Welcome to the latest edition of Delivering Recovery. Today, I'm talking to Circle Social owner and CEO, Nick Jaworski, about filling your beds in the age of AI. So Nick, thank you so much for joining us today.

Yeah, appreciate you having me on, Joanna. Thanks so much. 

This is just a fascinating topic to me.
Can you just kick us off by talking about how AI search has really changed the game for treatment center owners? 

Yeah, it's a major shift in some senses, and also at the same time, exactly the way it's always been. And so I'll explain that. So when we look at Google and the way it's search engine optimization works and how we're trying to constantly rank and get ranking for key terms like drug rehab near me, addiction treatment near me, what does cocaine look like? How do I identify cocaine? What do I do if I have a loved one using, all these terms that you're trying to rank for, that is starting to shift significantly in a couple of ways.

So for the past couple of years, Google has really been localizing their search results. And this makes sense. Most people wanna go near home.

Most people are looking for outpatient services rather than residential services. Google doesn't understand the business well enough to get really nuanced with that anyway. And so when we look at our search results and what the work we do for clients, we're constantly trying to rank in the map packs and generally anywhere from a 30 to a 50 mile radius around the facility, because that's what Google prefers to show.

So can you rank statewide? Yes, it's still possible, but it takes a lot of effort and a lot of money. So we have this localization aspect that's been in the works for a while. And then there's this other component where what we really used to do was just try to rank for as many terms as possible, whether it was really high intent or lower intent, all of that added to your overall site traffic, which kind of lifted your domain authority up and allowed some one-offs to come through.

Maybe you had an inquiry call come off of a weird search term and that was valuable. Google is moving away from that and they really want concentration. They want to see that you are an expert in your space and ideally locally.

So they're really looking for a lot more unique content than they used to in the past. So these search trends are completely shifting the way that you do SEO. And then on top of that, we have our AI search.

And this is really conversational in terms of the way people search. So you probably have done it yourself, if you think about it, by searching for a pizza restaurant, just type in your pizza joint and Google will automatically identify where I am and show me local pizza places, right? It's not showing me pizza places in New York or Chicago, it's showing me pizza places in Indianapolis, where I am. So addiction treatment works the same way.

But with AI, people are talking to it, they're asking it conversational questions. They'll be like, say, hey, is there a place around here that takes Cigna insurance? Those are Google searches that almost never came up in the past. So it's a very, very small volume in a normal Google search, but it's much more common in an AI search.

You also get really simple questions like, hey, I'm going to this treatment center, where do I park? Or if I'm using Cigna insurance, like how much am I gonna pay out of pocket? Or how many days does it take if I do residential care? And so the AI bots are actually going and searching websites and third-party sites to gather this information. And if it's not out there, sometimes it hallucinates and makes stuff up. 

Great.

Yeah, I know, they're working on that. That's getting better, right? But that's a change that's happening. And so what we're having to do with a lot of client sites is really get granular in some of those information pieces. So there's entire pages that we're designing with LLMs, with large language models in mind, and the way that search behavior is changing.

But what's really important is when we look at standard Google rankings and how the algorithm rank things, a lot of that came from your website. So you owned it, right? We can create the content on the website. We can reach out and support interlinking across the website and kind of help Google understand the structure.

The LLMs, the AI bots, they are much more so cross-referencing and using third-party validated information. So review sites, anything around like news or local journalism is big, cross-referencing what other people are telling you. So you're really no longer the authority on you, like it used to be the case with Google.

The AI bots start with your website and they say, okay, these people take Cigna insurance of a 30-day residential, or they're outpatient and they do PHP, IOP. AI then goes and cross-references that with all the reviews out there, with what other people are saying about you. And then it says, okay, that is true, or we don't see that to be true.

And where this becomes important would be an example. We have a client where they take Medicaid, but they are about 55% commercial on average. And they would rather have the commercial from a revenue standpoint, but because they take Medicaid and they're one of the only providers in the entire state that takes Medicaid, that's what people tend to talk about when they're referencing them across the web, whether it's a social media post or on their blog.

And so the AI bots will kick back that, hey, this is a Medicaid-focused provider. It's not quite accurate, partly true, right? So now we're having the situation where we have to own the narrative across the entire web, because what third-party sites are saying about us is more important often than what we're saying on our own site. And so going back to my first comment about why this is kind of the same, is that's how marketing and reputation has always been.

If we think about from a word-of-mouth standpoint, we don't control what other people say about us. Now it's all online. We can search it, we can find it, and the LLMs are doing a great job of finding that information.

But really people are having these conversations with their families, with their providers, with their friends, and what people are saying about you when you're not in the room definitely determines whether you get a referral, whether you get a recommendation, whether someone tells their family member to give you a call or give a competitor a call. So that was invisible before, and now it's just a lot more visible. So that's where there is the same, the differences. So I'll stop there, because that's a lot. 

So one of the things you said I thought was interesting, you just said that they wanna know how long is the stay and how much am I gonna pay out of pocket if I have Cigna? That stuff never used to be on websites, right? I mean, I don't remember looking at a website and saying, oh, well, they recommend 30 days, and it's gonna be $30,000 out of pocket. I mean, I don't remember ever seeing that.

In fact, 10 years ago, I wanted to put pricing up on the Conquer Addiction website, and the treatment centers really pushed back against that. And I said, okay, I'm not gonna battle that. But so are you finding that your clients are adding that type of information? 


That's a great question. So we're adding it, yes, for our clients, but it is something that still gets a bit of pushback because they're not comfortable with it. You know, we had the same issue when we started doing a lot more deductible collection, right? And so people originally would not collect deductibles, right, 10 years ago, and now you have to, and there's a lot of legal compliance around it. And so all of our clients were really nervous, and we'd say, hey, look, we've got tons of clients that are collecting deductibles on a regular basis.

Whenever I go to my doctor, to my dentist, they have deductibles, very normal in healthcare. It's not a surprise. You know, but there was all this fear around it.

Like, oh my God, we've never done this before. Once we start doing it, we're gonna lose all the patients, and they're all gonna go to some competitor that's not doing that. So it's really the same situation.

When you have your pricing on your website, and remember, the federal government mandated hospitals, they're all legally required to have charge master price lists on their sites now. So this is normal across healthcare, and you can put on it and say, hey, look, here is the top level pay rate, but your insurance is probably gonna cover a certain proportion of it. So we look at it the same way.

We have not seen a reduction in call volume. We have not seen less admissions coming in just because we're being transparent with pricing on the site. Um One other comment I'd make that you got brought up is, you didn't have, used to have it on there, and it wasn't as necessary before, because it's a pain in the butt, right? You think you go to a website, you're trying to find some information, I wanna find pricing for this provider.

I gotta dig through that site and find where they got it and see where it is on the page, and they probably buried it in like an accordion pop-up menu because they don't wanna display it, right? Well, the LLMs do that for you. So I just say, hey, check ChatGPT - what's the price? And within half a second, they find it on the site and show it to me. So that's why it's becoming so much more important, because before patients weren't bothering because they didn't wanna dig, but now because it takes them half a second, and if you don't have it on there, then it's frustrating to them.

Also remember, especially with commercial insurance, most people are searching anywhere from three to six different providers, and they're researching them, they make a short list, they decide who to call. So they'll just ask ChatGPT and say, hey, what are the price differences between this? And ChatGPT will literally give you a table with the name of the provider, the prices, the length of stay, right? Just spit it out for you real fast. And if you've got nothing there, now they just might take you off the short list.

They're like, oh, these people aren't transparent, or I don't know, so I'm gonna call the providers I know. So you wanna think of it all from this user experience. Transparency is better, information is better.

And because it's so accessible with the LLMs, where it wasn't before, and so easy for people with almost no investment of time on their part to run these comparisons, you have to be there to be competitive. 

Fascinating, fascinating. So you said that there's a lot of changes in what people are searching and they're searching.

I know I write in things that might be 30 words long, very specific queries that I'm trying to get the answers to. So how do you prepare your clients to rank for those or to be found for those kinds of queries? 

Yeah, really important. So there's two main things that we look at.

One is there's still primary search term kind of centrality in the way that the LLMs work. So let's say that I'm searching for addiction treatment near me. That's still my primary term, right? And that's how Google operates, that's how the LLM operates.

