Top Healthcare Marketing Trends for 2025

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 Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Alex Membrillo: Y’all didn’t watch Scaling Up, because if you did, you won’t need to listen to the next few minutes, but all you naughty boys and girls out there, I’m going to recap it for you with my co-host here, our Chief Growth Officer, Lauren Leone. Welcome to this show.

Lauren: To my own show.

Alex: Your show, I guess.

Lauren: Our show.

[laughter]

Alex: Thanks for having me on your show.

Lauren: Oh, thanks for having me.

Alex: Someone that doesn’t get a lot of credit is Emilee. She’s always on the other side of the camera here. I wish I could turn around, but she’ll yell at me, but Emilee, Carly, Lucas, Ashley, they have made all the magic happen in ’24. ’24 is over. Let’s talk about 2025. Scaling Up taught us a lot because we got to hear from all the healthcare marketing leaders around the country, and that was cool. One big resounding thing that we’ve heard going into next year is that the patient journey has evolved and it’s not just as simple as run PPC anymore. What are you seeing that is going to be really critical in terms of a different channel mix going into next year?

Lauren: I think for so many years, if you were in healthcare early to adopt paid search and you did it decently well and you said the right things, you could succeed in your digital and just doing paid search, but it is getting saturated. The landscape is changing. You’ve got AI results, and now Reddit is on the SERPs, and local is there. It’s just very busy and it’s getting expensive. CPCs are rising. You’ve got to think broader.

If you’re coming in and you’re only expecting to put one token into the machine, the PPC machine, and then get one candy out on the other side, you’re probably not going to scale efficiently the way that you’re hoping to. That’s just really where the other channels come into play, how do I touch the patient on their journey earlier so that I can then influence their decisioning or their behavior down the funnel? Maybe they’re searching for me by brand. Maybe when I do bid on those non-brand paid search terms, there’s a recognition and I get a click-through rate that makes spending the money on that click worth it.

Alex: Yes, absolutely. I can’t get past what kind of candy would be in the PPC machine. It’s like a gumball? No, it would be like M&M’s because it’s easy to chew and you never want to stop.

Lauren: Just the tiny little one that you could [unintelligible 00:02:15] a million of?

Alex: You never want to stop. Talking about other types of candy, what other channels, what have we seen effective? What types of healthcare is it working in? Everybody wants to know. All two of our listeners.

Lauren: Yes. You don’t have to leave the Google sphere to start experimenting with some of this. I think leaning into some of the newer products, Performance Max, which is Google’s programmatic option. It allows you to look at signals in the audience category outside of just search and deliver ads across display, video, search included. That’s one place to start that is fairly low barrier to entry. You need a couple of basic assets, read the guidelines and put in the minimum assets, and the number one thing being to make sure you’re tracking the right things so it doesn’t go wild. That may be a simple place to start.

Moving into social, we see a lot of groups having success there. I would say social was a little bit of a black hole there for a while. We hadn’t really figured out the tracking. Everyone was dropping pixels. There wasn’t a lot of clear guidance on how to find the right audiences, and as that has changed, as we found really great data partners to bring in healthcare first and third-party audiences, we’re seeing the momentum pick up on using social channels.

Alex: When do you bring in those audience? For what kind of provider groups?

Lauren: I was talking to a dental group the other day and it’s not worth paying for an expensive third-party audience for general dentistry, like everyone’s your patient, so you don’t need to build fancy cohorts. Now if you have a strategy to drive growth in a certain payer mix or you’ve got a higher consideration audience that’s a little bit more niche and hard to find, it would be worth looking at bringing in some third party audiences to feed the top of your funnel and then pull them down from there. I suggest always testing those against the native audiences to see if they’re more efficient or effective.

Alex: For a variety of different acuity types, paid social, you’ve seen work and you need the right kind of tracking. I’ve seen that be really important for running. Why and what?

Lauren: You’re working with an algorithm that feeds off of signals of reward, and if what you’re telling them as a reward is get me a click to my webpage, you’re probably not going to get much out of it. With the removal of pixels, you’ve got to have something like call tracking, you’ve got to be testing the native lead forms because that gives you a conversion signal, or you’ve got to have a CDP or a HIPAA-compliant analytics solution to send the signals back.

Alex: Run PPC easy, SEO easy, listings easy with simple tracking, evolving out of those more difficult when you start going omni-channel, especially if you start going out of the Google sphere. We’ve also seen LSAs work where approved.

Lauren: Yes. It’s a higher barrier to get in. Everybody who’s done it knows it’s a pain to do the application, pull the provider’s insurance, and there’s a barrier there, because of that barrier, a lot of groups say, “Ugh, it’s not worth it.” If you can push through that barrier, you could be in a small group of people bidding on inventory and that it’s not overly saturated or competitive. It’s still up in the air. It is not a universal, it works for everybody.

We’ve seen situations when you’ve got high competition, de novos, high Medicaid populations, or extremely urban areas, it tends to be good, it doesn’t work in every instance. If you’re going to test it, maybe pull a couple of different types of locations in your portfolio, test it first and then figure out where it works and then maybe go double down on that.

Alex: Yes. Vet and dental, seen it work really well. CBL is 20% less than even traditional search when it works. Another big thing we heard at Scaling Up was that the macroeconomic factors, you got inflation up, interest rates aren’t coming down super-fast. Seems like most provider groups are going to be focused on ROI, on profit. I think most businesses in America are going to be focused on profit instead of intense growth, which all of us don’t really feel like is going to happen in 2025. Slightly pessimistic view, but it’s good for marketers because we have to focus on profit and efficiency. What are you seeing from provider groups when they start looking at how to spend money in the right way? Where do the smart groups start?

