Are You Reaching the Right Consumers?
In healthcare marketing, success isn’t just about generating leads—it’s about generating the right leads. Yet many organizations struggle with poor lead quality, filling the pipeline with patients who are not the right fit. This leads to wasted marketing spend, lower conversion rates, and frustration for both providers and patients.
Table of Contents
- 1) Identify The Problem
- 2) Define Your Goals, Position, & Audience
- 3) Implement Advanced Media Tactics
- 4) Test & Refine
- 5) Optimize the Patient Experience
- Conclusion
In healthcare, the harsh reality is that no single organization can help everybody. I’d like to take that notion a step further. No single healthcare organization should help everybody. Why? Because every healthcare journey is a little bit different. And if it’s not a good fit, neither the patient nor the healthcare organization will arrive at the best outcome.
Unfortunately, many healthcare organizations are great at reaching a lot of the wrong people. One reason that I’d like to address head-on is poor lead quality. I see it all the time: the marketing team puts a high volume of leads into the pipeline, but the quality is poor. It’s not a fit. As a result, those patients aren’t converting into booked appointments. This, in turn, costs the organization time and money.
That goes double for mental healthcare, addiction treatment, aesthetic and plastic surgery, or any other healthcare with similarly heavy consideration before a purchase decision. If it’s already tough to get the right patients to commit, you’re never going to meet your goals chasing the wrong people.
Your best option, therefore, is to make sure you’re reaching the right people.
How To Reach The Right People
The first step, as always, is recognizing that the problem exists. Looking at key metrics and data points like CVR and booking rates will help you evaluate whether you’re not reaching the right people currently. Once you’ve identified the problem, you can put together a strategy to solve it by defining your ideal patient and figuring out how your unique selling proposition aligns with their needs.
From there, you can dive into the nuts and bolts of leveraging the data you have to achieve the results you want. Expect to do a lot of testing to figure out the most effective marketing tactics to reach your ideal audience. Beyond your marketing strategy, there’s typically plenty of room for improving the patient experience and removing any remaining barriers between you and your ideal patients.
That’s a concise summary of the 5-step process for reaching the right people, but of course, the devil is in the details—so here are the details.
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1) Identify The Problem
Evaluate the Leads You’re Already Creating
“Measurement is the path to understanding,” a Very Wise Person once said. You need to examine your existing lead data to see where the good leads come from and where there’s room for improvement. The data should show you what good and bad leads search for and the steps they take along the journey. It will show you where leads come from, too (PPC, Facebook Ads, organic search, and so on).
As you parse the data, look for trends that might indicate an opportunity for improvement. You’re looking for those a-ha moments in the journey where you say, “Ah, THAT’S why so many of our surgery leads don’t convert—they need more information on post-surgery rehabilitation care.” To that end, a few important metrics ought to provide some clues:
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Conversion rate (CVR)
- Call to booking CVR
Know How to Spot the Signs of Suffering Lead Quality
As part of your evaluation, you’ll want to look for the common signs and causes of poor lead quality. The three most common causes that we see are:
Mismatch between what the lead wants and what you offer
How well do you know your ideal customers and what they want? If you’re not meeting their needs and intent at each stage, your lead-generation metrics will suffer.
Messaging either over promises or inaccurately describes your solution
Expectations are everything. If a lead enters your pipeline expecting to consult with a surgeon but can’t get an appointment for six months, you might have a problem. Or your website says you offer a service that you really don’t.
Messaging doesn’t provide enough detail about your solution
One common example is the healthcare provider that doesn’t offer insurance information on their website. What happens when leads come in that may need a different type of insurance or payment option? Insurance is a widespread objection.
Understand How HIPAA Limits Your Options
Healthcare marketing comes with one big challenge: HIPAA’s tight grip on privacy.
HIPAA compliance has become increasingly complex over the past two years as evolving privacy regulations have raised the stakes for healthcare marketers. With new clarifications and legal challenges reshaping the landscape, organizations must now navigate tighter restrictions while facing heightened scrutiny. These recent shifts demand a deeper understanding of the boundaries between marketing strategies and patient privacy, making compliance more crucial—and challenging—than ever before.
In December 2022, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a bulletin that tightened regulations on how healthcare information is shared. The bulletin stated that regulated entities cannot use tracking technologies if doing so would result in unauthorized disclosures of protected health information (PHI).
Tracking technologies include scripts or codes on websites or apps that collect user data through cookies, web beacons, tracking pixels, session replay scripts, and fingerprinting tools. However, this definition has faced legal challenges. On January 5, 2024, the American Hospital Association (AHA) and other organizations filed a lawsuit claiming that an IP address combined with a visit to a specific health-related webpage doesn’t qualify as PHI.
On June 20, 2024, the court ruled that the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) overstepped its authority by trying to regulate this “Proscribed Combination.” While the ruling leaves other HIPAA rules intact, it remains uncertain how aggressively the OCR will push for stricter enforcement in this area.
With the regulatory landscape still unclear and the threat of class action lawsuits remaining, healthcare organizations must assess their risk tolerance when developing digital marketing strategies. We recommend healthcare providers consult with their legal and compliance teams and make sure their marketing strategy adheres to the latest privacy rules. This not only helps protect you from lawsuits but also meets the privacy expectations of today’s consumers.
2) Define Your Goals, Position, & Audience
Research the Ideal Patient
Your ideal patients are looking for you. But if you want them to find you, you need to understand who they are as a whole person. Knowing some keywords they use is a good first step, but focusing too narrowly on specific keywords will limit your ability to reach your ideal patients. By considering them as whole people and understanding what makes them an ideal fit, you’ll be able to shift your perspective and find new tactics for reaching the audience you want to reach.
To do that, you’ll need to leverage your available data to put together a more comprehensive ideal patient profile and persona. You can analyze everything from on-site usage metrics and usability testing data to intake data and exit interviews to user geodata. You may also want to send out surveys to gather additional data.
Once you have crunched all that data, you’ll be able to build an ideal patient persona, which you can then target for further research by interviewing patients or potential patients who fit the profile, as well as doing some competitive analysis to understand what approach others in the market are taking.
By gaining a fuller understanding of your ideal patients and who they are, you’ll be better positioned to devise new methods of reaching them. That will allow you to develop campaigns more likely to reach your ideal patient by considering things like:
- Clinical Suitability: Target by diagnosis, provider visits, prescriptions, etc.
- Financial Qualifications: Household income targeting, Payor targeting, etc.
- Warm Audiences: Reaching the decision maker, Household-level targeting to reach parents, etc.
Gain Stronger Marketing – Ops Alignment
Marketing needs to be in conversation with operations to understand exactly who your ads need to be reaching and adjust accordingly. Focusing purely on lead volume without optimizing for quality leads results in a high volume of disqualified leads —especially in verticals like behavioral, where leads are frequently disqualified for a variety of reasons from age requirements to insurance.
Aligning with operations to understand why leads are disqualified will help you understand what a qualified lead looks like—and let you feed better signals to platforms like Google Ads to refine your media strategy.
There’s no giant bucket labeled “ideal patients.” Well, maybe if your 3-year-old daughter wants to play doctor, then everyone’s an ideal patient. However, for actual healthcare organizations, what makes an ideal patient is nuanced and will vary based on vertical, service lines, market, and provider groups. So you can’t just grab someone else’s ideal patients; you need YOUR ideal patients, and that means strong alignment with operations around defining your ideal patient profile. That’s how you’re going to improve lead quality and drive more new appointments.
Related: Read Marketing + Operations: Why Total Alignment is Vital to Growth to learn how to gain alignment around ideal patient, service line priorities, messaging, technology, and practice capacity.
Define Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
In How to Define Your USP and Improve Your Healthcare Marketing, I go into great detail on the importance of a crystallized USP. The strength and specificity of your USP will differentiate you in crowded and competitive markets. It can help improve lead quality by engaging and persuading your ideal patient.
To define your USP, you can use many of the same avenues you use for keyword and customer research. Generally, think about the unique capabilities or services that you offer. Special equipment or technology? Training, experience, or credentials? What about your patient experience? These are common differentiators for healthcare providers.