The shifting landscape of the behavioral health industry continues to rock business owners -- and it’s not just small players who’ve been affected. Last week, AAC Holdings – the parent company for American Addiction Centers – posted a third-quarter loss of $11.5 million, citing the Google Adwords changes as the reason behind the drop.
“We got hit by a meteorite,” CEO Michel Cartwright told investors admitting that the company saw a 30% drop in call center activity from July to September, and a patient census drop of almost 10%.
According to Cartwright, the company plans to “navigate these headwinds” with a behavioral health marketing strategy that is “broad and diverse, focused on various paid and earned media online and in other traditional media.”
The lesson from the Google Adwords shift – for businesses of all sizes – is clearly that there’s too much risk involved in hanging the success of your business on one marketing stream. (And even if you were going to take that risk, PPC is one of the most volatile options.)
Renting your sales funnel from a major player like Google or Bing means you have to start at zero every month. If that faucet turns off, it’s as if you never spent a marketing dollar to begin with, and the funnel will dry up.
Anyone who experienced the Google “meteorite” firsthand knows how that can cripple your business.
At BuzzFactory, we teach business owners how to engage and build your own audience, so you own your marketing machine instead of renting it. With a diversified marketing strategy, you can build an inbound marketing funnel that is even more powerful and valuable over time. Best of all, if you own your own content it can never be turned off.
To learn how, book a call with us today.
And in the meantime, get a quick refresher on the latest Adwords news in our Marketing Mastery series ebook by filling out the form below.
