The End of Easy Growth in Healthcare

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 Leone: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Ignite: Healthcare Marketing Podcast. We are here with what I am calling our 200 Part B episode. Last week, we spent almost 30 minutes chatting with Rich, a little bit of nostalgia, what we’ve seen change, where the industry is going, and today we’re going to broaden those questions to a panel of experts across our media and analytics team and get to hear their perspectives.

I want to kick it off with Rob Sauter, who is our VP of Owned and Earned Media, on a trend that I’m sure no one is surprised to hear about, which is the current impact of AI on the search landscape not only in how we are navigating the search landscape ourselves as an agency and as marketers, but how the consumer’s behavior is changing with the introduction of generative engine searches. Rob, I want to start by getting your perspective on what is the most significant shift you’ve seen in how healthcare groups are retaining their visibility, how that visibility is changing, and where it’s moving to.

Rob Sauter: The biggest shift I’ve seen is AI is the ultimate researcher. It is able to pull in data from social, from third parties, from reviews, from all over the internet. What we’ve found now more than ever is when you’re out there, when you’re making a claim, when you’re writing content, when you’re creating a strategy, you really need to be able to back it up. You have to have the first-party data, the patient stories, the outcomes, because you can’t simply just create well-optimized information anymore and use clever marketing to trick patients into believing you are truly the best. You really got to back up the fact that you are the best. Sometimes that means not being the best at everything and finding that specialized position, that specialized niche that you really can defend, and use that as a weapon to create organic demand.

Lauren: Yes, Rob, that’s all super helpful information. I always love to hear your perspective. What should they do with that? What are your top recommendations to activate on for 2026?

Rob: Something I think more healthcare organizations need to be investing in is that asset, that first-party informational asset. So often now when we work with clients who are serving patients, we ask for information, we ask for data, et cetera, and often the best source of that information is simply reviews online, and we end up combing and grabbing that information on our own. Same with even providers and other experts. We have to extract that information from these professionals.

As I mentioned before, that trust factor, that specificity to that first party, that’s something that’s to be treasured, that’s something to be a unique competitive advantage in the marketplace. I think if companies right now who are really looking to improve their content, improve their organic visibility, improve their AI visibility, really investing and capturing that unique data, unique asset, when we have an asset like that, when we have a real wealth of information and data, it’s amazing what we can accomplish with that.

When you have to develop it, we have to build it from scratch, it takes a lot longer to build that momentum. If you’re looking at your own marketing group today, you really don’t have that centralized database. It’s not a business performance, we all have that, but a real outcome, patient differentiators, data, stories, et cetera, that’s something that can be a huge asset as this continued AI pushes forward.

Lauren: Speaking of AI, a great segue into our next subject matter expert, Alex Kemp. Alex, how is AI affecting how healthcare marketers are using and leveraging their data?

Alex Kemp: The biggest opportunity and use case for using AI when it comes to data analytics is going to be insight generation. What that actually means is getting insights from your data and from your source of truth faster. We think of it like speed to insight. A lot of times we’re digging through dashboards and reports and all these disparate data sources to try to answer a very specific question.

If you can just get the answer to that question through natural language prompts, it makes it much quicker. Then again, the goal isn’t necessarily speed to insight, but speed to action. We need insights to be able to act, but sometimes those insights is what causes us to take longer to actually act on the data that we’re seeing. Actually connecting these LLMs to your sources of truth, being able to query those datasets, and again, get those answers that you need in a faster way.

Lauren: Alex, how should marketers actually use it? I think something interesting that we usually talk about is how scrappy and lean analytics departments or functions can be inside of these healthcare organizations. I always love to hear your perspective on how that can really make their job easier and help their resources go further.

Alex: One of the biggest opportunities for healthcare marketers to be using AI to advance their measurement methodology is thinking of it as a means to get to a media mix modeling light aspect. Being able to actually upload these datasets into AI platforms and let them build these preliminary models. It’s not going to be a full media mix model that we could deploy through a full engagement, but it can give you a starting point to better understand your channel mix, the true contribution of those channels. You definitely want to continue to validate and calibrate that model with actual performance data. It’s very useful to get into the conversation of media mix modeling when you don’t have a full platform set up or an engagement set up. That’s a big opportunity to use AI for that.

