Healthcare Marketing Trends Reshaping Patient Acquisition

Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite Podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinals experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Lauren: Hey everyone, welcome to Ignite. We have a very special episode, our 200th episode. I think we’ve been recording Ignite Podcast episodes here for three-plus years, and it would only make sense to have our chief strategy officer, Rich Briddock, here as our guest on our 200th episode. Rich, it’s great to have you.

Rich: Thanks. I was just looking for the confetti emoji, but can’t find it on this one.

Lauren: We can get Alex, our video editor, to put some special effects over this episode, for sure.

Rich: Yes, the fireworks go off in the background.

Lauren: Both of you can watch the clips on LinkedIn and aren’t just listening to it like a normal podcast. Rich, for our 200th episode, we thought it would be fun to do a little reflection and a little look forward. What we’ve learned, what we have noticed, what the biggest shifts in the industry have been, and what we think the biggest shifts are to come. Looking at trends that are shaping healthcare, what’s not working anymore, what are some of the deprecated or old-school ideas, and how do we want everybody to be thinking about marketing as healthcare specialists as we go forward.

I will start with framing up what you and I talk about a lot as one of the shifts and want to get your thoughts on it. When we started and ventured into healthcare marketing in 2015 and really decided that was the lane that we wanted to choose, the challenges were, how do I diversify from traditional? How do I pull some money into digital? How do I cover the basics? Now, I think we see our marketing counterparts internally owning the revenue KPI, and that has evolved.

It used to be their owning the traffic, the impressions, the reach, and then it became their owning the calls and the leads, and the really sophisticated ones now own revenue KPIs, which is great. It’s a great problem to have. It creates a lot of challenges for our healthcare marketers to navigate, how do I attribute revenue? I’d be curious to your thoughts, how has the expectation shifted of marketers from internal and external pressures?

Rich: As we think about this as more of a reflective episode and to take it all the way back when we actually worked on our first healthcare client together, it’s funny, we were actually ahead of our time in a way, but we were correlating digital spend with actual appointments seen in clinic that previous day. That was an outlier in that we were lucky in terms of our first healthcare client to work with someone where digital was the primary driver of appointments seen for the business. There was a direct correlation between–

Lauren: [crosstalk] Right, or the need was so direct. It was an easy correlation.

Rich: So direct, easy correlation. This is not like a health system that’s trying to build a brand in a local market and has to have affiliations and has to essentially have all of these deep roots inside of a community. This is somebody who’s like, “There is a need that needs to be filled,” and you can focus on that bottom of the funnel, digital acquisition. I think a lot of healthcare is now having to catch up to that because over the last 11 years since we were doing that, or 12 years since we were doing that, obviously, the health journey has predominantly become digital, especially for referral-like service lines like primary care, OB/GYN, these entry points into health systems.

It starts online. Your online presence and your online marketing efforts can often be the main revenue driver. There is a reliance and a need to measure revenue. There’s obviously multiple ways in which you can do that through actual direct attribution, which has its own challenges, tying in your CRM system if you have it and you track revenue there, tying in an EHR or a patient management system. Again, connecting some of those systems together can be very tricky. Then how do you figure out your attribution model that sits on top of that?

Are you going to try and invest in a multitouch attribution system, which, again, has challenges when it comes to Wolf Gardens, or are you just going to rely on last-click attribution, which I know we did a podcast about last week, which way you guys got into the pitfalls of last-click attribution? Ultimately, what the expectation now is for marketers is that they need to be able to show some kind of ROI on their digital efforts. A lot of our challenge is, how do we do that? Then how do we do that in a way that is HIPAA-compliant as well? Because–

Lauren: I think we have to acknowledge that fun wrench that got thrown in there a few years ago and how that changed everything that this industry does.

Rich: Right. You can’t just throw up GA4 now for a lot of these covered entities and say, “Okay, I’m just going to run everything through here and try and understand how much revenue I’m driving.” Maybe you do need a CDP. Maybe you need a HIPAA-compliant analytics solution. You have to be careful with passing data from a PMS or an EHR back into an ad platform. You even have to be careful with matchbacks if you’re trying to do the attribution inside your own walls. How do you handle that data? How do you share that information? How do you perform the matchback?

There’s a lot of things to think about once you start getting into the weeds of measuring revenue and measuring return on investment. To your point, it’s become a new standard. We are not just looking at board submissions and calls from ads anymore. We need to make sure that we’re driving the business. I think one thing that we’re seeing more and more of with our clients that we’re pushing more and more of is the rise of modeling. Whether it’s incrementality testing, not every client needs a predictive element to their modeling. They do need to understand at least the prescriptive element of modeling to have a better attribution model and understand what’s actually driving impact to the business.

Lauren: These are concepts that have long supported other industries, marketers in other industries.

Rich: 100%.

Lauren: That’s typically how it goes. It’s typically what can I learn and glean and borrow and steal from other industries because healthcare has come far enough in the journey to be ready for that. MMM and incrementality are two of those concepts. If we were to sum this up into where are we today versus where we have been and where we’re going, think of a client that you’re working with that has the ideal framework at the moment. What makes it ideal? What about both maybe their MarTech setup and what they can capture in real attribution plus the modeling side of things makes it the way of the future, at least for the next few years?

Rich: We have some larger clients where we are running a combination of, we are tying an attribution to their CRM systems or EHR and we’re running incrementality testing. It gives you just these different lenses to look at performance through. It’s interesting. I talk about one use case a fair amount where we came into that engagement and they were way over-invested in the bottom of the funnel.

They were spending way too much money on search and we stood up incremental for them, which isn’t always on incrementality platform. What that showed them was that while search has a really strong blended cost per acquisition, the next dollar being put into search was incredibly inefficient, which is what we’d shown them at a high level through just regression modeling and analysis.

This platform was able to show them that at a much more granular level, by market, by tactic, and has allowed us to diversify much more into top of the funnel demand generation, middle of the funnel demand generation, and allowed them to scale their budgets 3X to over $3 million a month whilst maintaining the same level of efficiency that they had when they were spending $1 million a month. That’s key. I think a lot of people, when they think about these sophisticated measurement solutions, they think “We don’t have the budget for that. We don’t have the team to support that.”

Nowadays, these tools are becoming a lot more democratized and you have to look at the investment as something that’s going to drive a significant multiplier if you’re spending a lot of money on media. The good thing about some of these solutions too is it’s not just digital that they take into account, they take into account traditional offline, out-of-home, et cetera. You can factor in the sponsorship of a baseball game with various degrees of accuracy. It helps you to shape your entire marketing strategy, not just your digital marketing strategy.

Lauren: I think that’s a great segue because one of the other trends we wanted to talk about today was the evolution of the mix itself and everything you’ve just said is what lends the credibility to recommendations to diversify the mix. Framing up the historical statement, it was “Put up a PVC ad and they will come.” Especially if you were an early adopter of some of the Google suite of products, if you were an early adopter of basic SEO frameworks, basic content production, technical health, you could dominate the search landscape and you could drive your new patient engine on hand raisers alone.

As every brand adopted SEO, PPC as their standard playbook, migrated some of their digital dollars, you have extremely saturated markets, rising CPCs, you have everyone saying the same thing in their ad copy, “I’m here, I’m conveniently located, I take your insurance.” All of a sudden that unlock was no longer an unlock, it became the baseline. On top of that, the concepts then that allow you to discover that and really understand how it’s affecting your business are things like understanding the marginal effect of every dollar and not just the blended effect of every dollar. Give a little bit of your background on what you think the common mistakes are or errors are.

Rich: We’ve already touched on it, but the most common mistake that we see is people being too wedded to the bottom of the funnel, too wedded to search. Search is very straightforward to set up, but the targeting is easy. You just have to basically put in the keywords that people would search to find your business. Google has done a great job of taking some of the difficulty out of implementation campaigns set up to make it easy for anybody to potentially start up Google.

Obviously, they have ideals and other missions, but reality is they’re trying to get as many people to advertise on that platform as possible because Google Ads is the moneymaker that drives the Google ecosystem. They’ve reduced the barrier to entry in terms of getting live on Google Ads. You’ve had this influx of advertisers from mom-and-pop shops all the way to sophisticated MSOs, DSOs who are spending millions a month on Google. Obviously, the competition has gone up significantly. The ad depth has gone up significantly. What you were saying there is the price to play is just far greater than it was.

I was actually looking at an account that they sell or they offer GLP-1s. You looked over the last 12 months in terms of what they were driving from a ROI perspective from Google Ads, and you see the return on investment is just trending down. The spend is trending up because they’re like, “I’m not getting as much out of Google in terms of revenue.” The knee-jerk reaction is let me put more in. Let me put more in. I’ve got to fight competition. Let me spend more. I think that’s a really dangerous slide to get on of just pushing more dollars into the Google machine and hoping for a different outcome or hoping to get to the same outcome that you had. I think you have to, as a marketer–

Lauren: [crosstalk] That’s a huge yellow flag for me when I meet with prospective new clients is our board expects the CPA to be X because that’s what it was two years ago. It’s not going to be that. I tell them that and maybe I’m the only one telling them that and they don’t want to hear it, but that is the reality.

Rich: That’s where you have to really start to look at the patient journey and understand what has changed that’s causing that decline. Probably what has changed is GLP-1s are now being offered by everybody. There’s more price competition. It’s become more commoditized. Now you’ve got to build a brand that differentiates itself in some other way, which is a lot harder to do than just spend more money in a channel that has historically worked for you. Ultimately, that’s the search ceiling and the need for the media mix reset.

I hear this all the time like, “Oh, well, we’re not on social or we’re not on programmatic.” That might be a problem, but really, the problem, the statement that marketers should be making is, “We’re not engaging with the patient across their entire journey. We are missing them at crucial stages of the journey where they are starting to build brand affinity, where they’re starting to understand about category awareness, where they’re starting to evaluate the potential options out there and determine which ones they want to move forward with or remove from their consideration set.”

That’s the questions that marketers should be asking themselves. Then it’s how do we then engage at those crucial moments so that we can be top of mind when that person is ready to take the action that we want them to take. Spoiler alert.

Lauren: Brand search, get the organic click, get it cheap. That’s where we’re going to get it, at least in a last-click model, what appears to be cheap at the bottom. You’ve really got to think blended.

Rich: These are big decisions. Who you go and trust your health to is a significant decision, especially if it is a consumer-driven decision where you’re not relying on a physician to give you a referral and guide you in the right direction. That’s the other trend that we’re seeing where the full funnel strategy and the medium mix is so important is HCPs are changing the way that they do referrals now. Not all of them and not all the time, but typically what is starting to happen with HCPs is they are providing a list of specialists that you can go to. It’s not a case of, “Hey, go and see Dr. Smith down the street.”

Lauren: This is the guy that you have to see.

Rich: This is the guy they’ll sort you out. It’s here’s three potential specialists that you can go to or in some instances, especially in the ABA world, here’s 100 of ABA providers that work in your market. Go do your research and make a decision. Those trends are also driving the need for the patient journey to become far more diversified and far more complex because the patient is spending a lot more time driving the decision than ever before.

Lauren: Rich, just quick tips for everybody listening, getting specific here, the channels you are seeing healthcare begin to adopt and or where the consumers are spending their time. There’s obvious ones like Meta, but can you just talk quick hit on what some of those are, how we’re diversifying?

Rich: Yes, Meta definitely is the secondary channel, I would say after search and the Meta ecosystem, including Instagram and Facebook.

Lauren: It’s driven by the fact that its buying engine and measurement engines are second in terms of sophistication to that of Google. Not necessarily that there are another emerging channels that are high impact to consumer, but just that the buying is sometimes less sophisticated.

Rich: Yes, and I think the big thing that plays into Meta’s favor when we think about healthcare is it has the captive audience of healthcare consumers. Predominantly people who are 50-plus consume a significant amount of healthcare, but it’s 30-plus who are really consuming most healthcare or any kind of healthcare. A lot of 20-something-year-olds don’t have a primary care physician, they’re not regularly going to the dentist. Even the most basic healthcare engagement is not really happening for that group. Platforms that skew more towards that demographic are not as valuable to a lot of healthcare providers, although that’s changing.

