Launching a new marketing strategy for a health product is never straightforward. Companies in regulated and high-compliance industries face the same competitive and go-to-market hurdles as any brand—but with the added burden of both federal and platform-based rules, certifications, and privacy restrictions.
As a health marketing agency that frequently works with startups and growing digital health brands, we’ve been down this road countless times—so we’ve assembled a list of 7 things that brands need to do when rolling out marketing around a new health product.
1. Get Compliance and Approvals in Order
Companies need to ensure that they are adhering to both legal and platform-based health marketing policies. That means maintaining PHI-secure health marketing practices, understanding what claims they are allowed to make about product safety and efficacy, and identifying if there are specific restrictions about how they are allowed to advertise their particular class of product.
Pharmaceutical products are the most complicated. They typically require LegitScript certification and can be limited to specific countries, audiences or platforms. Certain products in that category (e.g., prescription opioids, unapproved supplements, or those with ephedra/anabolic steroids) cannot be advertised at all.
Legal privacy restrictions limit how healthcare brands can target users and track conversion actions—so if you’re not already equipped there, you shouldn’t be launching any digital marketing campaigns. You must also avoid misleading claims and ensure that messages match across all channels and pages on your website.
Google (and Google Merchant Center), Meta and other advertising platforms have policy restrictions to navigate. These limit where you can advertise certain products or how you can target the advertising.
Compliance is non-negotiable in health marketing. Before even ideating an ad campaign, you need to have all your ducks in a row.
2. Understand Your Market and Competitive Positioning
From a general business perspective, brands always need to understand how competitive their market is, what their pricing strategy is and what are the personas or audiences they are trying to reach.
It’s most helpful when the product stands out and speaks for itself. Competitive advantages and unique selling points should be showcased and emphasized in all advertising. If launching against established brands, conquesting and showcasing how the new product stands up or is better than existing products can be helpful.
If you’re launching advertising around a product that can be obtained from other sources (like beginning to offer a pre-existing generic pharmaceutical), your differentiators need to be brand-based. Emphasize value propositions (“Insurance accepted!” “Free Shipping!”) while building brand trust and credibility.
3. Choose the Right Channels
Despite the numerous limitations in place, health marketers still have a wide variety of digital advertising options at their disposal—but they need to choose the right ones for their goals and audience.
If the audience already knows about the product and has a need for the product, search platforms like Google and Microsoft are the best at capturing intent. Meta and TikTok are good for raising awareness or educating users about products or solutions that the audience didn’t know were available.
Within Google’s advertising platform, YouTube and Demand Gen can also capture users at various stages of the funnel to build awareness and engagement for a brand and their new product. Programmatic or digital out-of-home (like public signage and billboards) are more appropriate for broad campaigns or for reaching audiences via segments (e.g., buyers near clinics) without relying on non-compliant personalization.
4. Differentiate With Messaging and Creative
As we alluded to earlier, your creative should not be just visually appealing—your messaging must also be unique from what everyone else is saying. There’s a time and a place to copy the successes of others, but for new products you also need to find ways to stand out.
Understand your audience and focus on serving their needs in an original way. In health marketing, that often means leaning on authenticity rather than polish: Awareness campaigns based on user-generated content (UGC) and testimonials tend to outperform glossy campaign imagery because they make brands feel approachable and trustworthy.
Prioritize eye-catching visuals with simple but compelling storytelling, and make sure every claim is vetted against platform policies and regulatory limits before it goes live.
5. Test and Optimize Relentlessly
There are countless things to test, creative iterations being the most obvious. In our health marketing work, we’ve seen that running variations of messaging, visuals, and formats early can make the difference between a flat launch and one that scales. User-generated content versus static ads, testimonials versus lifestyle creative, or even subtle shifts in messaging—such as highlighting access, affordability, or patient outcomes—can all perform differently with the same audience. Testing these angles side by side helps surface what resonates best and ensures you’re not locked into a single narrative too soon.
Testing isn’t limited to creative elements, however. Another important area to investigate is user experience: look to pressure test your checkout flows for new products. This type of testing allows them to identify where users may be falling off of the checkout experience.
You’ll want to answer questions like “Do we have too many questions in our flow for eligibility”, “does certain language in a checkout flow contribute to higher conversion rate?” Brands can A/B test checkout flows by sending different ads to different landing pages. Do users have better engagement landing on a traditional informational landing page, or do they convert more when they are sent directly into a checkout experience? There’s only one way to find out.
6. Build Smarter Keyword and Targeting Strategies
The highest volume core keywords typically have very high CPCs, but there is often opportunity to find low hanging fruit in the keyword mix and then build off successes. That low-hanging fruit often comes from identifying overlooked terms where intent is strong but competition is lighter—think condition-specific modifiers, symptom-related phrases, or searches tied to context like geography or urgency. Capturing these wins early creates efficiency and gives you budget to scale into the more competitive terms later.
A holistic negative keyword strategy is equally important for better search alignment. In one launch, broad traffic for a heart medication prescribed off-label for anxiety initially drew the wrong users. Negative keywords like psychiatry, psychology, and therapy tightened alignment, while more specific search terms turned early underperformance into measurable progress.
7. Track Early Performance Signals—But Don’t Overreact
Early in a launch, you’re watching for signs that your campaigns are delivering the way you anticipated. Cost, reach, and impression metrics should line up with your forecasts, showing that you’re getting the delivery you planned for. Affordable CPCs and high click-through rates (CTRs) signal that there’s real interest and engagement, while good conversion rates (CVRs) and affordable customer acquisition costs (CACs) confirm that users are ultimately making the purchases you projected.
The reality is, new product launches rarely go perfectly according to plan. Underperformance at any stage of the funnel is common. The key is to identify which stage is breaking down and adjust accordingly, rather than assuming the whole strategy is off track. In our work with health brands, we’ve seen that even small tweaks at this stage—like adjusting ad creative, refining keyword sets, or simplifying a landing page—can quickly bring metrics back in line.
With new product launches, however, it’s important not to overreact positively or negatively to preliminary results in the first days or weeks. In a sense, a new product launch is kind of one big test, so analyze data carefully and iterate off of successes. As you build more and more data you can gain confidence in your insights and, from there, increase the frequency of testing.
Putting it All Together
Health marketers have a lot to contend with, from hyper-specific policy considerations to rapidly-growing competition across all digital marketing lanes. Your product launches need to be built on compliance and strategic planning, but success will come through adaptability, testing, and a little bit of patience.
Challenges are inevitable—particularly in a field where new platform policies or market changes can come down out of the blue and derail both your existing strategies or new expansion plans. If you’re looking for an expert marketing partner who can help you navigate new product launches and ongoing growth more smoothly, don’t hesitate to reach out to the ADM team below for a quick consultation:
