Marketing for Mental Health Services

Book excerpt: Marketing has come of age in health care. This book will help you discover valuable marketing techniques to defeat the negative image that often haunt mental health services. Marketing for Mental Health Services presents constructive suggestions for using marketing to help make decisions related to accessibility, pricing, types and quality of mental health services, and community relations. This book will stimulate mental health professionals to use marketing more frequently as a key management tool. In it, you will learn: what a marketing plan is and how to develop one, step-by-step how to more effectively target key groups and develop target-based strategies the basics of using market research, done internally and externally, specifically for mental health organizations how several community mental health services utilized marketing the "nuts and bolts" methodology of marketing Employee Assistance Programs to businesses interested in cost-containment These chapters and others provide pragmatic marketing information for direct application by marketers in the mental health services. Marketing can become a most useful and beneficial tool when used effectively and this book will show you how to begin.