using right now and how to approach them in a strategic way.

If you answered yes to the question above, you’re in the majority. There are virtually no short-term marketing tactics in the addiction recovery and mental health world that aren’t being used by most competitors simultaneously. This is because there are only so many tactics that can rapidly increase admissions without an exorbitant cost.

Some of the most common tactics we see in the industry include pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Facebook and other social media advertising, and search engine optimization (SEO). Outside of the digital realm, you’ll probably see tried-and-true methods like call centers or “boots on the ground,” that is, sales representatives in the field, as well.

These are all short-term tactics that can be harnessed for a relatively low cost to drive client traffic for a short period of time.

Longer-term tactics can help stabilize business over a longer period of time, especially when combined with these quicker approaches, but they often aren’t effective until you have a steady cash flow or able to make a large initial investment.

In all likelihood, you’ll be using short-term tactics in this stage of your business. There’s nothing wrong with that! As we noted above, effective use of short-term marketing tactics can help bring in higher volumes of leads faster than relying on slow-burning, long-term marketing tactics that require expensive upfront investments.

But if you are going the short-term route, it’s important to understand the pros and cons of the tactics you choose.

For example, you might decide that digital marketing is too costly, confusing, or time-consuming for you. So instead you choose more traditional techniques, such as relationship marketing or referrals.

Growing exclusively through the relationships you build can work if your treatment center is small or just starting out—and it’s an important part of any marketing strategy, no matter your size. But it shouldn’t be relied upon as your exclusive marketing channel for the long term.

Because it relies solely on your personal contacts, referral marketing is inherently unpredictable. People change jobs, retire, and, yes, sometimes get hit by buses—and all of that is outside of your control. Wherever they go, they take that relationship, that advocacy for your business, and that cheerleader for your brand with them.

When you’re working in the treatment industry, where cash flow is already unpredictable, relying upon an equally unpredictable marketing source is going to be a challenge.

On the other hand, digital tactics, such as PPC, Facebook, and SEO, have their own set of pros and cons. Digital marketing is accessible, can be optimized by a skilled marketer, and produces data that’s easier to track than human relationships do. But because the barriers to entry in digital marketing are low, the playing field becomes increasingly competitive when other businesses enter the marketplace, especially when you’re just starting out and have a small budget.

As a result, if you want to grow sustainably, you’re going to need to learn to balance the “brute force” digital marketing efforts of PPC with other more cost-effective tactics. In other words, you’re going to need to wean yourself off of exclusively relying on PPC as quickly as possible, and only use it for short bursts when necessary.

Check out our recent podcast on how to enhance these short-term techniques with a long-term strategy.

Question 4: Are you LegitScript certified?

If you’ve been in the behavioral health industry over the last three years, this next question won’t come as much of a surprise.

But just in case you’re new around here, let’s give you a brief primer: in 2017, Google decided to begin cracking down on unethical, shady treatment businesses by blocking ads featuring keywords like “addiction,” “treatment,” and “rehab.” While this had the intended effect of shutting down traffic to unethical providers, it also dealt a blow to legitimate treatment programs, as well, effectively turning off the tap of leads from Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords).

(This is another good reminder of why it’s important to not put all your marketing budget into a single tactic, but that’s a lesson for later in this guide.)

Eventually, Google announced that it would allow treatment providers to advertise on their Ad platforms once more, but it would carefully vet each provider through an independent program called LegitScript, which would help prove that each business was playing by the rules.

Not long after, Microsoft’s search engine Bing also announced that it, too, would only allow LegitScript-certified businesses to purchase PPC ads on its platform.

So, today, LegitScript certification remains the gold standard for PPC advertising in the treatment industry. If you’ve been considering getting certified but haven’t done so yet, don’t wait. Start your application today—even if you’re unsure whether PPC advertising is a key part of your marketing strategy. Like CARF or Joint Commission accreditation, LegitScript certification is quickly becoming standard across all reputable treatment providers.

Yes, it’s true that some other digital advertising platforms don’t require LegitScript certification to run PPC ads, including LinkedIn, Quora, and more. But there’s no guarantee that these sites won’t also decide that LegitScript certification is a prerequisite for doing business soon.

If you answered yes to this question, congratulations, you’re already ahead of the game. But if you’ve been wavering about LegitScript due to the time commitment or cost, understand that not taking action today could cut off opportunities for growth in the future.

Question 5: Are you saying the same things as your competition?

Raise your hand if you’ve heard your competitors say any of the following sentences (or something similar):

“We have a staff that truly cares.”

“We provide positive outcomes for our clients.”

“We offer individualized care for every client.”

“We have a beautiful, state-of-the-art facility.”

Chances are you’ve raised your hand at least once when reading over that list. Now repeat this exercise and ask yourself how often you’ve said those things about your own treatment program.

You probably have your hand in the air, too.

There’s nothing wrong with the sentences above. For most legitimate treatment providers, these are probably true statements about their programs.

The problem is that if you’ve heard these sentiments before, so have your prospective clients—likely many, many times during their journey to selecting a treatment provider.

How can you start to differentiate yourself from the competition? We’ll dive deeper into this topic later in this guide, but here’s a good (if obvious) place to start: to be different, you have to do things differently. This may mean taking some actions that seem counterintuitive or going against the grain of what others in your industry are doing—which means you’re probably on the right track.

We’ll dive into this deeper in a later chapter, so keep reading.

2. Beware of the volume trap

Remember when we said earlier that if you answered question # 1 (“Are you struggling to keep the lights on?”) as “yes,” that the best solution to stabilize your business was to grow your volume of clients?

Well, this advice comes with a caveat and here it is:

Whatever strategy you use to grow client leads in the short term shouldn’t be your only strategy to grow client leads in the medium term (and definitely not in the long term.)

What do we mean here?

We worked with a talented behavioral health executive in the Northeast who loved his call centers. He would tell us frequently that he was so confident in his call center performance that he wanted to triple the number of employees as soon as he had the cash flow.

And for a while, he was right. His two call centers performed far better than the industry average, helping hundreds of people get connected to care. But inevitably there came a downturn. His call centers began to receive fewer and fewer calls as he began to exhaust his market. With his other marketing channels barely running, he had no choice but to weather the storm.

We advised him to diversify his marketing portfolio, but he insisted that this was a temporary blip and that he would soon be filling his census once again.

And, just as he had promised, call volume eventually ticked back up, and he insisted, once again, that his call centers were the only marketing he needed.

By the time the next downturn hit, he had realized his mistake: he was firmly stuck in the volume trap.

In a nutshell, the volume trap occurs when you invest so heavily in one marketing channel that you’re at the mercy of ups and downs in the market, locked into the rollercoaster because you neglected other options. Sometimes it might be weeks with low lead volume, sometimes it might be months—but either way, you’re stuck.

Believe it or not, but some behavioral health executives spend their whole careers like this, seesawing between prosperity and pitfalls. Maybe they had great luck early on with PPC advertising and have remained loyal to it ever since, even as the marketplace has changed and they no longer get the same return on investment.

Or perhaps they refuse to consider other marketing channels because they remember the “good old days” of cash flow highs from their call center, referral marketing, or PPC.

Either way, they spend their time “chasing the dragon”—looking for that cash flow high they once received from short-term transactional tactics.

But a sustainable business isn’t built on short-term highs. It’s built on predictable revenue. And marketing, when done properly, shouldn’t feel like gambling, hoping that you’ll strike it rich like you did once before.

As we said earlier—and will say again—if your business is suffering, short-term tactics like PPC and Facebook advertising can be a quick and effective remedy. But depending on these tactics for the long term because they worked in the short term just isn’t sustainable.

Just as coffee isn’t a suitable replacement for sleep, using these short-term tactics for long-term business growth will just lead to a crash. Use these tactics as a quick boost when needed and focus instead on creating a repeatable, scalable, and diversified revenue model.

Let’s talk about how to do just that.

3. Set clear goals and budgets

Do you know the difference between spending and investing?

You might think it’s obvious: spending means losing money, investing means gaining money. But what about if you’re spending money to grow your business? Isn’t that also a form of investing, too?

Here’s the key difference between spending and investing: a budget.

If you’re spending money on marketing channels because your competitors are, or because your friend told you to try out PPC, or because you have money to burn, then you are simply spending.

But if you are spending money on marketing channels because they fit into your budget, move your business closer towards your goals, and advance your strategy, then you’re investing.

Let’s break this down further with two key points:

Marketing is not gambling. You need to have a clear idea of which channels you plan to invest in, the length of time you plan to invest, and what you’d like to see as a return on your investment. This is the opposite of going in blind—it’s a smart, strategic and targeted use of your money.

You need to have goals. Think about your own personal finances. Would you invest in a stock simply because all your friends at the gym were also? Probably not, at least not without doing your own due diligence first. The same holds true for your business. Just as your individual investment strategy will differ depending on your age, your income, your cost of living, and your tolerance for risk, your behavioral health marketing budget will also differ based on what you are trying to achieve.

Before determining your marketing budget, it’s important to consider how much appetite for risk your business can tolerate. For example, if you’re looking to run a series of PPC ads that compete with the largest player in your market, you’re going to have shell out a significant amount of money. Is your website optimized for that kind of traffic? Do you have compelling landing pages set up to convert potential clients? Are you willing to take the risk that, even after all that spending, you still may not increase your client volume appreciably?

Setting realistic expectations of what you’re likely to achieve given your budget—as well as how much risk your business can absorb—is key before spending a single dollar. Remember that your potential reward is always proportionate to the risk involved. Yes, you could have doubled your money in a week with a Bitcoin investment, but you had a much higher chance of losing your investment altogether.

When we think about a return on investment, it’s sometimes hard to analyze marketing channels if we don’t have a lot of experience in the market. So instead, think about something you probably already know: the rate of return on personal investments.

For example, here are approximate rates of return on everyday investments we make in our personal lives, including stocks, bonds, and savings account.

• The stock market returns about 12% annually
• Bonds return around 5% annually
• Savings accounts return about 2% or less annually

You can clearly see that the returns here are proportionate to the amount of risk built into each investment.

Now think about this in the context of your marketing return on investment. You can see that getting a high monthly return is going to take trial and error, discipline, and some amount of risk. So before you create your marketing budget, ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the realistic timeframe you need to get a return on your initial investment by?
• How much can you afford to invest over that timeframe?

If that feels too daunting to answer at this stage, you can think about it another way:

• What does your ideal situation look like in 6 months?
• What is your current situation?
• What is the gap between the two?

Creating a budget, projecting your desired rate of return, and figuring out your target timeframe are the first key steps to moving your marketing from the “spending” to the “investing” category.

This is an ongoing process that you should undertake no matter how large your company gets. Annually, quarterly, or even monthly, reassess your marketing budget to make sure it is on target with your medium and long-term goals. Businesses can get complex, but boiling down your planning to these basic questions is a great way to get started making decisions quickly.

4. Make sure your tactics fit your clients’ path

Many of you reading this started your behavioral health business because you know firsthand what it feels like to recover from addiction, substance abuse, or mental health challenges.

So you remember what a momentous decision it is to finally choose a treatment provider, put your faith in their abilities, and be honest and humble enough to admit that you need help.

In other words, deciding to seek treatment isn’t the same decision as buying paper towels or a candy bar. We shouldn’t treat it that way as marketers, either.

