Recovery from substance use disorder … and digital marketing?

Those seemingly unrelated pieces come together in Start Your Recovery, an online resource that one Reingold employee was inspired to create after years spent helping clients with campaigns to combat addiction and promote recovery.

Brooks Lape, senior director of digital marketing, saw a gap between rehabilitation centers offering various services and the people seeking different forms of support. As Lape put it when he came up with the idea:

“We kept asking, ‘Why doesn’t someone offer access to recovery resources all in one place?’ Then we asked: ‘Why don’t we?’”

That’s why, in 2016, Lape developed Start Your Recovery, a site that reflects his savvy in digital marketing and his access to experts who specialize in recovery.

Part of the problem Lape was tackling is that untold numbers of Americans with substance use disorders are being tricked by “unscrupulous operators.” They and their families need to know of trustworthy places — those that, for example, use evidence-based interventions — that can help them lead healthy lives free of addiction. But too many places offer little besides incentives to sign up, in the end making money from having large rosters of patients.

That’s why Start Your Recovery matches treatment centers with those on the recovery journey. Reputable facilities can log on to advertise their availability, while people seeking treatment can go to the same site to plug in their ZIP code and find support where they need it.

Lape is knowledgeable about the issue and inspired as well by dozens of experts whose wisdom Reingold has tapped over the years on behalf of clients. Start Your Recovery has partnered with leading clinicians and experts in substance use prevention treatment and recovery from nonprofit, academic, and government institutions, including EDC (Education Development Center), The Jed Foundation, Faces & Voices of Recovery, the American Association of Suicidology, and many more.

Even for legitimate facilities, typical recovery advertising strategies — such as keyword search — face fierce competition, so such centers find that prices to promote their services are skyrocketing. That’s where Lape’s digital smarts come in. A strong marketing strategy in these turbulent times, says Lape, includes content strategy, digital advertising, search engine optimization, and, finally, analytics and optimization to hone it all for success.

The combination is working: Today, Start Your Recovery connects over 800,000 people each year to substance use disorder treatment.