3 Ketamine Clinic Marketing Mistakes To Avoid in 2024

Editor’s Note: This blog was originally published on 01-11-2021 and has been updated on 07-21-2024 to ensure accuracy, relevance, and the inclusion of the latest information.

Synopsis: Explore vital marketing strategies to avoid common pitfalls in promoting your ketamine clinic. Gain practical advice drawn from our own experiences to help you effectively reach potential patients and ensure your innovative treatments gain the visibility they deserve.

Key Takeaway: Effective marketing is crucial for the success of your ketamine clinic; it's not just about providing great service but also ensuring potential patients know about you and can find your clinic easily.

Effective marketing is crucial for the success of your ketamine clinic; it's not just about providing great service but also ensuring potential patients know about and can find your clinic easily.

A successful service based business requires outstanding service and innovative effective marketing. Sure there is a lot more to running a business, but these two components are a must-have! Ketamine infusions are transforming the treatment of mood and pain disorders, so you already have a great service to provide there with your ketamine infusion clinic. 

BUT if nobody knows your clinic exists, you are in trouble. We know, you just want to be your own boss by opening a ketamine clinic, providing effective ketamine treatments, and making an income that would rival your current hospital based salary. Marketing is probably the last thing on your mind.

Owning our own ketamine infusion clinic over the years, we’ve made a lot of mistakes. From these mistakes, we learned a lot, but at the price of a little (or a lot) of pain. And hopefully from the mistakes that we’ve experienced, you get some golden nuggets of wisdom from them to apply to your ketamine clinic!

Perhaps you already have a ketamine clinic but you’d love to have more patients. Or you are about to open one and you want to start out on the right foot. So do yourself a favor and learn about the 3 ketamine infusions marketing mistakes you should avoid: 

Patients care more about what you can do for them rather than what you’ve achieved.

Mistake #1: Your marketing materials focus on you instead of who you are serving.

What this looks like: You’re promoting your new office remodel or posting that it’s somebody’s birthday in the office. You have little engagement on your social media, and a potential patient has no clue what to expect from your clinic. 

Definitely share good news and things you are proud of - social media is about being social! We’ve been guilty of this, after all, all the mistakes we are sharing are ones we have made!  But patients want to know what you can do for them rather than how cool you think you are. Your marketing should educate, entertain, or inspire your potential patients while also being authentic. We are in the information age filled with very tech savvy patients. They will research ketamine and want to know if your clinic is the place to be. 

As of the writing of this update, some of the most popular social media content is “BTS” content aka “behind-the-scenes” content. This really is a no-brainer, because who doesn’t love knowing what is really going on! 

While on the surface it looks like this content is more self-focused, the behind-the-scenes content that does really well is actually very patient-oriented. 

Think about it. After you watch great behind-the-scenes content for a business, you feel like you know them better. You appreciate them a little more. The key here is that you feel more connected to them. The content they made spoke to you and drew you into them. There is definitely an art to this. It’s a balance and finding that right balance can change and evolve overtime.

Key takeaway: Your marketing content should be able to answer the basic questions potential patients want answered plus also show who you are, thereby clarifying why they should choose you over someone else.

Invest more of your resources into SEO, which is one of the best organic ways to be found online.

Mistake #2: Allocating time and money to traditional marketing, but not to SEO. 

What this looks like: You have a well produced commercial airing on local TV, but if you were to google your clinic, you’d find nothing on the first page or even the third page of the search results. 

Unless a potential patient is being referred to you from a doctor or recommended by a former patient, chances are they are going online and researching their ketamine clinic options. So your clinic’s website needs to be on that search result. This is where SEO (search engine optimization) comes into play. Optimizing your website for organic (unpaid) reach is key in today’s market even if you are going to use paid advertising. 

Early on, the majority of patients found us by personally searching online instead of being referred to us by a physician. 

Storytime:

It took about a year being open before we had consistent physician referrals. We spent a lot of money and time making flyers, informational packets, and making calls to potential referring physicians in our area. This was back in 2018 during the early days of this industry (we’re still in the early days, to be honest) plus we were new and had minimal connections. 