Lauren: All right. Next up, we’re going to hear from our panel of media directors. We have Brandon, Ruchi, and Scott, who are going to be joining us here. I’m going to start with Brandon. Brandon, I want to understand from you what you think the biggest shift in paid media performance has been over the last year.

Brandon: Yes, I think the biggest shift I’m seeing is in what drives performance. We’re seeing that it’s less about perfect targeting or the perfect keyword and much more about the creative that’s actually driving the performance. That’s a big shift in the traditional way of thinking for media. We’re looking at things like Andromeda in meta really driving a lot of this change, but it’s not exclusive to that channel.

We’re seeing it much more broadly across different types of media. That’s a really good example of it because messaging themes and variety are actually driving that performance. In the past, we were really used to tweaking our targeting around key audiences. As that has gotten more and more limited, at least directly in those platforms, we’ve seen messaging be a significant driver in our performance.

What I mean by that is not making little tweaks to colors and headlines, but actually going through messaging themes and things that we can test at a high volume. We’ve actually seen very recently clients where we didn’t see a 10% or 20% increase. We actually saw the performance be 2X, 3X better because of making this focus around what’s driving that performance. That’s been a big one.

Lauren: What do you see that’s working differently than it was before, or maybe not working at all anymore?

Ruchi: I think the biggest shift has come with AI. Again, it’s not just paid media. I think every industry is experiencing it with ChatGPT, DeepSeek, all of them entering the market. The one thing that we’ve seen specifically for Google Ads and Meta is the emphasis that these platforms have on letting the platform decide the best user to target, the best geo-targeting, the best keywords, the best profile to go after based on the signals that they have in paid.

In Google Ads, we were very focused on search terms, but now with AI Max, we are actually starting to take a step back, and Google is determining which search terms make sense based on the best conversion signals we have. Same for Meta as well, with the new update that they rolled out last year. The emphasis is very heavily on let us figure out who the best audience is. You just tell us who has converted in the past, and we can give you more insights, and we can do the analysis on our end to decide who we should be targeting for you to improve your efficiencies.

That is the biggest change that we as marketers are dealing with. We love controlling campaigns. We love controlling the keyword, every dollar, where it goes, how it goes. I think taking a step back and trusting the algorithm, obviously setting it up for success, making sure the foundation is strong, but after that, once we’ve established the foundation, trusting the algorithm probably is the biggest change that this industry needs to see based on the trends that we are seeing right now.

Lauren: Scott, I’ve asked Brandon and Ruchi very similar questions, and I want to get your perspective on it. The biggest shift in paid media over the past year?

Scott: The biggest shift has probably been something that’s really happening for a while now, but it’s been honestly more pronounced in terms of impact in the last year. That to me is the importance of quality signals. Obviously, we’ve been seeing this happening for a long time. There’s been a shift in that direction. To me, it’s just become the number one unlock in terms of performance. We can take something like a shallow conversion signal, and if we can move that further along to tie that towards real business outcomes, we see complete changes in performance.

That’s really been the biggest shift, I think, just being able to move towards those better signals. Really, all of this ties into the larger industry trend, which is platforms moving away from manual campaign optimization and really getting into the algorithm. If you don’t have that initial signal, you just can’t really move past it. Or you’re really giving the algorithms data that it can’t work with. For me, that’s really been the biggest thing and truly something that’s working differently than it has in the past because we’re leaning into that more. We’re really focused on making sure those signals are the way we want them to be.

Lauren: One of the things I want to hear from you all is the challenges. What are our counterparts in-house up against? What are you seeing across the accounts that you manage today that is the biggest challenge for healthcare marketers?

Ruchi: This is a question that we ask ourselves every year. Hey, what is the biggest challenge? It is almost always around measurement. I think last year, the problem that I personally felt that my clients were struggling with was identifying how important it is. This year, it’s shifted. Everybody understands that you require good signals. Everybody knows that a phone call or a form is not a good enough signal. You need qualified users. You need new patients, all of those signals that you have in the CRM.