You might ask that question in a variety of different ways. Hey, where are the best addiction treatment centers near me? What addiction treatment centers look good near me? Which ones, Chat GPT, what treatment centers do you recommend, right? All of those are different ways of asking the same question. So in terms of the machine language and the learning and the outputs, it's still centering around addiction treatment as your primary term.

So you don't have to worry about that too much because the AI is being so sophisticated that it understands all the different potential variations of that primary term. So we're still trying to rank for addiction treatment, right? So that's our baseline there. Now you have all these other queries that I was talking about there.

That's really the main difference is people are following up on this. So I'm great, I've got my short list and now I'm gonna ask ChatGPT to give me a table of cost comparisons or give me a table of what their differentiators are. And also really important, can the bots understand what the difference is? So if I say, hey, can you tell me what's good about these three providers and why I might choose one? Those are questions that people will ask.

Everyone's gonna have on their website, evidence-based care, dual diagnosis. So if you've got that on the website, well, now you're just looking the same as everyone else, right? And this is the same exact thing that people would do when people are researching it, but because it's so much easier, they'll do the legwork now, whereas before they would probably call. They're like, I don't wanna dig for this and do all the research, I'll just call and ask.

So now you're not getting that call stage in the beginning. And so we have a lot of clients when we first started working with them, they'll have evidence-based on the site. Well, what the hell does that mean? Patients don't know.

And if every single provider has evidence-based somewhere on their homepage near the top, then now we still don't know how to differentiate you or why we would choose one or the other. So what we really want is we want a linked text, right? So hyperlink an internal page that tells how we deliver evidence-based treatment and hopefully something like your outcomes, right? So do we have a piece on research and can we display outcomes related to our evidence-based treatment? That's gonna show up in the ChatGPT results and that's gonna be really impactful for if people are gonna make a call or not. So it's understanding that you kind of got those two different levels or scales of search functionality.

One, we're trying to rank or show up in an AI response to a query and that's your primary search terms. But then there's all these follow-ups that people are asking. So we really have to think through that because it's so idiosyncratic.

And the other challenge we have with AI that's really shifting the game is AI learns you. So the more that you use it, the more individuated it becomes. Now Google did this too.

Like if you and I sit next to each other and search the same exact term, we'll actually get slightly different results a lot of the time, because it knows your age, your search history, the things you like and knows mine. And so we get slightly variegated results. AI does that to a much larger degree.

So it really gets to know you and spits out individuated results. And so for that reason, we can't just provide a blanket experience to the user or different answers. Really quick, funny story.

I was talking with my daughter last night and we have a little Alexa Echo Dot in her room. I was just joking around and say, hey Alexa, who's cooler, me or Jasmine, my daughter? And I thought it would be like, oh, I don't know how to answer that. It gave a whole 20 second answer.

It says, well, it's a difficult question, but Jasmine's cooler because Jasmine likes to play Dungeons and Dragons. And Dungeons and Dragons is a very cool social activity that helps with problem solving skills. And she clearly has a creative mentality.

So we think Jasmine is cooler. And then so it knows her search history. It knows what she's engaging with, right? It's combining all of that.

It's fascinating. It's a little scary. 

That's just what I was thinking. That's just a little scary. 

Yeah, yeah. But I mean, so if you asked Alexa that, you would get a completely different answer, right? So that's where we're moving towards.

And so we really wanna be covering all of our bases in terms of how users are behaving, what they're thinking about. It's a lot more about psychology than it is aggregating search terms as we move into the AI world. 

Well, I think what you just said that really struck home with me was that we have to answer the question, how do you differentiate your center? And I just remember from my years looking at treatment center websites, and I think it's still true today, they pretty much all look the same.

Yes.

I mean, you just can't figure out why I'd want to go here versus there. One has a prettier picture of the pool, one has a prettier picture of this, but the real things that you need to know about what type of treatment they provide are not very obvious. So what do you recommend that treatment centers do to answer that question? What differentiates your center? 

It's such an excellent question, and it is the primary issue that we deal with, with a large majority of providers, especially when they first come on.

So I often give the analogy of people delivering what I call vanilla care. We're providing the treatment, right? And we're using all the words, it's evidence-based, it's trauma-informed, it's dual diagnosis. But like you said, that's the same across the board.

So how do you differentiate your center? You have to really think through that. And so what we always tell clients is you should have three primary differentiators. At least one of them has to be unique to your community or competitive environment, right? So if you're a residential, you're looking at kind of statewide or like 150 mile radius.

If you're an outpatient, you just need to look at a 20, 30 mile radius, right? So, but you need to analyze your competitive environment. You also need to understand what your community needs. Do we have trauma-informed providers in this community? And is that something that we're good at? If so, that's a great match, and we should be really leaning into that.

But if every single provider around us has trauma-informed care, and from our evaluation, they seem to be doing a good job with that, then that's not gonna be an outstanding differentiator that's unique to us that we wanna lean into or focus on. So we do spend a lot of work around understanding what the clinical care delivery model is, and there can be lots of things around that. Sometimes people get confused and they think, oh, we have to be the best.

We have to be the best at trauma-informed care. Well, that's a great goal and is definitely a potential unique differentiator, but it can be things like the amount of insurances you can take. It can be speed to care and delivery.

We differentiate some of our larger clients in speed to care with ERs. So ERs are much more concerned about getting a bed freed up and getting someone out to care, and also the medical records components of it. They want that to happen fast.

They want it to be efficient. So the differentiator that we communicate to a hospital is different than we will communicate to a direct-to-consumer standpoint, but that's an area that you can differentiate on. So you have to figure out what your differentiators are.

It doesn't always have to be quality. It can be something around insurances or speed or just involvement in the community can be a big one. Are you seen as a thought leader versus other people? So those are some important components.

Then are we communicating that on the website really accurately? So once we've identified it, how do we make sure that that's clear? And what we really want to do is move towards personalized expertise and localized content. So that's that shift I mentioned in the beginning with Google. To your point, if you look at most treatment provider websites, they all have the same pages.

They all say the same thing. We have to spend, like on the marketing side, we have to spend a lot more time interviewing staff. We have to spend a lot more time researching the community and seeing what the community needs are.

A lot of people don't know that like hospitals, for example, are legally required to do a community needs assessment from a healthcare standpoint every couple of years. So they will actually have a written report that includes behavioral health needs that you can pull, you can research and identify what you want to specialize in or where to focus. But we have to pull all that information together.

So it's not, which sometimes you see people doing these days is kicking stuff into AI and saying, hey, can you spit out 15 different pages on this topic? That's the exact opposite of what Google wants. So Google has actually been punishing AI written content pretty frequently. Last March was a big update.

This April, April 1st was another big update where it just really crashed a number of provider websites that were heavy on AI content because Google wants it to be unique. It wants it to be focused on the community. And so that means doing legwork.

That means not having someone just write an article to write an article or copying what else is out there. You actually have to really think through your community needs. You have to interview your staff and that can be a really good differentiator.

So say, hey, here's our staff. Here's who they are. Here's who's gonna be treating you or who's gonna be treating you.

Here's what they're good at. That's different than what most providers have, right? Most providers just have a blanket document that says, hey, we provide addiction treatment for alcoholism, opioid addiction, stimulants, et cetera, versus, hey, here's Dr. Nick and here's what Dr. Nick says on stimulants and here's the things we've seen with our patients. That's the value add now.

The challenge is it's more time and it's a little bit more expensive to make. 

Interesting. So if you have some of your staff write articles from their own experience and pulling their, you know, pulling research results or other things, writing that, that can be a way to differentiate yourself.

Like if you have a lot of people, patients with meth addiction, you could have one of your staff members just write a number of different articles about how your center specifically treats meth? 

Yes, with caveats. So you have challenges, like you need a strategy when you look at your search engine optimization or your AI engine optimization. We have what's called cannibalization.

So if you're writing pages on similar content, Google and the AI bots will get a little confused and they won't really be sure which ones to reference or which ones to rank. So you don't want your staff just writing stuff willy nilly because it will actually interfere with your ability to show up in AI response queries or in Google search results. So you should be working with either internal staff or an outside agency that understands those components to make sure that there is a clear strategy, your silos are split, there's no cannibalization between content.

So that's one part, but to your other question, yes. Google in general for years has loved having staff writing articles and Google will also cross-reference people. So if I'm writing the article and I just graduated and I just got my LPC, I don't have any other references on Google except maybe my Psychology Today profile.

So Google doesn't give that a lot of weight. Whereas if you have someone that has done research topics and they may be presented at conferences or really wonderful they have a book, Google will find that and then actually give that page more weight and it's more likely to rank higher because you've got someone that is a credible in Google and the AI chatbot's eyes. So those things are really useful and then that personalization aspect.

So I'm looking at multiple different websites, I've got three providers where they all have the same thing in terms of a meth addiction page, right? Here's what's going on with meth addiction, we treat it, blah, blah, blah. Versus here's Dr. John and here's what Dr. John says about meth addiction. Like that's not just for Google and AI, but for me as a potential patient or family searching treatment that speaks to me, that's more valuable.

So yes, it's important to have staff writing content. We don't just wanna give them free reign. You wanna have some kind of expertise assisting them as well.

Interesting. You also mentioned that the AI and others are pulling from reviews and directories and so forth. That is today a really important place to focus on? 

Very much so. Again, the ownership and the authority has really moved away from your website and what you say about yourself, especially with AI. To third-party sources. So we've run a lot of data analyses and a lot of people have heard, for example, that AI loves Reddit.

AI actually doesn't like Reddit for behavioral health. And this has been the way that Google works for a long time, but AI is similar, whereas different industries or different topic clusters, we could say, have different primary sources that they're pulling from. So when we run an analysis of where AI is getting content, so we have a bunch of backend tools and we've got thousands and thousands and thousands of data points where we can pull stuff from, we see that Reddit's not very used, but like recovery.com is considered a primary source by Perplexity, by ChatGPT, by Gemini.

Those three are really using recovery.com as a source of third-party accredited or validated information, let's say. Google reviews are another really big one. So if you say, hey, we're the best top-rated treatment center in Arizona, and then they find out that you've got a 3.5 average star rating on Google, AI will actually kick that back and say, well, actually this provider is claiming something that they're not.

So we now are not sure if we really trust what they're saying about themselves because it doesn't actually match up with what real people are saying about it. So you want to understand like where AI is pulling different information from. The other part there is it's a lot.

So that's what makes it challenging. That's what's changing this whole game. So when I say it's using recovery.com a lot, that's like 3%.

So 3% of the AI chatbots are kind of how they're weighting recovery.com. Then there's hundreds of other websites, hundreds of them that they're pulling from. So recovery.com gets the most by far by like a factor of almost 10, if you look at most of the other sites that are being pulled from. But still, even with that being said, it's still a small percentage overall.

So we have to be thinking, how are we controlling our narrative across the entire web? That's really hard because we've got to talk to people. We've got to get to know people. We've got to say, hey, can we add some information to your website? Can we update this information on your website? But a different way to do that and how we really think about it is it's similar to word of mouth.

How do I change what people are saying about me in the community? I'm not going to go knocking on doors and have conversations with all these people. That's not realistic. But what we are going to do is push out marketing messaging.

So there's a much stronger need for outbound messaging campaigns across channels like Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, because that's us owning our narrative and communicating that out there. As more people see that, then they're like, okay, this is what they're saying about themselves. Ideally, you're backing that up with either you're bringing in testimonials or reviews or referencing third-party data sets like you have with Vista.

All that stuff is really valuable and people will then see that and that's how we start getting backlinks and things like that across the web too. So one of those people on Facebook might be the web admin for the local hospital site. And they're going to say, oh, these people seem to give you really good results.

Let's add them to our resource page on the website. They've never even talked to anyone at your company. They don't know you, but you've been pushing these campaigns out.

You've built trust over time. They're able to validate it. Maybe they've seen your BD rep as well.

So there's an additional kind of trust building point there. But these things working together are then what starts to build your narrative for you across the web. So you're owning it a lot more than you used to have to in the past.

So is it predominantly like Facebook and LinkedIn do you think that are the most important or is it more YouTube or Instagram or are there particular sites that seem to be more credible in this space? 

From a marketing standpoint, we always tell people to be where your audience is. And so where are people that are experiencing behavioral health issues? 

Pretty much everywhere. 

Yeah, right. So you don't have to worry about channel strategy as much as you might with a different vertical where maybe people are more focused. Now with that said, you should be understanding differentiation within the content. So when we're thinking about what channels to be on, for example, we're looking at costs, how much are these platforms charging? Facebook on average will charge about a $10 CPM.

So about $10 for a thousand views. LinkedIn will charge anywhere from 60 to 120. So I'm paying six to 12 times more on LinkedIn, but LinkedIn is also more for B2B audiences.

So if we're using the platform well, we're actually trying to build referral relationships on LinkedIn, whereas with Facebook, we are trying to build direct to consumer channels. So that's a factor. Other things to think about are your capabilities internally.

YouTube really needs to be polished. If I want to throw up a video on Facebook, that's fine. And it can be more of what we call native to the platform.

So it could be just a conversation like this. I could have a talking head of one of my therapists or the medical director, but with YouTube, I really want to have some higher production quality and really push some thought process into that content. So do I have that capability? Do I want to invest that time and that money in that higher level content? That's going to help determine my channel strategy.

So what you were just talking about though, was talking about the price of advertising versus I was thinking just in terms of general posting, but it's more important you think to boost the posts that you do so that they get seen.

I'm glad you brought that up. Absolutely. It's a complete waste of time and money to post for free to social media. So all of these platforms are pay to play. That's how they make their money.

That's their entire business model. They are not giving you free reach. So when you look at, I guarantee anyone that's listening to this podcast, go to your Facebook page and see how many likes and engagement you have on your posts.

Most providers, even really, really large enterprise level national providers are lucky to get 10 likes on a post. It's only being seen by about 3% of your page followers on average across platforms. So you're spending all this time and money, and we get it all the time. 

We get clients that create podcasts, they create really nice YouTube channels. So they spend all this time and money on this wonderful content that nobody's seen. We're working with a really large provider that everyone will know. 

They have a pretty nice YouTube channel. Their average number of views on that YouTube channel, 30. And they have over 50 pieces of content. 

So they spend a lot of time, a lot of money creating this content, and they got 50 views per piece. So if you are going to invest in production of content, you absolutely, absolutely have to have a budget to promote that content so it actually gets seen by people. Now, if you've done that for a while, and it's really good, right, if it's quality content, you might start to build up an organic following. 

Well, that's not going to happen naturally. People aren't going to randomly find your podcast. No one's searching for recovery podcasts, by and large, right? Even if they do, there's like 100 of them out there. 

So what's the chance that you're going to show up? Not much. Whereas if I'm taking a Facebook spend or LinkedIn spend and pushing those campaigns out, or YouTube spend and pushing out on YouTube, I'll start to build followers, assuming that content's good. They'll start to share it with other people. 

And so now I've got an engine, right? I've got a flywheel. I've got our paid campaigns. I've got word of mouth happening. 

I've got people emailing back and forth, like even for our content, like our blog content and our podcasts that we do, those get emailed around. I can't tell you how many times I've walked into a provider and they go, oh, Nick Jaworski. I'm like, I don't know you. 

They're like, oh, no, but I've been listening to your podcast for years. I went into a major provider one time that I was told that the podcast was required listening by their entire executive team. And you know that these executives were listening to the podcast, right? So that's what you want. 

That's the flywheel you want to build. We had to start marketing at one point. We pushed it out. 

We paid for that content to be seen by people. But because it was good and people found it valuable, they started to share it on the back end. And that's what you want. 

Fascinating. I needed to hear this today. We're trying to figure out how do we increase the reach of the work that we're doing. 

So one last question or two last questions. One of the things that is interesting is how much of a treatment center's volume comes from referral relationships. Are there things that they can invest in to improve the quality of the referrals they get? 