In other words, the local docs didn’t know us and were not sure about the legitimacy of ketamine treatments. When we realized we were not getting any traction with this strategy, we pivoted.  We started to create content on our website that would help with our website’s SEO but more importantly be visible to our potential ideal patients who would be searching online. This strategy has continued to pay off to this day!

A mistake that our potential competition is making that we are benefiting from are billboards. Billboards are great at getting people’s attention. But when was the last time you saw a billboard, stopped and wrote down or took a picture of the billboard so that later you could call the number on it? Never right? 

You go home and Google what you thought you remembered you saw on the billboard, if at all. We’ve gotten lots of calls from people who had seen “our” billboard when in fact we don’t even have our own!  Please save your money, or better yet allocate your money where it will be the most effective.

Key takeaway:Include SEO in your marketing budget and get someone to help you with this (if you are not interested in learning & doing this yourself). Goal is to be easily found online!

The key is to be adaptable in your marketing strategy and seeing what works best for you and your clinic.

Mistake #3: Not being adaptable with your marketing strategy.

What this looks like: You spent a lot of cash on gorgeous pamphlets or you’re adamant that you need to have a commercial because your competition does. You’re getting a lot of likes and comments on your Facebook page but don’t take advantage of it. 

You need to adapt and lean in to where your potential patients are. Redirect cash and time to being where your potential patients are online. 

Storytime:

Our first year out, we paid beaucoup bucks to be in a local health trade magazine. We had two leads from this magazine, but neither patient completed their six initiation infusions. We did not recoup our cost from this marketing misadventure. But, we really loved how professional we looked in the magazine. The article and photos looked amazing! 

The following year, the magazine came to us asking if we’d do it again. However, by then, we realized already that we need to be adaptable. It wasn’t a total mistake nor disaster when we did it the prior year because we were new to the area and had yet to establish ourselves. We felt at that time that we were making the right move. 

But as we became more established, our patients started coming from referrals and online search. So instead of spending more money on this, we used that same money we would have spent on the magazine, to spend it on further improving our website and SEO. 
When we’ve asked other ketamine clinic owners what marketing efforts were successful for them before, some did really well with radio and newspaper ads. Would that have worked for us? Maybe. Would that still work for them now? Not sure. We recognized what was working for us (SEO in our case), and leaned into it. 

Key takeaway: Spend time and money on what is actually working for you rather than what you think is working or what your competition is doing.  

Marketing!?! All I Wanted To Do Was Practice Medicine!

Marketing is key to keeping your clinic busy, afloat, and successful. You might have a bad taste in your mouth about marketing as it may bring up memories of pharmaceutical companies or a McDonald’s commercial. If you need some convincing about marketing, think of it this way: you are providing a revolutionizing effective treatment. By not letting people know about your clinic and ketamine therapy, you are depriving them the opportunity to benefit from ketamine. 

We’ve been running our ketamine clinic since 2018 and have worked hand-in-hand with fellow physicians who want to start their own clinic. From this experience, we’ve received questions from other clinic owners on who we do our marketing with and how we do our marketing. We realized that marketing is as important as the life-changing ketamine treatments. 

You can have all the medical knowledge plus the passion and integrity to transform your patients lives, but if they don’t know about you or where to find you…well it’s like you don’t exist. 

Do better than us. We want you to succeed because the demand for ketamine treatments and psychedelic therapy is only going to increase from here. So avoid the mistakes above. Get the message out that you are open and here to serve your community. 

Was this helpful? Want to learn more about marketing and specifically marketing ketamine infusions? Sign up here to be notified for our next free ketamine marketing webinar or check out our other marketing blogs!

Related Questions:

Why is search engine optimization (SEO) important for ketamine clinics?

• SEO is critical because most potential patients begin their search for treatments online. If your clinic isn't easily found on search engines, you're missing out on significant patient engagement and potential business.

What are some ways to create effective marketing for ketamine clinics?

• Prepare by understanding your audience's needs, focusing on digital marketing strategies that increase visibility and credibility, and continuously adapting your approach based on what works.

If you enjoyed this blog, check out these other marketing blog posts:

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Explore vital marketing strategies to avoid common pitfalls in promoting your ketamine clinic. Gain practical advice drawn from our own experiences to help you effectively reach potential patients and ensure your innovative treatments gain the visibility they deserve.

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