Lauren: I think the natural inclination when you think focus on profit is focus on bottom of the funnel because you can see the dollars going in and something coming out. What tends to happen when you only live there is you look at something like a blended cost per acquisition and you think if I add more money here, it only increases my blended by 10%, 20% and I can tolerate that. What you’re not thinking about is that incremental dollar you put in is costing you 10 times what the first dollar you put in, so marginally, is that dollar even worth spending at that point?

That’s where we’re using things like or starting to talk with our clients about things like modeling different combinations of channel mixes that might yield a greater overall efficiency and that overall efficiency has to have a measurement framework like did I see a lift in organic and brand and are my overall costs to acquire coming down? Because that channel in and of itself might not look efficient as a standalone.

Alex: Yes. The specific use cases most people think just dump more into the run PPC M&M machine when actually it’s not the cheapest lead at a certain point Meta could be, but it deceives you because it looks like it might be, and these modeling frameworks that we’re using can also measure traditional media.

Lauren: Yes. What you’re looking for is a correlation between when I do this combination of services at these investment levels, how does that correlate to increases or decreases or changes in my revenue? When you’re working with multiple touches like TV, you’re never going to measure if someone saw a TV ad and then clicked a PPC ad, same with some of your digital higher funnel touch points, and so you’ve got to have another way to understand are they correlating to the business outcome that I’m desiring? That’s where you might want to work with an algorithm like that. I’m not suggesting abandoning attempts to do multi-touch attribution or look at lift and overall improvement in digital, but it is a layer that often resonates better with CFOs and C-suites when you can make an additional case where you’re lacking in attribution.

Alex: Yes. Absolutely. We’re excited about all of the modeling that is to come because that’s going to help drive profitability. Knowing where to spend money, not just on what channels, but where is also important and often overlooked. We talk about MOps, marketing ops alignment. If you’re a marketer in today’s– well, we want to be called growth wizards, is what the poll said on LinkedIn. If you’re a marketer going into 2025 and you’re in-house, which I know you desperately want to do because you can’t wait to quit Cardinal, where are you starting? You go to your ops counterpart, is it awkward because it’s true? You go to your ops counterpart and you start with what?

Lauren: Where do you need more patients? I think that’s something that if you run any type of model ever and you understand marginally where your channels are efficient, that is not going to then tell you where to put the dollar. You’ve got to then understand the business needs. Where do you need more patients geographically? Which clinics have capacity? I do not want to spend a dollar where I’m booking 120 days out. That is a poor patient experience and they will go elsewhere, so let’s not waste the dollar sending them to a competitor.

Same with service lines. Where are the service lines that you want to grow? What appointment types do you have available? If you are really getting in the weeds, you might be looking at things like what types of insurance do I need these people to have too? Depending on how complex the answer to those questions are should dictate then what channels you use to accomplish it.

Alex: Yes. Absolutely. It starts with a business goal. Where do we need patients? What kind of patients? What service lines? Then making sure you stay updated on that. Some of our most advanced marketing– I was just hosting a podcast with the head of marketing and Biz Dev from one of the largest PT groups in the country and it was really interesting. They’re like best friends. They talk every day about neat ideas, where we need patients, but also how to move them through their plan of care so obviously the revenue stays in stakes and comes back. Having a counterpart that you absolutely love and adore, it seems to be really critical going into next year.

Lauren: I just got off the phone with a friend who they decided to blend their sales and marketing functions together and there’s kind of leads on each arm, but someone that unifies the two and make sure they work together. It is absolutely happening.

Alex: Chief revenue officer?

Lauren: Yes, these functions cannot live in silos anymore.

Alex: Big trends to recap, like you said, Lauren, you’re talking about different measurement frameworks, channel mix diversification, making marketing and ops align. How do you do all this? Where do you start?

Lauren: If I don’t have data, how can we possibly help you make any of those decisions? If you don’t have good, clean data from your operational counterparts on capacity, how are you going to know where to spend? If you don’t know what’s coming out on the other end in terms of patient appointments and who’s keeping and who’s not showing up, how are you going to know where to spend the next dollar to help the business grow? I think one thing we heard pretty universally this year is a lot of groups really starting to invest in some internal BI functions that maybe they didn’t have before, building out a clean data warehouse where the data is just available.

Not even necessarily getting fancy with it yet. Just how am I acquiring these patients? How are they getting to us? How are they staying with us? What are they doing with us from a patient-type perspective? Then you can use that data to make better decisions. Oftentimes where we get stuck is we don’t know the answers to those questions because the data isn’t available and we live in a little bit of a perpetual limbo of doing the activities we think are best, but there’s no way to validate it.

Alex: Why does it get to that? Because it’s house of brands and they grew really quickly and then everybody’s on different EMR, CRM, marketing system and it’s not–

Lauren: Absolutely. That’s a huge one. The just lack of financing, the need for it, like not having anyone in house owning it, so then you just get too many hands tossing their data over the fence and no one ever really making any meaning of it. I think the systems and just healthcare in general is very challenging to extract. You’ve got some closed systems where you’re not going to get much out of it.

Alex: Thank you for joining you on your show, Lauren. This has been awesome. Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. Happy New Year’s. We’re excited about 2025. Finally, the focus is going to be on what matters, which is profitable growth, so I’m pumped about 2025. At the end of the day, Lauren, what’s the best thing to do if you don’t know what to do?

Lauren: Call Cardinal.

Alex: Yes, bro.

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.