Any time people make a big decision—whether that’s buying a house or car or enrolling in a behavioral health treatment program—they typically act differently than they do when making a smaller purchase.

The reason, as many of you know all too well, is that there is much more risk riding on this decision than there is in the type of paper towels you got from the store. This isn’t a purchase you can hide away in a kitchen cabinet or toss in the trash.

Let’s briefly review the risks surrounding making a treatment decision:

There is financial risk. For most people, choosing a treatment provider means they are using a considerable amount of their personal funds and insurance benefits in the hopes that they will recover. If they make the wrong decision, they will likely not be able to choose another treatment provider, at least not anytime soon.

There is social risk. Perhaps the most acute of the risks surrounding seeking treatment is the risk of damaging your reputation, hurting your relationships with family and friends, or harming your career if you make the wrong decision when selecting a treatment provider.

There is complexity risk. When something is expensive, whether that’s a house or a car or a treatment program, that likely means it is also complicated. Clients are rarely experts in the intricacies of recovery programs and are relying on your word that your program can help them. Needless to say, that is a big leap of faith for most people, particularly if they are struggling with addiction or mental health issues at the decision point.

When all these factors come together, we’re left with a decision-making process that typically takes much longer than buying that roll of paper towels. Sometimes, as you might have experienced, multiple people—family, friends, co-workers—are involved in making the decision together.

Needless to say, we can’t change the way people think about and choose a treatment program. It is a major life decision and should be treated accordingly. All we can do is adjust our marketing strategy to meet the needs of the person (or people) making that final purchase decision.

One of the most useful steps you can take when dealing with potential clients is to organize them according to need. We recommend breaking up to your prospective client pool into three categories:

• People who are ready for treatment now
• People who are ready for treatment soon
• People who are ready for treatment much later

For many treatment businesses just starting out, the most enticing pool of potential customers is from the first category of people seeking immediate help. This often because, as we mentioned earlier, insurance reimbursements and other cash flow issues make it imperative that businesses get clients through the door immediately.

As you stabilize your business, you’ll be able to move more into the other two categories, deepening your pipeline and name recognition in the market. But if you’re scrambling for clients, focus solely on the first category with short-term tactics before trying to reach the other two groups.

How do you group prospective clients into these groups effectively?

Use the skill that likely got you into the treatment business in the first place: your empathy. If you’ve gone through what your potential client is going through, or if you’ve been close to people in recovery, you’ll know intuitively how severe or urgent their need is and will be able to slot them into the appropriate category. Just remember that you’re dealing with real people with real needs who are coming to you at what is likely the lowest point in their lives, so take care at every touchpoint.

Once you’ve figured out where your prospective clients fit within these three groups, you can start to figure out which tactics apply best to which groups. If you’re in dire need of people who have immediate needs, you’ll want to use short-term, quick return tactics that may also be more expensive. If you are looking to create a steady pipeline, you may want to use longer-term tactics to help cement your brand.

Good short-term tactics include:

• PPC
• SEO
• Facebook ads
• Call centers
• “Boots on the ground”/referrals and outreach (here is some guidance on improving your conference strategy)

Good longer-term tactics include:

• Billboards
• Television commercials
• Radio
• Social media
• Public relations
• Event sponsorships
• Content marketing

Think of it this way: a successful PPC campaign may generate leads, but it does little in terms of cementing your brand reputation. On the other hand, a successful social media account may do little to generate immediate leads but can do wonders for your brand reputation.

A good rule of thumb is that customers trust stable businesses, and stable businesses generate trust by being consistent over time. So what’s the first step? Stabilize your business. Then look at cementing trust in your brand in the marketplace.

5. Take a look at your existing tactics

In the last section, we talked about the three types of prospective clients. To review, it’s important to categorize your potential clients into three main categories:

• People who are ready for treatment now
• People who are ready for treatment soon
• People who are ready for treatment much later

We also discussed the fact that certain marketing channels are going to be more applicable to the first group of clients than the second two groups, and vice versa.

So now it’s time for you to ask yourself another question: which groups do I want to pursue now?

It’s tempting to choose all three groups. But in reality, your marketing choices depend on being specific and targeted, otherwise you’re throwing money after a loose idea of who your client actually is.

Here’s a good way to approach making this decision:

• If you can’t keep your doors open for the next 6 months without immediate new business, you should go after the first group (people who are ready for treatment now.)
• If you can keep your doors open from recurring revenue for the next 6 months, you should go after the second two groups (people who are ready for treatment soon and people who are ready for treatment much later.)

Let’s assume, for example’s sake, that you’re in the first category and need revenue now.

Do your current marketing tactics align with these goals? Do they match up with the needs of your prospective clients?

We worked with an early-stage treatment provider who, when we began our relationship, was incredibly excited about working on their new television commercial.

They had spent time and money recording the commercial, had met with a media planner at their local TV network, and were just weeks away from launching the spot.

When we asked them why they had decided on a TV commercial, they said they were confident it could generate a high volume of qualified calls. We respectfully questioned that logic, pointing out that, in our experience, TV rarely produces a significant spike in short-term admissions, especially at a cost they could afford.

We told them, “You’ve put a lot of energy into this project and you want to make your money back. And maybe you’ll get enough clients to cover the cost of the project. But the data doesn’t support that.”

Then we told them a tough truth: in our opinion, it was time to cut their losses and get out.

Ultimately, that’s what they did. They looked at their contract terms and cut all spending on the TV commercial as soon as they could. It never aired.

Luckily, they didn’t spend a single dollar more than they needed to spend on the project. Yes, they had sunk costs that were tough to recover, but they understood they didn’t need to throw good money after bad.

Instead, they put the TV commercial into their archives for use in the future, when their business was more stable. And they took the funds they were going to use to air the spot to bring in short-term business and stabilize their cash flow.

What can we all learn from this experiment?

They should have saved the funds they poured into creating the commercial and funneled them into tactics that were more likely to drive short-term volume, such as PPC ads.

Let’s say that’s what they had done from the beginning. How can they tell if their PPC strategy is actually working or if they need to adjust to a different tactic?

Here’s a handy formula to see whether you’re paying too much for a particular tactic. (We talk more about measurement later in this guide—if you haven’t implemented a proper measurement system right away, you should, even if it’s basic to start.)

• The average marketing Cost Per Client* in a behavioral health treatment center ranges from 8-15% of the top-line revenue that the client pays you.

* Note that this doesn’t have to be absolutely precise at this stage. There may be variation depending on which insurance the client has or whether they are paying cash, for example. For now, though, just keep it simple.

• Next, take your monthly PPC budget (or the budget of whichever tactic you’re assessing) and divide it by the average number of admits you get in a given month to come up with a Cost Per Admit.
• Now divide your Cost Per Client by your Revenue Per Client: is that number above 15%? You’re probably in trouble. Is it below 8%? You are probably in OK shape.

Let’s say your numbers reveal that you’re getting a great return on your investment and that what you’re spending is a bargain. What should you do? Increase your budget! You’ve found a tactic that is working. By increasing your budget, you’ll be “stress testing” your tactic to see if you can get the same results at an increased volume.

But let’s say that you realize, after running the numbers, that you’re paying way too much and maybe even losing money on your current marketing tactics. Should you cut your losses and give up entirely?

If you’re spending at such an unsustainably high rate that you’ll put yourself out of business, cut your losses and stop immediately. These tactics should be helping you increase short-term volume, not creating more stress and chaos in your business.

In that situation, you would be wise to cut all your marketing spending and reinvest your time and money into old-fashioned relationship marketing. Hit the street yourself and start forging relationships to get people through the door. You’ll need at least some baseline stability before you can try any of these tactics again.

Hopefully you’re not in quite that dire of a situation, but your spending is still higher than you would like. How long have you been sustaining these losses? If it’s been more than a few months, it’s probably time to say goodbye to any marketing partners who may be leading your efforts. It may also be time to cut some team members and regroup.

How do you know which area to cut first?

As difficult as it is to do, we always recommend looking inward first. If you have a low-performing team member or someone who drives down the team with negative performance or attitude, they should be the first to go. Letting someone go is tough, especially since you’ve probably gotten to know them personally and understand the impact of taking away their paycheck. But keeping them around will only make the situation worse, which will be far more painful than making one tough decision.

If you’re confident that your staff is performing to full capacity, then you have probably chosen the wrong marketing partner to assist you. While they may be skilled in some areas, they aren’t delivering the results that you need. That may mean reassigning them to a different project that better suits their skills or it may mean firing them altogether.

In both cases, the right thing to do is to let any parties involved know that you’re unhappy, express to them why you’re unhappy, and give them a brief but fair period of time to turn around their performance. You should also ask them candidly if they feel there is anything that is holding them back from their top performance and then eliminate those excuses, at least those within your power. Maybe they truly are handcuffed by circumstances, but chances are it is time for a reboot. Don’t let this process drag on any longer than 30 days without tangible improvements.

If you suddenly find yourself having cut your staff and your marketing partners and have dropped your marketing budget to zero, read on to find out how to ramp back up safely and responsibly.

6. Try new marketing tactics safely

At the risk of sounding obvious, every business is different. Even among direct competitors in the behavioral health industry, the staff, location, facilities, services offered, levels of care, brand, website, reputation, insurances, and founders are all different—all the way down to the way different businesses answer the phones.

That’s why, even among two very close competitors, there is no universal growth strategy that can translate from one brand to another without optimization and hard work.

Sure, you can see this as a downside, as there’s no proven formula that works for every company. But we like to reframe this a positive: your competitors are experimenting just as much as you are and probably haven’t found the magic formula yet either. Just remember that while expertise in your industry will improve your chances of success, finding the right mix of marketing tactics for your business is a process of trial and error no matter how large or small your company and how many years you’ve been working in this space.

A handy rule of thumb is: approach every marketing initiative as an experiment until proven otherwise.

What does this mean for your marketing budget?

First off, only spend an amount that you’re not afraid to lose if the tactic or channel you pick doesn’t pay off right away. In other words, don’t spend more than what’s prudent until you’re certain the tactic will pay off.

And as you gauge the effectiveness of a particular marketing tactic, remember to take it a step at a time. For example, in the tech industry, the first benchmark a growing business should hit is becoming “ramen profitable,” that is, making enough money for the founders to afford a ramen noodle diet.

Your own marketing tactics should be “ramen profitable” as a first goal, making enough money to cover their cost and perhaps a few dollars more. Expecting a windfall when you first attempt a new marketing channel is not just unrealistic, it might cause you to pull the plug on an investment that is slowly beginning to work.

If you’re undertaking a marketing tactic that you’ve never attempted before—even if your competitors are doing it and your best friend swears by it—the best you can do is make an educated guess on what you should expect in return. You should use historical data to make a projection of your likely return based on your upfront investment.

So how do you budget for a marketing tactic you’ve never tried before? As we noted above, there is no exact science, but a few guidelines you can follow include:

• Find the sweet spot between investing enough to ensure you are giving the tactic a fair chance at success but not more than you can afford to lose.
• Think about the ideal number of clients you’d like to bring in each month and approximately how much revenue that would generate. Then, take 10% of that number. That’s roughly the budget you should allocate while you work towards “ramen profitability” with that tactic.
• Typically, tactics like PPC and Facebook advertising should be “ramen profitable” in about 3 months, while tactics like SEO may take up to six months (or more) to break even and begin earning.
• Remember, you’re not trying to break any records with initial performance. Testing out a new tactic is simply designed to prove whether or not a particular tactic will work for your business.
• During this initial testing phase, it’s critical to measure and track every component of the process, from the budget you’re testing to the copy, visual, and layout of each advertisement and the script for every phone call. If a tactic proves successful, you’ll then be able to lay the groundwork for a repeatable, scalable financial model moving forward. (More on that in the next chapter.)

7. Build a repeatable financial model

As you grow your business, you may feel like success sometimes comes when you least expect it. For example, your client census might dip dangerously low one month but then rebound furiously the next month.

When you’re starting out, these ups and downs may feel random. In fact, there is likely a pattern governing these changes—you just haven’t detected it yet and learned how to make it work for you in a predictable way.

Predictability is the opposite of this feeling of randomness and chaos. Successful investors, for example, don’t fear the stock market because they understand that its movements aren’t random but rather, over time, relatively predictable.

Successful businesses are the same way. You want to arrive at the point where you’re reasonably confident that you’re investing your money wisely in ways that work for your business, where your growth efforts are more predictable than chaotic.

In physics, chaos is defined as behavior so unpredictable that it appears random. In business, events—like those ups and downs in your client census—may appear random but almost never are. Usually we just haven’t found the pattern that explains them.

Marketing is no exception to this rule. As we discussed in the previous chapter, when you’re trying marketing tactics for the first time, there’s virtually no guarantee about what will work and what won’t for your business, even if some tactics work well for your competitors and others don’t.

First, go through the process we laid out in the previous chapter to get a better understanding of which tactics might actually be feasible for your business. This may take a few weeks as you gather data on what’s working and what’s not. Ideally your tactics will have reached “ramen profitability” and have proven that they can, at the very least, work as intended.

Once you have a sense for what tactics are working, you can begin to refine each tactic to fix or eliminate weak spots.

To begin, it’s helpful to understand the four components that make any marketing initiative work:

1. The message
2. The audience
3. The time
4. The place (aka the marketing channel)

At its essence, marketing is about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time in the right places.

Anything that isn’t serving that mission is waste. To help streamline our marketing and bring order and predictability to chaos, we need to ruthlessly cut the parts of our marketing efforts that aren’t fulfilling that key mission. The more we cut waste, the less chaotic our marketing efforts will feel, and the more predictable our business growth will become.

OK, you might say, I can see why cutting wasted effort is important in the beginning, but eventually I can sit back and relax while my marketing runs on autopilot, right?

Many business owners think like this. They find a handful of marketing tactics that work well for them and simply put them on repeat, keeping everything identical month after month.

In reality, you should never stop improving your marketing efforts. Eventually, you will have refined your marketing initiatives to the point where you can almost guarantee a solid return on investment. Even then, there is room for refinement and improvement.

Take, for example, a typical PPC campaign. What areas can you evaluate and improve over time?

• You need the right keywords
• You need the right ads
• You need the right targeting
• You need the right landing page and call to action
• You need the right person to pick up the phone and provide consistent, trustworthy communication
• You need the right social proof, such as reviews and certifications, as well as a strong website and leave-behind materials

Think of each of these criteria as another link in a chain connecting your potential customers to your business. If any link is broken or missing, the chain won’t work. In other words, if your prospective clients can’t move smoothly from one piece of your marketing initiative to the next, you’ll lose those clients.

So, going back to our PPC example for a moment, imagine if your campaign is nicely optimized and targeting affordable but high-yield keywords and precise geo-targeted audiences. So far, so good, right?

What happens when a potential client is served the ad but finds the ad copy boring, uninspiring, or confusing? Even though a few of the links in your marketing chain are strong, a single weak chain—at any point in the process—is enough to stop a future client in their tracks.

Let’s look at some other ways that “weak links” can break a marketing effort, using PPC as an example:

• Keywords: instead of attracting prospective clients in need of treatment, you reach someone writing a research paper on drug addiction or looking for rehab for a broken leg
• Ads: you’re reaching the right people, but they aren’t clicking because the ad copy isn’t compelling
• Targeting: you’re reaching the wrong audience with the wrong insurances
• Landing page: you’ve compelled people to click on your ad, but very few convert when they reach your lackluster landing page
• Admissions: you’re getting leads and inquiries but very few real conversations because of your slow response time or poor admissions experience—or you’ve sold prospects on a service you don’t offer, such as detox
• Social proof: you have strong initial conversations that end up going nowhere because of bad reviews, an outdated website, a weak brand, or limited follow-up

Chances are you aren’t an expert in every area we’ve discussed above (one person rarely is.) Maybe you’re reasonably confident in your ability to target an audience or to write some basic ad copy. Or maybe you’ve outsourced those responsibilities to others and just need to understand whether or not the ads are working.

Either way, as the person at the top, you’re ultimately accountable for whether the initiative as a whole—the entire chain, to use our metaphor—works. After all, as the person running the campaign, you’re the only person who has influence over every single component.

So rather than getting frustrated and blaming others if you aren’t getting results, your job is to become the expert in identifying what’s not working and putting the right people and processes in place to fix them. If you determine that the people in charge of a particular component can’t fix it, you should replace them with someone who can.

The job of a growth-focused leader is to demand accountability at every stage of the path to purchase. Remember: you demand accountability, not request it.

How do you get started examining your marketing efforts and holding people accountable? First, you need to identify what isn’t working.

This where a scary marketing term comes into play—Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. This is the kind of jargon that many people like to toss around to pretend they are marketing experts. In fact, the underlying concept is actually rather simple.

A Key Performance Indicator is essentially a fancy way of saying a high-level metric (that is, something important that can be measured) that summarizes whether you’re getting the desired result from a given tactic.