The education part is done, but the challenge now still remains that my CRM is dropping all of these fields. For whatever reason, I’m unable to attribute back this particular admit to the particular channel that drove it. I think that is the biggest challenge that most people in this industry are coming across right now. They know what is important, but there is so much analytics help required to clean it up, to set it up for the system to flow seamlessly. I think that is the biggest challenge that everybody needs to work on this year.

Scott: Some of it does tie back to not actually having those quality signals that we need. Sometimes that’s just an organizational challenge. We can’t get that from their CRM, or their some sort of analytics trouble, which will always prevent us from being able to move to that deeper conversion signal, which is going to really impact performance. Another really big challenge that we’re seeing, I’d say, within the industry is CPC inflation, rising competition coming from that as well. We did an internal benchmarking exercise and saw that there’s like an 87% or 89% increase in CPC year over year, which is a staggering number.

Again, it really does stem back towards that whole thought of making sure that we’re doing more with less. We have the same budgets often, and now we’re getting fewer clicks as a result of those rising costs. How are our strategic pivots leading to more or better conversions or better business outcomes really is the ultimate goal, which again ties back to the conversion signal quality and making sure that while the cost per click is increasing, are we making sure that the cost per new patient booking, for example, is improving or is stagnant?

Lauren: We’ve got the common challenges that we’ve seen in the past, but is there anything new or emerging in the challenge landscape that you’re noticing, a pattern, something that we’re not used to dealing with that the marketers are now having to think about?

Brandon: I think there’s a lot of change happening from a channel perspective. We’re seeing new things emerge, so really, besides just the real channel focus, I think there’s a big shift even within platforms themselves. We’ve seen it across all kinds of channels like Google and Meta and others, but I would actually hone in on the social side of things with Meta where we see that video on Facebook and Instagram, and particularly Reels formats is really having a bigger and more outsized influence than it did previously.

We’re seeing a lot of promise in that, and it doesn’t even stick exclusively to Meta on that side. It goes and applies to TikTok, YouTube, even in those shorts formats. We’re just seeing them take up a bigger and bigger portion of what’s driving the results that we’re trying to get from campaigns. Within that, people often think of UGC, but it’s not all about UGC.

There’s other opportunities, I think, to represent your brand in those formats far beyond that, especially when advertising. That’s what jumps out and is a big focus for us going forward. I also think that there are other interesting and emerging channels like ChatGPT. Everyone’s talking about that emerging on Criteo or other types of channels, for example, but even the ones that we’re working in directly, I think are evolving in a way that we should be paying attention to.

Scott: I don’t know if I call it emerging because it’s been on the scene and making progress over the last few years, but evolving is probably the better word I would use for something like programmatic. The reason I bring that up is because what we’re seeing now is more sophistication, I’d say, in terms of measurement, better quality audiences that we’re able to use.

Of course, I love, as a marketer, the ability to be able to reach people with online video or OTT or streaming audio or digital at home. There’s a lot of flexibility, and it allows us to be a lot more creative with our media mix. That one’s been really exciting to me. I think ultimately having a full funnel strategy where we are able to leverage those different points rather than just having search and social, which is pretty common, right? You usually see those two paired.

Now what we’re seeing is a lot of clients moving towards how do we have a full funnel mix that covers all those stages of the journey, but also making sure that we’re omnichannel, that we’re in front of people whenever they’re trying to make decisions about their healthcare, consumer choices. I think that’s where we want to be with it. We are ultimately seeing people a lot more receptive to a full funnel mix, if that makes sense.

Lauren: Ruchi, you are our veteran group media director here at Cardinal. We’ve been working together for over four years. I know that you and I have seen it change a lot. I’d love to get your perspective on how you think the media channel mix has changed, how performance has changed since you’ve been working in healthcare for nearly half a decade.