With all these social platforms, its early adopters are younger folks, and then the demographic starts to age up. I think TikTok is definitely one for us where certainly we’ve got a lot of the mom, the matriarch now emerging onto TikTok, and so we’re spending more there than we ever have done. AI is allowing us to generate creative in lieu of genuine UGC that we can leverage on TikTok that feels authentic and native. Then there’s definitely space for programmatic, and especially I think there’s space for a lot of programmatic where there is a more high-acuity service line.

CTV definitely drives incrementality, and that’s an opportunity to replace the traditional EV buys that you were doing previously and get a lot more targeted and a lot more measurable. Then I think Native definitely has a role to play in terms of education in these higher-acuity service line. Previously, it’s been very difficult to understand a specific category or to determine differentiation. I think Native driving to long-form blog content can play a significant role in the journey. That’s a combination of organic and paid amplification to really help on the why category piece and some more educational play.

Lauren: I’ll add to that because I’ll put on my broader marketing hat here for a minute. We talk about media mix, but if I broaden that to marketing mix, the role of generative engine searches and queries and prompts is also part of it.

Rich: Oh, yes, absolutely.

Lauren: I know that’s not currently a paid channel, although we all know that’s coming. When we think about the marketing mix, it absolutely has to consider how people are using those channels to find information too. Something like that long-form helpful content that you can promote and amplify via Native also needs to have a dual purpose of educating through the other channels that people are finding it through.

Rich: I think I read the other week that there are 600,000, or they estimated there’s something like 600,000 health-related queries on ChatGPT every single day in the United States. Because again, people don’t necessarily feel comfortable picking up the phone and asking someone about a health symptom, but they seem to feel a lot more comfortable just typing that into ChatGPT and trying to understand what’s going on.

Lauren: How do I, who’s the best at, a lot of those discovery and mid-funnel consideration queries and prompts are migrating into those platforms.

Rich: Absolute huge.

Lauren: As they’re coming, eventually those will be monetized, but for now it’s all an organic play. Rich, you mentioned something, and I’ll bring this up as our third trend before we close out this episode. It’s not just that I’m there and present with the ad buy in front of the right audience, but the real crux to successful media and managing the cost of media is having something to say to those people that is specific when you get in front of them. The creative, specifically your brand positioning, understanding what your consumers care about, their fears, barriers, motivations, all of that.

I’ll lean specifically on the evolution of some of the creative tooling, the AI platforms built into places like Meta and Google, as well as some of the solutions that sit outside of that can enhance. General thoughts on Meta, Andromeda, some of the PMax, Landscape, and some of the dynamic creative capabilities of these platforms.

Rich: I think it’s a push to, again, Google and Meta. They’re looking to automate as much of the audience targeting and as much of the other elements of running campaigns as possible. The one thing that they cannot fully automate, and I think where AI still is playing a significant secondary role, is creative strategy. The requirement of marketers, understand the brand, understand brand positioning, and then present unique concepts to their prospective patients that these solutions, these essentially programmatic solutions, these algorithms, can then serve up to these prospective patients and determine what resonates and what’s going to perform.

Sometimes the answer is going to be, “Well, this creative performance is better than this creative.” A lot of the time, now we’re at a point where it’s, “This creative performance is better for Lauren. This creative performance is better for Rich.” You’re never really going to know as a marketer that this is Lauren, this is Rich, but you need to have a different creative for Rich and a different creative for Lauren.

Don’t put five ads into your Meta campaign that are all slight variants of one another, or let’s say a single message, because I might care about speed of care, you might care about affordability. You might care about the qualifications of the doctor, I might care about location. There needs to be these messaging strands around everything in terms of USP, around motivation. I might have a different objection or hurdle to overcome than you do, as an example. All of these things have to be addressed. Then to add even more complexity to the creative journey is, I might need to be targeted with multiple of these messages in a certain order, and so may you.

I think where we see a lot of clients struggle is they either don’t have the creative diversity and variety that they need to be successful now on channels like Meta and Performance Max, or they are married to an old way of thinking about creative, which is “I’m going to have this control creative, and then I’m going to test in these variants. These variants are going to be slight changes to the control, like a red background instead of a blue background, which performs fast.”

The algorithms just don’t work that way anymore. If you think about frequency, maybe I’m going to see four ads on Meta served from one campaign. Meta’s going to be far more likely to be successful if you’re showing me four significantly different concepts rather than the same message just reskinned four different times, because if I wasn’t interested in affordability the first time you showed it to me with a blue background, I’m not going to be interested when you show it to me again with a purple background. We’ve got to break out of that mindset.