Remember that KPIs tell us what is broken, not why something isn’t working. Once we have data indicating something is amiss, it’s up to us to troubleshoot and figure out why.

When you’re creating your first set of KPIs, think about which part of your marketing process—the chain that links your prospects to your business—is broken. Where are potential clients dropping off during the marketing process?

Let’s go back to our PPC example to bring this to life. Let’s say you know your PPC ads aren’t performing as well as you would like, so you decide to pick a series of KPIs to track what’s gone wrong.

Here are some questions you can answer through KPIs:

• Am I not getting many clicks?
• Am I getting clicks but few leads?
• Am I getting a lot of leads but few conversations?
• Am I have promising conversations with little follow up?

Once you have identified the areas that are underperforming and have started to track them through KPIs, you’ll quickly be able to identify the possible breakdown points.

From there, you’ll want to enlist your team members responsible for those areas and give them the opportunity to fix the weak points in the process. After a short period of time, you can then use those KPIs to determine whether their “fixes” are working, and adjust accordingly once more.

The good news is that KPIs will remain relevant throughout the entire lifecycle of a marketing initiative. You may decide to stop measuring one area and start measuring another, but using KPIs as measurement tools is a key part of the process of improving performance and making your return on marketing investment more predictable for the long term.

8. Understand Pay-Per-Click ads

The next few chapters are going to be quick dives into several key marketing channels, tactics, and terms so you can get up to speed quickly on digital marketing, whether you’re a seasoned veteran or just starting out.

Let’s start with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. If you’ve ever searched for something on Google and seen an AdWords result, or noticed a text ad on LinkedIn, you’ve seen an example of PPC ads in the wild.

Why are PPC ads so popular? They are the fastest technique for generating leads in digital marketing, often reaching huge audiences quickly.

On the flip side, however, PPC advertising can quickly become the most expensive digital marketing channel as you start to increase your budget to keep up with the competition.

Another challenge to PPC ads is that, although all the ads look similar, there is no formula for what works from business to business. What works for one treatment provider won’t necessarily work for the other, so piggybacking off your competitor’s success or copycatting a well-known brand is doomed to failure (besides being unethical).

Before you launch your campaign, understand the four major components to a successful PPC campaign that generates a high number of qualified leads:

• The right keywords
• The right geography
• The right ad copy
• The right landing page

Make sure that each component above is developed by a specialist in the field rather than a generalist doing it all at once. Once the campaign is underway, have someone trained in data analysis—such as a data scientist or business analytics expert—continually review the results so you make sure you’re getting an accurate picture of what’s happening.

Because it’s easy to quickly overspend your budget on PPC ads, it’s important to keep a close eye on both ad results and ad spending in the first 60 days after launching a campaign. Are you spending an amount that makes you comfortable? Are you seeing results? Are the leads that you are generating similar to the type of client you want to attract?

As you grow your PPC efforts, stay focused on attracting the right clients rather than a large volume of leads. It’s a lot easier to scale a moderately-sized campaign that’s working well then optimize a large campaign that’s performing poorly.

If you’re lucky, you’ll attract a handful of clients which can pay for an entire month’s PPC budget, but don’t simply sit and wait. Keep a close eye on what you’re spending and the potential return on your investment. We recommend checking your data weekly, since PPC results often fluctuate widely (it’s not uncommon to get 0 phone calls one day and 20 the next.)

While it’s tempting to obsess over every fluctuation in your campaign, looking at the numbers week-by-week (with a bigger analysis each month) will keep campaign performance in perspective. Remember to stay patient and understand that your first year of PPC advertising is helping you set the benchmark for future performance. After that, you’ll have a better understanding of seasonal trends and other factors due to the historical data you can access.

Many executives who run PPC campaigns feel it’s important to funnel traffic directly to their website, especially if they have invested heavily in the look and feel of their main site. We’ve found the opposite often works better.

By leading potential clients to a customized landing page—that is, a separate one-page website optimized for conversions—often leads to more conversions (such as phone calls or filled-out forms) than sending someone straight to a site, where they can get lost or overwhelmed.

Plus, the more consistent and branded the experience can be for a potential client, the more likely they will feel they can trust your business with a major life decision.

As you let your PPC campaigns run and gather data, you’ll be tempted to worry over every metric presented to you on your ad campaign dashboard. Here’s a handy cheat sheet for what matters and what doesn’t when it comes to PPC ad data:

Don’t be concerned with:

• Cost Per Click
• Launching ads quickly

Be concerned with:

• Quality Score
• Cost Per Qualified Lead (lower this by capturing more leads)
• Lead Qualification Rate (here are some tips on improving that)

Watch out for these common pitfalls:

• High volume of wrong numbers
• Too many leads with incorrect insurance or cash pay requirements
• A campaign using a large number of “broad match” keywords
• A campaign with a large number of negative keywords that is still performing poorly

If your PPC campaign involves increasing the number of phone calls to your admissions team, you should use a software solution like Call Tracking Metrics to record all incoming calls linked to your campaign. This is easy to set up and involves using a dedicated phone number connected to your PPC ads.

When you’re just starting out with this type of PPC campaign, it’s a good idea to listen to every call recording yourself—or better yet, pick up the phone yourself to get an idea of the type of leads the campaign is generating.

9. Understand Facebook & Instagram advertising

For a long time, social media was seen as an untapped resource for marketers, especially as the audience for platforms like Facebook and Instagram grew. But as marketers became more experienced with these platforms, they realized that, despite their huge reach and potential, they aren’t going to replace all other marketing channels anytime soon.

Unlike PPC ads, which are usually triggered by relevant searches in search engines like Google or Bing, social media advertising isn’t as targeted. While this can be a major downside, the sheer audience size on the major platforms can sometimes outweigh these concerns. For example, Facebook has the cheapest potential Cost per Admission of any short-term lead generation advertising platform.

We’re going to focus primarily on Facebook here (and, since Facebook owns Instagram, we’re going to use that name to refer to both platforms.) Like Google and Bing, you must be LegitScript certified to advertise on Facebook.

As we mentioned earlier, the biggest challenge to using Facebook for advertising is that there is no clear way to decipher commercial intent among its audience—in other words, you can’t easily tell when someone is actually interested in your services. As a result, you get a random mix of people who are ready for treatment now as well as people who might be ready at some point in the future.

Because of this, you’ll need to focus on getting a high volume of leads and that you will then need to manually sort based on priority of need. If your ads are effective, you should be able to attract a large pool of people who need immediate follow-up. However, if you end up with a mix of people in different stages of their journey, you can still be successful with dedicated follow-up touchpoints.

In general, Facebook audiences skew heavily (90%) towards filling out forms versus picking up the phone and contacting businesses directly. This means that you’ll need to particularly proactive in terms of following up on any leads.

One best practice we recommend for Facebook follow-up is allowing no more than 5 minutes to elapse before following up with a form fill lead, with 4 attempts by phone and 4 attempts by email or text message before you give up on each lead. Believe it or not, but data shows that waiting more than 5 minutes to respond can drop your success rate by 90%. This is a surprising statistic, we know, but it shows the importance of being responsive on social media platforms.

It’s also good practice, at least in the beginning, to review each form fill submission personally before following up. This allows you to see exactly how effective the campaigns actually are at attracting the kind of clients you want. With some fine-tuning, Facebook and other social media platforms can help you quickly and effectively lower your Cost Per Admission.

Of course, like every platform, Facebook has red flags and pitfalls for unsuspecting marketers. Watch out for:

• A high volume of leads that require more than a few minutes follow-up
• A high volume of wrong numbers
• An excessive amount of leads with incorrect insurance or cash pay requirements
• A high volume of web traffic for a very low cost-per-click but very few leads

10. Understand SEO and blogging

Search engine optimization (SEO) and blogging are the slowest but most cost-effective way to generate leads for your business.

These methods, which include creating and optimizing the content on your website, take some time to gain momentum, but once they are up and running, they can be used to attract clients who are ready for treatment right away.

Still, if you’re in a rush, it’s better to consider alternatives like PPC and social advertising to fill the gap while you build your SEO and blogging practice. A typical timetable for results is about 6-12 months before seeing a substantial return on your investment.

However, don’t let this timeframe scare you away. SEO and blogging are highly effective ways to attract an audience, even if they take time to build. Like compounding interest in investing, doing something small now is better than waiting until you can do something bigger all at once.

When you’re just getting started with these two disciplines, it’s easy to get distracted by metrics that don’t matter. These include:

• Whether you rank #1 on Google: search results on Google and other search engines vary person to person, as your search experience is customized based on your location, the device you’re using, and your previous search history—which is different than your ideal client
• Vanity keywords: don’t compare how you stack up relative to your competitors on “vanity keywords” related to your industry, as no two people’s searches are alike
• Worrying more about “linkbacks” than actually creating valuable content people can use

Another important point to remember when embarking on an SEO and blogging effort is that there is no point in trying to “game the system” and beat the search engines at their own game.

The driving motivation for Google, Bing, and other search engines is to provide the absolute best search experience for their users. This is what keeps users returning to their platform.

Take, for example, Google’s decision in 2017 to ban Google Ads from addiction treatment providers out of concerns that advertisers were using deceptive practices to confuse or manipulate users. Google made this decision because the trust of users in their platform is key to their success as a business.

So when you’re thinking about performing well on Google or another search engine, think about the kind of content they want to promote: results that their users can trust. Rather than doing what your competitors are doing and simply blogging for the SEO boost, create blog content designed to genuinely help people. Not only will it improve your search engine ranking, it will increase trust of your brand among potential customers.

Now that we know what metrics not to focus on when blogging and doing SEO updates, let’s talk about what metrics actually matter, including:

• Each month’s year-over-year increase in overall traffic volume
• Volume of long-tail keywords in which you rank first
• Providing high-quality content and user experiences for people searching
• Consistent content creation around keywords and topics that are already bringing in traffic

As we mentioned earlier, there’s no point in trying to manipulate results or find shortcuts to success. The search engine industry responds best to old school, tried-and-true techniques that make it tough for businesses to compete without effort and discipline. These techniques include:

• Traditional link building (that is, linking to others and being linked back in return)
• High-quality blog posts that are either under 500 words or more than 1,000 words (avoid the uninteresting middle)
• Attention to detail in content creation (are you creating content that no one else is creating or are you just pumping it out?)

In addition to these traditional approaches, there are a few new techniques that are effective in boosting your content creation and SEO efforts. These include:

• Posting content at a regular interval
• Page load time on mobile (AMP) pages: page load time, especially on mobile, is an increasingly important ranking factor, plus slow-loading sites typically have higher bounce rates
• Evaluating time on site and time on page: these metrics are used by Google to see how long someone stays on your site before clicking the Back button
• Adjusting your headlines for better CTR: Google has been known to prioritize sites based on their clickthrough rates
• Social media following and interaction: a large number of people liking, sharing, and commenting on your content makes a big difference
• Influencers are the new link backs: interesting rich media and interactive content on your website can get high-profile people engaged
• Rich media: make use of video, audio, long-form PDFS, infographic, and interactive content
• Podcasting: you can produce a large amount of content in a relatively short period of time with audio production

11. Understand analytics and measurement tools

We’ve talked several times in this guide about the importance of measuring your marketing efforts so you can make smart decisions informed by data, not by guesswork.

But how do you actually go about measuring things in the first place?

For many business executives, the easiest, most accessible, and certainly most affordable analytics tool on the market is Google Analytics, a free web-based tool that can measure traffic and interaction on virtually any website.

As one of the web’s most popular analytics tools, Google Analytics is the standard across industries, but that doesn’t mean it’s without flaws. A few points to consider when you’re setting up your first Google Analytics account are:

• The same people may be tracked as unique visitors because they are visiting your site from different devices at different times
• Many SEO keywords will not show up by default due to new Google privacy initiatives (integrating Google Search Console can help with this)
• Your direct traffic numbers may be artificially inflated
• Your ad campaigns may not be tracked properly
• You can’t add Analytics tracking code to your site and expect everything to be accurate—use an analytics expert to configure it instead
• Make sure you have goal tracking and conversion tracking properly enabled
• Beware of duplicative data between Google Analytics and your other analytics sources

This isn’t an argument against using Google Analytics—it’s difficult to beat for versatility, ease of use, and price. But remember that simply plugging in the tracking code on your site isn’t sufficient for an accurate interpretation of your data. Hire an analytics expert to install it instead to ensure you’re seeing accurate numbers.

Once you have Google Analytics up and running properly, you can add advanced analytics systems on top to provide further context to the data that you’re seeing. These systems include weather data, to track connections between the weather and potential client behavior, and website-related data such as scroll reach, mouse movements, and even screen recordings to help optimize your site or landing pages for calls and form fills.

If you don’t already, it’s wise to use a paid software plan to record and track all incoming prospect calls from different sources. If you’re not personally answering the phones when leads call, it’s important that you take the time to listen to each call to make sure you understand both the types of leads you’re receiving and the way they are handled within your office.

With this data, you can even set up a recurring admissions meeting to look at the new opportunities that have arrived recently and discuss the status of older leads.

During that meeting, you can use the insights from the call tracking system to answer key questions like:

• What was the quality of the lead?
• How many times were they followed up with?
• Were there clear next steps in the conversation?

As you review your lead flow more closely in meetings like this one, you’ll want to start to record your findings in a system that allows you to see the big picture of open and closed leads.

You may already use a customer relationship management (CRM) system such as Zoho or Salesforce. If you don’t, now is a good time to look into whether you can afford the monthly cost of operating such a system. A well-organized CRM can quickly pay for itself in the number of leads it can help you manage. If you’re concerned about the cost or upkeep of a CRM system, you can use a basic spreadsheet to track open and closed leads.

It’s also important to take time to “score” your leads by quality. This helps you identify not only which leads are most likely to convert—and thus are worth investing time and resources in—but also which marketing channels are producing quality leads and which are producing poorly targeted ones. This information can then be used to determine which channels to invest in further and which to cut.

If you’d like more advanced lead tracking, talk to an analytics expert about assigning UTM codes within Google Analytics to improve your revenue attribution abilities. This is an advanced step suitable for businesses that have their marketing in good shape but are looking for further refinement, and it’s a critical step for any business looking to reach the next milestone of growth.

Up until now, we’ve focused on tracking digital marketing and phone calls. But what happens when you’re using traditional media like TV, radio, print, and out of home advertising? In that case, you can try using a technique called Media Mix Modeling (MMM), which uses a variety of data points and some statistical analysis to predict how marketing channels can impact your bottom line. Unfortunately, you’ll need about three years of data at a minimum to be able to use this technique effectively.

Now that you’ve begun to assemble data in locations like Google Analytics, CRM systems, or lead tracking documents, you’ll need a place to bring all those numbers together to see the big picture. One easy way to get started with that top-line analysis is through a simple dashboard, which can help you summarize all this data into a few Key Performance Indicators. You can make your own dashboard through Google Sheets and some clever integrations, but we recommend bringing in a data science and analytics expert to set one up for you and ensure you’re seeing your data accurately.

12. Understand marketing “speak”

Like all industries, marketing has its own language, from acronyms and jargon to slang and buzzwords. But sometimes just because you hear someone use a marketing term doesn’t mean they actually understand what it means.

To help you decipher the endless stream of terms and code words in the industry, we’ve assembled a handy glossary below.

General:

ROI: Return On Investment compares the cost of a tactic to how much revenue it has brought in. A higher ROI is better than a low or negative ROI.

KPI: In marketing, Key Performance Indicators are high-level metrics that summarize how well a tactic is accomplishing its stated purpose.

CPA: Cost Per Admission or Cost Per Acquisition is the total amount you spend on marketing divided by your total number of clients. This helps you to assess whether your marketing efforts are profitable. We also believe that it’s the ethical thing to do.

CPL: Cost Per Lead is the dollar amount you spend on a marketing tactic divided by the total number of leads that tactic generated

VOB: Verification of Benefits is a metric related to how many of your leads ended up being eligible for treatment at your program.

Advertising:

PPC: Pay Per Click advertising usually refers to Google or Bing, although many other marketing tactics operate on a Pay Per Click model

CPC: Cost Per Click or Cost Per Conversion based on context. Cost Per Click refers to the price paid in an online advertising auction, and usually ties into your Cost Per Lead or Cost Per Conversion.

CTR: Click Through Rate, the number of people that clicked your ad divided by the number of people that saw your ad. Often used as a measure of how well your ads are performing.

CPM: Cost Per Thousand, a common way of pricing display banner, display and video advertising. The price per individual ad view is very small, so companies translate it to what you would pay per thousand ad views to make the number more relevant.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization, the process of trying to improve long-term rankings in Google and other search engines without directly paying for advertising.

Measurement Tools and Other Technology:

GA: Google Analytics

A/B: A/B Testing, the process of comparing multiple versions of advertisements, websites or emails against each other to see what gets the best results.

API: Application Programming Interface, a set of standards that acts as a universal connector between websites and databases. APIs allow you to connect data from one source to another source.