Ruchi: Our product or service is not something that– it takes consideration. You do not decide overnight what rehab you want to be a part of. You do not decide overnight what ABA therapy clinic your child is going to join. These are all things where you need to be convinced, and creative plays a really, really big role. Creative can make a bigger impact than any kind of ad copy verbiage that you have in there. That is why Connected TV is making a big, big impact.

You have less clutter there. People are paying attention. There’s a 30-second ad that they show, but it is so impactful that when they are searching for their product or services, they remember you by that ad. Programmatic has always been a big deal in the digital marketing industry. In other fields, with healthcare, we’ve been very focused on bottom of funnel. As we are getting more and more nuanced and specialized in healthcare, we are realizing that at one point, you will exhaust the easy bottom of funnel leads that you can get.

You will have to figure out how you stand out in the industry. You will have to figure out how you separate yourself from the competitors. Programmatic is going to play a really big role in helping you nurture your audience. There have been challenges in the past. It’s hard to measure Programmatic. We are living in a HIPAA-compliant world, so there are challenges to what you can tap into, what you cannot.

Thankfully, everybody is recognizing the opportunities here. We are coming across a lot of Programmatic providers who have HIPAA-compliant audiences relevant to healthcare that they can tap into. They sign a BA. They actually are willing to provide services in the realm of HIPAA-compliance. That is actually making it a lot easier for us to tap into Programmatic than it was before, almost two years back. CTV, especially with more and more competitors coming in and being able to provide the services, is a big channel that is evolving, especially for the healthcare space. The boundaries are unlimited with what we can do with all of those audiences available to us.

Lauren: Last to the table, but certainly not least, we want to bring in our creative director, Jean Zhang, to talk about what she’s seeing change in the creative landscape and specifically the impact of performance creative on media performance. Jean, all I hear about nowadays is Andromeda and Meta’s reframing of their creative products. What do you think are the biggest mistakes that healthcare brands are making today, whether that’s in their traditional way of producing creative or in leaning into some of these AI products like Andromeda?

Jean Zhang: The interesting thing about the landscape shift now is that it’s really favoring creativity in multiple ways that a brand can show up in front of its users or prospects. As part of that, the major shift I think most people are going to have to work through is this former idea where variance and small nuances of different types of creative was what was going to drive performance forward, and that was truly enough.

In this new Andromeda world, where they’re able to see the vast portfolio of everything that’s live, and those are the pieces that it’s leveraging to act as a targeting mechanism, what needs to happen is more diversity within the creative sets. Now, typically speaking within healthcare, that’s a little bit hard because the amount of personas and the amount of different narratives, angles may be more limited historically based on how that brand has historically been structured.

Thinking beyond the historical ways of how their brand showed up, specifically within digital, is going to be something that I think will be absolutely instrumental and essential in order to meet the needs of Andromeda. It’s more about creating more from a creative concept type of world, leveraging the different personas, angles, contexts, and narratives that are available within the user base that they’re trying to talk to.

We’re at an interesting time where there is more in front of us within digital than ever before. The things that we are seeing perform are the things that champion humanity, authenticity, and a true brand voice. Along those lines, being in the know of what is trending within social and how you could potentially even apply that to your brand and make it something that’s interesting but feels authentic to, for instance, different platforms, is an easy way, maybe not easy, but a great way to bring more life to your brand and cut through some of the more standard types of ads that you would see within digital.

That’s an area that I think is also a lot of fun to play with. It’s very creative, and it’s also very dynamic given how quickly the platform and trends are shifting and changing. It presents a fun opportunity for brands, too, to be part of that storytelling. It’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about for our own team.

Lauren: Jean, you and I could talk about this topic all day, so thank you for that perspective. We are going to do a full episode specifically on this together, so I look forward to talking to you about it soon. All right, everybody. That officially wraps up our 200th episode, Parts A and B. I want to thank everybody who’s ever participated in an episode of Ignite, specifically all of our wonderful panelists today. I have to give a shout-out behind the scenes to the team that makes Ignite happen, Ashley, Susie, all of the marketers that have come before them. If you guys have ever worked with us on this podcast, you know what it takes to go into it. Thank you, guys, and we look forward to 200 more.

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.