Healthcare marketing demands thorough, nuanced approaches: from the platforms you advertise on to the audiences you target to the creative you deploy. But your entire strategy must be steered by clear, attainable goals. As an experienced healthcare marketing agency, we’ve helped countless health and wellness brands define their marketing by establishing those goals and identifying the ways they can achieve them.
Of course, “health and wellness” isn’t a monolith—different companies will inevitably have different targets and needs. In this blog, we aim to give you additional insight into how we go about tracking success and setting goals for different types of healthcare brands.
Understanding Different Healthcare Marketing Business Models
Success in healthcare marketing isn’t one-size-fits-all. For brands selling a service—like online therapy—success looks fundamentally different than it does for those selling a product, such as a prescription medication or supplement.
A smart healthcare marketing agency will help its clients set goals that are not only ambitious, but realistic, compliant, and grounded in their business model. Our process is rooted in understanding the unique dynamics of each client and using data to guide decision-making.
That work starts with understanding how the client operates. For service-based businesses like telehealth providers, we focus on metrics like patient bookings, intake completion rates, and retention over time. Are patients attending multiple sessions? Are they satisfied with the experience? What’s their LTV?
By aligning our marketing strategy with the client’s revenue model, we ensure that our campaigns support their most important business objectives.
Success Metrics for Service-Based Healthcare Brands (e.g., online therapy)
For service-based brands, success often hinges on long-term relationships—not just one-time actions. Key performance indicators (KPIs) focus on ongoing patient engagement and retention:
- New Patient Acquisition: Success starts with getting patients in the door, whether through form submissions, bookings, or completed intake flows.
- Retention Metrics: One session isn’t enough. Metrics like average sessions per patient and lifetime value (LTV) are crucial for tracking how long and how often patients stay engaged.
- Engagement Tracking: Understanding where users drop off in the intake process helps identify friction points and improve the path to care.
- Revenue Goals: Revenue accumulates over time. The value lies in sustained sessions, not isolated transactions.
Success Metrics for Product-Based Healthcare brands (e.g., prescription medications)
For product-based brands, the focus is more transactional. That means we’ll be designing strategies with an emphasis on purchase behavior and efficiency:
- Transactions and ROAS: In this case, a conversion will mean a completed purchase, and return on ad spend (ROAS) becomes the central metric.
- Conversion Rates: Success often depends on how well product pages convert, and how many users complete the checkout process.
- Upsells and Cross-Sells: Increasing average order value (AOV) through bundles, add-ons, or related products can significantly impact revenue.
Shared Considerations
Despite these differences, all healthcare advertisers share some universal challenges and priorities. Regulatory compliance is one of them. Success isn’t just about hitting targets—it’s about doing so while respecting strict legal and ethical guidelines.
Healthcare marketing always has to work within strict regulatory frameworks. We build that into our goal-setting process:
- Ad Policy Alignment: We ensure every goal is achievable within HIPAA, platform-specific restrictions, and any necessary certifications like LegitScript.
- Targeting Realities: With limited first-party data and strict retargeting rules, audience reach must be factored into how we define success.
Whether we’re working with a mental health platform or a supplement brand, we’re always navigating regulations, policies, and other compliance needs. From targeting to data collection, every step must be compliant and secure. This requires a careful balance: crafting effective campaigns without compromising the rules that govern patient data and advertising in healthcare.
Setting the Right Healthcare Marketing Goals
Once we’ve established what KPIs we’ll be prioritizing based on a healthcare client’s unique business model, we can begin working with them to set our marketing targets. We base this process on historical performance and industry benchmarks so that expectations are grounded in data. That process includes:
- Auditing Current Metrics: Our healthcare marketing agency has a robust audit process. We look at where the client is at that time and identify all the areas where they could—or need to—improve.
- Competitive Analysis: Competitors can be the best inspiration. We explore in-depth how the client’s performance stacks up against its direct competition in the same healthcare industry niches.
- Channel Insights: Which platforms and tactics are driving the best results—and which need to be better? Because different marketing channels (SEM, paid social, programmatic…) can serve different functions, we must assess how well each is doing its job relative to brand needs.
By thoroughly analyzing all this data, we can assure that we are creating goals that maximize the client’s budget and resources without overwhelming them.
Creating a Collaborative Framework
Of course, we don’t set goals in a vacuum. We need to work closely with healthcare brands to keep everyone on the same page throughout the process. This is done through:
- Goal-Setting Workshops: We stake out time early in any client marketing relationship to host sessions where we align on budgets, timelines, and platform rules.
- Ongoing Checkpoints: As performance evolves, so do the goals. We revisit them regularly to ensure continued alignment.
Continual communication and check-ins are a must to ensure any healthcare marketing strategy stays on point.
Knowing When It’s Time to Adjust Your Targets
At ADM, we view goal-setting as an iterative process. Goals aren’t static—they need to evolve with performance, resources, and market conditions. Here’s how we know when it’s time to adjust (up or down), and how we guide health and wellness brands through those changes.
Making Informed Decisions
To be a premier healthcare marketing agency, we believe you need to be proactive, transparent, and data-driven when revisiting goals:
- Lead with Data: We use trends, benchmarks, and campaign learnings to justify any change in direction.
- Tie Adjustments to Strategy: We connect the dots between what’s happening and why a goal shift supports long-term success.
- Keep the Big Picture in View: We show how updates fit into the broader business plan—not just the current campaign.
When to Raise Goals
- Metrics are Consistently Exceeding Targets: If we’re outperforming expectations—say, hitting lower-than-expected CPAs or driving more sessions than forecast—we raise the bar to keep growing.
- Improved Market Conditions Generating Better Outcomes: External forces constantly impact our marketing efforts—but sometimes, that’s a good thing. A new product launch, increased demand, changing policies, or reduced competition might justify more aggressive goals.
- Expanded Budgets or Resources: As a growth marketing agency, we help clients fuel new growth—and often that newfound revenue leads them to increase their budgets. When a client ramps up investment, it creates opportunities to scale.
When to Lower Goals
- External Headwinds: On the other side of things, outside forces can sometimes make marketing more challenging. This is especially true in healthcare. Algorithm changes, tighter ad restrictions, or market saturation may reduce performance and require recalibration.
- Overly-Ambitious Starting Points: Even well-laid plans can be thrown off by something unforeseen. If early projections missed the mark or an external change threatens performance, it’s vital to revisit goals based on actual data and tweak expectations to keep campaigns grounded in reality.
- Budget or Seasonality Shifts: Likewise, internal factors at a healthcare company can change our goal equations. Temporary dips in spend or seasonal lulls can justify a short-term adjustment down.
Effective Healthcare Marketing Starts with Well-Defined Goals
Measuring success in healthcare marketing depends on understanding the nuances of what you’re selling. Service-based brands need strategies that emphasize retention and relationship-building. Product-based brands need performance-driven campaigns that convert efficiently. At ADM, we tailor our approach to reflect these distinctions—always through the lens of data, compliance, and collaboration.
Whether it’s setting ambitious goals or adjusting them based on real-world performance, our job is to help healthcare brands grow sustainably and confidently in a highly regulated space. If you’re looking for a healthcare marketing agency that can help your brand reach its next phase of growth, reach out to the ADM team below:
