Ethical Marketing Strategies for Mental Health Practices with Adrienne Wilkerson

welcome to Mental Health Evolution, a podcast about what's changing in mental health and why it matters. I'm your host, Rachel Harrison, inviting you into honest conversations with people from all perspectives in the field. Clinicians, tech founders, investors, insurance companies, and all the folks in between. Let's explore what's working, what's not, and what's next.

welcome back everyone to the Mental Health Evolution Podcast. I am here with my guest today, Adrienne Wilkerson, and we are talking about how the landscape is quickly evolving in the mental health industry. Today, Adrienne is going to give us her expert perspective on marketing. In particular. She is the Founder and CEO of Beacon Media and Marketing and she focuses specifically on helping mental and behavioral health organizations grow their visibility, communicate effectively, and connect with the people who need care. Her work centers on translating marketing strategies into practical ethical approaches that small and independent practices can actually use, especially in a competitive environment where larger corporate and tech enabled organizations are increasingly present. She is also the author of Digital Marketing for Mental Health where she shares actionable strategies tailored specifically to behavioral health organizations and we will definitely link that in the show notes for you if you want to find out more about her book. So as always, I want to go ahead and start this podcast with some articles relevant to our conversation for today the first one is called Inside the Consolidation Renaissance Across Digital Behavioral Health. And this article talks about how corporate and private equity backed organizations are increasingly acquiring smaller behavioral health providers. It highlights how consolidation is reshaping the competitive landscape and creating challenges for independent practices trying to maintain visibility and sustainability. So when Adrian and I have a chance to dig in a little bit more, we'll definitely look at that. But just understanding that a lot of these consolidations are happening, I just read about three more this week, so. So every week the landscape is changing. Article number two is called How AI Is Changing Online Marketing for Small Businesses. And this article by Forbes talks about how AI tools are being used to streamline marketing tasks like content creation, audience targeting, and campaign optimization. It also talks about how small businesses can leverage AI to compete more effectively with larger organizations that have bigger marketing budgets. So I'm excited to dive into that one a little bit more too. And last but not least is Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. And I love, love that Adrian likes to focus on ethics too, because as we all know, just as a reminder, for those of us that do have a license in mental health, there are certain things we're required to do to market ourselves in ethical ways. So we want to make sure that, that that is a part of this conversation as well. So without further ado, Adrian, welcome for being here.

Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.

Yes. So let's dig in. I want to talk about a little bit about you. I would love to know, how did you kind of get into this niche of marketing?

That's a fantastic question and a great story that we probably don't have a ton of time for. But the cliff note version is my f is a therapist and an entrepreneur. He just retired after 30 years of running his own. He actually did a medical and counseling practice. And so the idea was care for the whole person and being able to pair the medical and, you know, the mental health together. So it was one of my first jobs, was working on the medical side actually, but kind of back and forth. So I got kind of a real in depth look at what the back end of running a practice looks like. The billing side of it, you know, the just the logistics and everything behind the curtain. So I also watched him, you know, grow this practice and really struggle with the balance of I just want to help people and how can I help more people, but then also really struggling to promote himself and his clinicians. And that kind of like, I don't want to talk about myself. I don't want to brag. I don't want to put myself out there. And just really watched him struggle with that. And we had a lot, many, many conversations, you know, and I think he was really hoping I would follow in his footsteps. But I'm like, my path runs parallel to yours. So really taking that experience and my giftings in communication and solving complex problems and really trying to address, you know, something that I really watched him struggle with for a long time. And then my husband was actually behavioral health counsel for many years as well. So I got the addiction recovery side of it, as well as growing up with a therapist as a father and getting to work in the clinic. So all of that kind of put it together in 2019 when we realized we really needed to niche down. We started in Alaska and worked with a lot of small businesses up there. I was born and raised there, so it was kind of a natural transition place to start. So that also feeds into some of the reason why we're in this. Just the mental toughness and really wanting to be able to help other people on their journey too. Because in Alaska, we're pretty isolated. You kind of have to depend on each other a lot of times, and so being able to help each other through things. But, you know, really we expanded out of Alaska in 2019 or 2017. Sorry. And by 2019, we realized we really needed to pick a niche. And it's funny because we tell our clients this all the time. You know, you got a niche down, everybody is nobody. You got it niche down. And we realized we weren't really living by our own minute, you know, weren't walking out what we were preaching. So we niched down. We were already kind of specialized in the healthcare industry, but we realized that really wasn't enough when we were marketing on a national scale. So we decided to niche down in mental and behavioral health. And in part because of my background, and that was really a lot of where my heart was, but also being able to speak the language. So a lot of the business owners we work with, and they don't have to explain all the acronyms, they don't have to explain the frustrations of insurance billing and the delays and just all of. All of the intricacy that's unique to the mental and behavioral health world. So it was kind of a natural transition, I guess, if you. If you were.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So let's dig into that a little bit more. What would you describe as some of the differences in marketing for behavioral health versus other industries?

Well, I think some of the articles that you brought up kind of touch on it too. There's a unique ethical component to marketing for mental health. Unlike some industries, you know, this is not like you're buying a new pair of tennis shoes, right? This is, you're in crisis, you know, either you or the loved one that's reaching out trying to find that answer at 2 o' clock in the morning because they can't sleep, because I don't know where their teenager is. They don't know if they're in a, you know, strung out somewhere. You just, or they're just end of the rope communicating with their spouse or with their. I mean, we're dealing with people in, in serious, in a very serious place. And so it's a very vulnerable population. And so marketing has to be approached in a very specific way. It has to be marketing with empathy. This is, again, this is not transactional. This is somebody's mental health, this is somebody's addiction recovery side. I mean, this is life or death for some people. So it carries a whole different weight than say E commerce does, for example. So understanding the impact and the responsibility that we as marketers carry in this, like I said, it's, it's not selling tennis shoes. So there is a different perspective, a different point of view, a different tone, a different sensitivity. I really say all the time that marketing is about connection and it should always be about connection. Whatever tool you're using, paid ads, AI content, it has to be about connection first. And when you make the right connections, the right clients will follow. But if you're not choosing to make that connection first, you're going to get a broad sweep. It's not going to really help your ROI because you're going to get a lot of clients that may or may not be a good fit for you. And you'll get a lot of tire kickers. And again, in the mental health space, you just probably won't get as many leads because you're not connecting with a person who is in need. And guess what? They're going to bounce to the next listing that AI gave them. Definitely they're going to bounce because they're looking for that connection. And if you're not genuinely meeting them where they're at and connecting with them there, whether that is the actual patient themselves or the loved one or whomever it is, or even the referring doctor who's looking desperately for something else to help this patient, you're going to miss really valuable leads of people you could really, really help. So there's that whole component which we could probably pontificate on for a long time. But there's also the hipaa, the PHI side that has gotten much more stringent, which is not a bad thing at all. But it does make it more challenging for marketers. We have to be cognizant of it, we have to be respectful of it. And like I said, I think it's a good thing. But it is a thing that marketers who aren't used to it get very frustrated by it don't even know it exists half the time. I mean, I was talking to one marketer who works in E commerce and when I told him we can't track IP addresses, his jaw hit the floor. He's like, well, how do you retarget? How do you even do your job? And I'm like, very creatively. Because a lot of tools that are available to other marketers you can't use in our industry. At least not the same way you can't ask for reviews like you can in most other industries. I mean, everybody asks for you. They are a cornerstone of marketing. And yet in the mental behavioral health field, you have to tread very carefully and very respectfully. And so it's a real balancing act in some areas. And if you don't understand what you're getting into, when you get into marketing and the mental health, you can do some real damage, not just to the public at large, but legally to your company if you're not respecting the hipaa, the phi, if even understand the intricacies which are getting more and more significant. You know, we've had clients that are trying to do paid ads and they do med management. And if they don't have legit scripts, Google's going to pull your website and blacklist it. And it's almost impossible to get off the blacklist once you're on. So we've had to rebuild whole websites, whole brands, whole presences for clients, because they didn't even know when they were working with a marketing agency that did not know that you had to have legit scripts if you were going to do paid ads. So there's some very interesting nuances that I enjoy and I appreciate for what they are, but it is definitely unique. Yeah.

And you mentioned AI. I'm really curious how you think AI is intersecting with marketing in this space particularly.

It's messy.

Yeah, I know that was a huge question too, but yeah, it is.

It's a really important question though. And I've spoken at the Mental Health Marketing conference in Nashville many Years of many different years on this. Because it is really important that we in the mental health industry understand the pluses and the minuses of what AI can do, not just in the marketing space, but just kind of across the board, but in the mental health space specifically. I think one of the big dangers, especially for smaller clinics, is AI almost feels like this golden bullet at the beginning. Oh, I can use this to do all this ad copy and write all my social media posts and do all my blogs. This is amazing. And it is, except you have to be very, very careful. And there's lots of layers to that. AI is great at pattern recognition. It has no empathy. It does not know what empathy is. It might mimic it if the pattern's there, but it's not true empathy. It's not true connection. And so I think it's a trap for a lot of smaller agencies or and smaller clinics where we want to use it to be able to keep up with the big boys. You know, you mentioned that of getting gobbled up. You know, a lot of companies getting gobbled up. We're seeing it on the marketing side, by the way, too. The marketing industry is saying the same trend, very, very rapid growth with some agencies gobbling up a lot of the smaller ones and some of the same problems in our industry as with the mental health industry around that too. But back to AI. So with AI, you have to humanize it. And this is the piece that a lot of companies miss. AI's again, great at pattern recognition. So it's really great at taking a lot of data, recognizing patterns that we probably would never see, because we can't assimilate that much data, much less analyze it. But it can only analyze it from its context of patterns. It doesn't analyze it from an empathetic human standpoint. Now, some engineers would probably argue with me that the AI way is better, but those of us in mental health understand that that empathy is what sets us apart, if you will. And so what I advise a lot of people is, yes, leverage AI as a powerful tool, but don't advocate your humanness, your thought authority to that AI. And I think that that's my, usually my bottom line on AI. It's a great copilot. It's great for doing research, it's great for writing blog outlines and blog drafts. But read that draft out loud to yourself. Would you really speak like that to another human being? More often than not, probably no. There might be some parts that just sound fine and then you're going to run across a sentence you're like, okay, that sounds like I came right out of the matrix, that was not me kind of a thing. So oftentimes when we read out loud, we can catch stuff that when we read it just silently. Our brains tend to find, plug in automatically some of those empathetic pieces, but we tend to catch them better when we read out loud. Don't know exactly why that is. I'm sure there's a scientific something or other around it somewhere, but it's one of the things that, that I experience quite often in that arena that there's just something about reading it out loud. So yes, AI can level the playing field, but only if you use it in a way that's empathetic. If you're not, what ends up happening is you damage yourself more than you hope. Because now that image that starts going out online in your, in your blogs and your social media copy, it presents something probably I'm going to assume you don't want to present. It's a cold front. It's not caring. It's kind of shallow is the word I hear a lot of people use. They're like, it's just kind of two dimensional, it doesn't have any depth and people can't always pick out why now People pick on EM dashes all the time, which drive me nuts because I've been using EM dashes since long before AI was using them, but now I can't use them anymore because everybody's like, that's AI Because AI loves them, they're good tools but they're overused. So, but there's, you know, there's just certain things people be like, it just doesn't feel right. And usually what they're picking up on it, it just doesn't have that human connection part. There's nothing empathy there. It's a mimic of what a human would do. And that's, I think that's still the differentiator. That differentiator might disappear in the future the way things are going. God, I hope not. But it is becoming harder and harder, I think, to differentiate. Video is getting better and better. Deep fakes are getting better and better. And that just creates more and more distrust in the public about what the content that's being put out.

Yeah.

So again, that human to human connection becomes even more important as that distrust grows because of what AI is bringing to the marketplace.

You mentioned some parallels to what's happening in the marketing industry as well as the mental health industry. And because you probably work with a lot of mental health providers Groups, even larger organizations. I'm curious, what are you seeing as patterns both for, like, what people are looking for in a therapy provider and also what do you see shifting in

the industry, in the mental health industry, specifically?

Yeah.

One interesting trend that we're seeing, which I find scary, is the amount of men that are turning to AI for therapy. And it's a. It's a really. It's not growing, like, in leaps and bounds, but it is steadily growing. The amount of men that are reporting that they were. They've found relief, they found help from AI they don't. They would prefer AI to a therapist. And, you know, I think men have always historically struggled with going to see therapy, which is interesting, considering my father is a therapist. But even he would talk about this like, you have to approach treating a guy often differently than a woman because there's a different thought process, there's, you know, a different way of that they process emotions or they. They view things and. And, you know, everybody's individual and different too. But that stigma of men don't go see therapy kind of a thing has, I think, opened up this back door to men using AI. They don't feel judged. Nobody knows that they're getting help. My husband thoroughly enjoys trying to trip AI up because his background as a counselor, he's just like, okay, I'm gonna test this out and see how good it actually is. And he's like, on the surface, it's okay. On the surface, it appears to give good answers, but he's like, when you dig any deeper than that, again, it just. There's not a human component. It is pattern recognition. And so it's easy to mislead it, to be honest. And we've seen lots of lawsuits, and they're growing, unfortunately, of AI convincing people to kill themselves or to do bodily harm or some really scary stuff. So I think that's a very worrisome trend that we're seeing. I think there's a lot of men that are really hurting that are turning to this when traditional therapy would probably be better more often than not, you know, so that's an interesting trend that we're combating a lot with our clients of, you know, how do you do that with a positive angle? You know, you don't want to judge. Don't go AI but bringing up the positive sides of talking to a therapist, helping break down the barriers that they're shouldn't be a stigma for a guy to see therapy. Now, this is not so true of the younger generations, but the older millennials you know, the Xennials, the, all the different names, the Gen Xers, all of the. That generation, they definitely struggle and they're actually adopting AI faster than a lot of the Gen Z generations are, which is also interesting. My son's 18, hates AI, won't, doesn't want to use it. He's like, it's fake, it's all fake. So there's like this baked in mistrust of AI that doesn't exist in some of the older generations. So that's a really. They have different mistrust, I should say, maybe more specifically. So that's an interesting trend we're seeing just the flood of content that AI is dumping into the Internet, creating a massive fatigue with people. So one of the interesting ways that's manifesting in mental health marketing specifically is the people aren't liking things as much, they're not commenting as much, they're just scrolling. And they might save that video. We're seeing a bigger increase of people saying, oh yeah, I saved one of your videos, or I saved an article that popped up in my newsfeed, you know, and I came back to it a month later, or I sent it to a friend of mine. So we're seeing an increase of that. But it's really hard to track because the only way you get that information is if they share it to you by the time they become a patient, which can be six to nine months after they saw your original piece of content.

Right? Yeah.

So that attribution arc that used to be really short with paid ads specifically, you know, you put this ad out, it goes to this page, they sign up, they book an appointment statement. It's a very clear attribution chain. I spent this much for this ad. I got this many clients, new clients in, and we converted this many of them made marketing really easy from that standpoint. Those days are gone and it's killing us marketers. And it's not easy for business owners either, because how do you quantify your ROI when you can't track attribution very well? Now, this was the problem we all dealt with in the early days of digital marketing. And frankly, this is what we dealt with forever in advertising too. It's really hard. You can't track how many people listen to your radio program or saw your TV commercial. You just kind of had to generally watch is this rising tribe lifting all ships. We're back to that world. Which is really interesting because for six years, ish, we had really clear tracking. And so this is a really hard trend. For marketers and for business owners alike. And it's a conversation we're having a lot, and it's brutal because I don't have a good answer. And anybody out there in the industry who says they do, I would seriously question their expertise because the tracking just isn't there the way it has been. It's evolving. It's becoming different, but we're still all guessing as to what AI is going to pull, when and where. We have some good ideas, but it is not as clean as what paid ads was. You know, paid ads even. Especially Google Ads. I mean, Google pushes those down below their Gemini recommendations now. Yeah, I mean, if you're looking on a smaller screen, they're not even on the screen anymore.

I know. Like, on the phone, all you see is the Gemini, right? Yeah.

Yes, exactly. So if you're not showing up there, nobody's even seeing your paid ads, you know, the way we used to. So are they dead? No. Are they evolving? Absolutely. And for right now, it's a very messy attribution chain, which, again, is uncomfortable for marketers and business owners alike, especially small business owners and small practice owners, where every dollar is so valuable. You know, this is. We talk in marketing that, you know, and they say this in business consulting a lot, too, but you should expect to spend about 5 to 7% of your overall revenue on marketing. That's kind of your benchmark if you're wanting to grow really aggressively, more than that. But that's a big chunk for small businesses. And that's. That's like. That's a hard check to write. And if you're not seeing direct ROI on that or you're having a marketing agency telling you it's going to be six months of paying this before you may ever see a return on that investment. That's not. That's not what you want to hear. It's not what I want to tell clients either. But unfortunately, it is the reality of where we're at right now. And I do think things will continue to evolve and get to where we can track attribution better. But there's almost no consistent tracking out there for roi. Through AI, we'll have a lot of the reputable marketing places are scrambling to get caught or reporting places are scrambling to get caught up, but they almost all contradict each other. HubSpot reports one thing, SEMrush reports something else. There's all these other AIs popping up, going, we can do it better. And some of them have some parts better than others, or they track Gemini really well, but not perplexity. So it's the wild west of marketing all over again. And it's brutal. I mean, like I said, we started in 2012. We were the first digital marketing agency in Alaska, and it was a wild west then. We never knew quite what was going to happen or when Facebook was going to change something and make it all miserable. Yeah. So we're kind of back in, in that world again. And that's. It's not a comfortable place to be for anybody, to be honest.

Yeah. And it's interesting that you mention, you know, like, the smaller business owners. I think the other trend I'm seeing because I interact with a lot of people in this space is people utilizing marketing for the first time because a lot of providers, a lot of businesses in the mental health space. My business also never needed to do marketing.

Right. Yeah, but no, that's really true.

Like you said, you got a therapist and all of these different things coming in. That's starting to, to shift. So looking at, oh, we might have to market now, like, we didn't even have to think about that before.

Right. Well, and we saw a really interesting trend. So, you know, we decided to niche down on mental health right before COVID And the need for mental health services obviously skyrocketed during COVID And so a lot of people started, you know, they left a group practice, started their own practice during that time. And like you said, there really was very little marketing needed. And by about 2020 to 2022, 2023, we were watching trends start to kind of go back to pre Covid norms. So the cost per lead, cost per click, all of that started kind of drifting back to that kind of telehealth spiked and then kind of came back down. It's reached a new kind of level ground that's higher than it was before, but definitely not as high as it was during COVID So that's also pushed a lot of people toward needing marketing. Like you said, they, you know, they. All you had to do was hang out a shingle. Unfortunately, or fortunately during COVID because people were so aware of the need for mental health services. And that really has decreased some, but not in comparison to the cost of cost per lead, cost per click, that kind of thing. So clinics that were around before COVID they're like, oh, yeah, we get this, this feels familiar. But the clinics that started during that time, it's sticker shock, you know, kind of a thing. So that's, that's kind of tapered down, but kind of Just to your point. Yeah, marketing is a need now that, that didn't exist in that in as urgent of a way before.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, we are getting to the end of our time together, but I would just like to kind of ask you a final question is just if you could leave something for anyone in this space from a marketing perspective, like what is a message? You would like either independ, independent clinicians, small practice owners or even larger entities in the space. What is the thing that people really need to know? What's, what's your, your kind of last word or inspiration for our listeners today?

I think I'll go back to what I harp on, that at the end of the day, marketing has to be about connection first. The conversions will follow. But if you focused on conversions first, you're never going to get a good second chance to make that connection. And you're going to invest a lot more money because you're going to have to dig through a lot that might, you might not be able to help a lot of clients that aren't your ideal client. But when you make that connection first, the leads convert at a higher rate. They are stickier clients because you made a connection with them and it's a real connection. So that's something that frequently gets lost in marketing. We talk conversions, we talk data, we talk numbers. All of that's important. But marketing has to start and end with connection, otherwise you won't get the right conversions. That's my little saying that I use a lot.

It's perfect and certainly perfect for this industry because that's what we exist in this industry. To do right, is to connect and help people, empower people to feel better. So I appreciate all of your insights and this conversation. Adrian, it was really inspiring to chat with you. Thank you so much for the work that you do. And as we mentioned earlier, Adrian's book will be in our links. It's called Digital Marketing for Mental Health. If you're interested in hearing more about her perspective. And we will be back next week to talk more about the relevant issues in the mental healthcare community. Thank you, Adrian.

Thank you so much for having me.

This was a pleasure and thank you listeners. Bye for now.