Yeah, such a good question because this is one of my other pet peeves. So on our end as a marketing agency, people will probably not be surprised to hear that there are very large budgets dedicated to Google Ads, which is a direct to consumer play, right? You're not getting referrals off of a Google Ads campaign for the most part. Back in the day, even five years ago, we used to have a million dollar a month budget across many clients. One client would spend a million dollars a month. 

That was not uncommon. Now, it's probably around 250 to 300,000 at a big budget. Smaller budgets are around 10,000.

But still. 

That's per month right?

Yes that's per month 

10,000 per month to 200 or 300,000 per month. 

Yeah. And that's just Google Ads. 

That's not counting Facebook or television or business development, rep budgets, all that kind of stuff. So my point is that there's this really sizable spend. But when you look at patient volume, most of your patients are coming from referrals.

That's how healthcare has always worked. And behavioral health and SUD is no different. You want it to work that way because that's a much cheaper cost. 

When you look at a Google Ads campaign, you're paying anywhere from $4,000 to $10,000 per patient acquisition, depending on if you're in network or if you're more out of network or private pay, areas of the country, whatever. That's not a sustainable cost for providers. And so we spend so much time talking with providers about their Google Ads budget because it is a big chunk of their total budget.

It's actually often the majority of it may be comparable to business development rep salaries. But most of your patients are coming from referrals. So you should be investing in marketing to your referrals. 

I always tell people, look, let's say I'm a business development rep. I can only meet with so many people per day, maybe five, if I'm really pushing it, especially if I'm trying to do face-to-face meetings and not virtual calls. Whereas on LinkedIn, even if I'm paying 60 bucks or a hundred bucks, I'm still getting in front of a thousand people. 

A thousand people for $60 to $100 versus that's probably what I'm paying my rep in one to two hours. So they got in front of two people, I got in front of a thousand. Those digital campaigns that you're running are incredibly valuable to supporting the business development team. 

They're not going to generally bring you direct referrals. I'm not sitting on my LinkedIn and be like, oh, I should refer to Joanna's Treatment Center. That's not really happening. 

But what does happen is when your business development rep picks up the phone and calls them and say, hey, I'd like to schedule a meeting, they already know who you are. And if you've put out good content, you want your advertising campaigns to be very educational in this space. That's another big mess that a lot of people have. 

They put up their promotional content. They're always trying to pitch. Hey, are you struggling with addiction? Come in now. 

Do you have a mental health issue? We'll treat it. You want to think more educational. How do we build trust and value with our audiences? And that's doubly so for referral sources. 

So can we educate them? Can we teach them something? Now, when you call them like, oh yeah, I read that really nice white paper, or you guys had a really valuable infographic that I thought was helpful that I would share with some of my patients. Yeah, yeah, you can come in. I'd be happy to sit down and have lunch. 

Or again, your business development reps only seen them maybe once a month. They're not top of mind that often. Whereas on LinkedIn, I can get in front of people three, four, five times a week on a very, very small budget. 

So you're just staying top of mind and you're supporting their business development team. Even things like television, combining my earlier questions, television is considered very high polish just psychologically for people. If they see a television ad, very serious. 

And you'll find that a lot of healthcare referral partners do still watch things like the morning news or the evening news. So we found that when we run television campaigns for news programming, we'll see a boost of anywhere from 10 to 20% in overall referrals per rep off of those campaigns. And so again, the mistake people are making is they're like, well, I don't see any calls coming off this. 

I put our phone number on the TV ad and no one's calling off of it. Well, actually, yeah. One, when have you ever seen a TV ad and just called something? It's like, oh yeah, time. 

Let me just stop what I'm doing. I'm going to go buy some Tide right now because I saw the ad. It's just silly. 

But also on the other end, it's because of who's watching the television. The people struggling with addiction are probably not watching the morning news. But your nurses, your doctors, your therapists, those people are watching the morning news. 

And so when they start to see that, and then again, they hear from your rep, that provides this cumulative positive impact that drives more referrals. So yes, definitely invest in referral-driven marketing because it's the bulk of your business. 

Well, Nick, I feel like I could sit here and talk with you and pick your brain for hours and hours, but we're going to have to wrap up. 

And I want to say thank you so much for coming in talking to us today. This has been incredibly educational. Yeah. 

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. All right. 

Thanks again.