The algorithm will quickly identify what ads I’m interested in and not interested in, what value props I’m interested in and not interested in. Because it’s trying to hit an efficiency target, most often, it’s just not going to serve to me. You’ve lost me as a prospective patient because the algorithm has made a determination that with the creative that it has in its hands, because it’s only got the same message with different colors, it can never win me.

Lauren: It’s ruling me out. Yes.

Rich: It’s ruling me out.

Lauren: I think that the general theory on creative going forward is to break down what is an asset. An asset contains what? It contains USP. It contains branding. It contains imagery or video. It contains calls to action. How do you break down those pieces, provide multiple options for each of them, and then allow that to be dynamic? The dynamic serving, that’s one thing. That’s where the platforms are going, but those inputs are the strategic piece that these platforms are never going to learn for you.

We’ve seen some fails if you go on LinkedIn or whatever, and you look up the Andromeda AI fails of when you allow them to simply maybe scrape your website and pull what it wants. It doesn’t necessarily translate. I think that is one that is a long way off from true automation. Like any AI, you have to control the inputs and the outputs. What happens in between? Let’s let the AI do that hard work.

Rich: 100%. I think AI is a great solution for rapid creative production when a human is at the wheel, and also allowing you to produce formats that previously were out of reach for a lot of marketers with small marketing teams.

Lauren: It’s too long. It costs too much money.

Rich: Costs too much. Yes, exactly. You still need a creative strategy that is human-driven.

Lauren: We’re talking about what to do with the assets once you have your talking points. If we can leave our marketers listening with one bit of advice, it is, take even a step back from that and think about– put on your retail hat. Put on your hat of, I’m trying to buy a pair of shoes. Think about the go-to-market strategy of your service as a product and what that individual cares about.

That is broader than what are my call to actions on my meta ads. That is your whole perspective on the industry and why patients should choose you. That, I think, is something, because it was build and they will come for so many years with healthcare digital marketing of the early adopters, you didn’t have to do that. You could bypass it.

Rich: Yes, I think that’s exactly right. Ultimately, and it goes back to the point we were making earlier when we first started talking about the changing trends, now that everybody is on these platforms, the first mover advantage is gone. Now we have to go back to the basics. Your brand positioning better be good. You better actually have something unique to sell. You better have a way to actually differentiate yourself if you want to win because just being there, to your point, and being the first one there, that’s not it anymore.

Lauren: Those are some good tips to leave our listeners with as they think about back half of ’26, back to basics, figuring out the best way to leverage these platforms, broadening your mix, doing so with the right measurement framework. That’s a lot to focus on for the back half of a year, but if you can do those things well and make progress in them, we’re talking progress over perfection, try to inch each of them forward. A mistake I see is someone spending all their time on measurement and leaving the go-to-market behind or vice versa.

It’s “Let’s take one giant leap forward in each area together in unison.” That will drive our programs forward. Then we can paint a picture for the next 12 months after that. Rich, it was great having you. We probably could have had a lot more laughs about the good old days, but I think it’s helpful for everybody listening to see where they need to focus on. Appreciate your time here on our 200th episode of Ignite.

Rich: Woo-hoo. Happy to be here.

Lauren: All right, Rich. Talk to you soon.

Rich: All right. See you.

Lauren: I’m excited to continue this episode with a 200.B next week. We’ve got some of our subject matter experts that I want to pose some of these similar questions to get their perspective on trends and insights and how they see the landscape has changed. With us next week, we are going to have Alex Kemp, Rob Schoder, Brandon Wilhelm, Jean Zhang, Scott Cameron, and Ruchi Patel, our wonderful healthcare strategists from Media Analytics who are in the trenches every day with our clients, our perspective clients, our partners. They are going to have a lot to share with you guys on top of what Rich and I discussed today. We hope to see you there.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to this episode of Ignite. Interested in keeping up with the latest trends in healthcare marketing? Subscribe to our podcast and leave a rating and review. For more healthcare marketing tips, visit our blog at cardinaldigitalmarketing.com.