A healthcare marketing strategy is the plan that decides which patients and referring physicians a provider wants to reach, for which services, through which channels, and how each dollar is traced to a booked appointment. In the US it also has to work inside HIPAA and FTC rules, which shape targeting, tracking and testimonials more than in most industries.
The eight provider examples below point to one pattern. Campaigns with published results lose most of their audience between the ad and the appointment, and the largest documented costs among them since 2023 came from tracking and privacy failures, not weak creative. A strategy that fixes access and compliance first gets more from every channel that follows.
| Provider | Year | Play | Reported result | Source type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| St. Mary Medical Center | 2025 | Patient-story cardiology campaign | 278,000 video views, 15 direct appointment requests | Hospital press release |
| Exer Urgent Care | 2024 | Local ads guided by media mix modeling | 8X return on ad spend, 17,000 incremental visits | Award entry (agency-reported) |
| Hims & Hers | 2025 | Direct-to-consumer subscriptions | $2.35 billion revenue, 2.5 million subscribers | Company earnings release |
| Amazon One Medical | 2023 | $9 a month membership for Prime members | No results published | Company press release |
| Intermountain Health | 2023 | Post-merger rebrand of eight hospitals | No results published | Trade press |
| The Christ Hospital Health Network | 2023 | Nurse recruitment campaign | Effie Gold; staffing goals exceeded | Award, hospital press release |
| NYU Langone Health | 2022 | Brand campaign | Record appointment month; conflicting social figures | Agency case study |
| Kaiser Permanente | 2024 to 2025 | Website trackers (failure) | 13.4 million people notified; $46 million settlement | Trade press |
What is a healthcare marketing strategy?
It is a decision about where patient volume will come from. A useful one names the service lines that need growth (orthopedics, cardiology, primary care), a volume target for each, and the two audiences that produce it: consumers who choose a provider themselves, and physicians who refer them.
Four things set healthcare apart: regulation on data and claims, referrals as a channel of their own, insurance networks and price that often decide before brand does, and decision cycles that can run months from first search to surgery, which means longer attribution windows.
Eight healthcare marketing examples with public sources
1. St. Mary Medical Center: a patient story measured to the appointment (2025)
St. Mary Medical Center in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, built a cardiovascular campaign around one patient’s survival story across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, radio, print and Spanish-language media. Over three months it reported 278,000 video views, 36,000 landing page visits, 91 risk assessments and 15 direct appointment requests (hospital press release, November 2025, on its PR Daily award).
Only about 0.25% of landing page visitors completed a risk assessment, and phone bookings were not reported. What to copy: publish the whole funnel, and put a low-commitment step between the ad and the booking.
2. Exer Urgent Care: local ads guided by modeling (2024)
Exer, a Southern California urgent care network with more than 50 locations, combined its visit data with media mix modeling and ran radius-targeted ads around each clinic. The agency’s entry reports an 8X return on ad spend, $14 million in marketing-driven revenue and 17,000 incremental visits (award entry, The Drum Awards for Marketing Americas, 2024).
Award entries show best cases, and these figures are modeled. The method still suits any multi-site provider: let visit data by location, not clicks, move the budget.
3. Hims & Hers: subscription care at scale (2025)
Hims & Hers reported 2025 revenue of $2.35 billion, up 59%, more than 2.5 million subscribers, up 13%, and marketing expense of $919.3 million (company earnings release, February 2026). That is about 39% of revenue, down from about 46% in 2024 ($678.8 million on $1.48 billion), calculated from the same release.
The lesson: direct-to-consumer care can scale, but it spends more than a third of revenue on marketing, a ratio few hospital budgets could carry.
4. Amazon One Medical: price as the message (2023)
In November 2023 Amazon offered One Medical membership to Prime members for $9 a month or $99 a year, up to $100 off the standard annual fee, with 24/7 virtual care included and office visits billed to insurance (company press release, November 2023). No uptake numbers were published. The play rests on go-to-market choices, pricing and distribution, rather than advertising.
5. Intermountain Health: one brand after a merger (2023)
After Intermountain Healthcare and SCL Health merged in April 2022, eight former SCL hospitals in Colorado and Montana took the Intermountain Health name in 2023, with a new logo on dark blue signs meant to honor the legacy facilities (Catholic Health World, September 2023, citing the system’s release). Cost and results were not disclosed. The lesson: settle brand architecture before service-line campaigns.
6. The Christ Hospital Health Network: marketing for staff (2023)
During a COVID-era nursing shortage, The Christ Hospital in Cincinnati ran a recruitment campaign with headlines written together with staff from the hiring departments. It won Gold in Healthcare Services at the 2023 US Effie Awards, and the network says it exceeded its staffing goals, without figures (hospital press release, June 2023). A service line without staff cannot absorb the demand a campaign creates.
7. NYU Langone Health: a brand campaign with conflicting numbers (2022)
NYU Langone’s #TheBestOutcomes campaign ran across digital, print, out-of-home and social. The agency’s page reports a record appointment month in January 2022 and 24 million YouTube views, but gives social performance as 243% above benchmark in one place and 422% in another (Deloitte Digital case study, 2022). A figure stated two ways, or a record month with no baseline, cannot be compared with anything.
8. Kaiser Permanente: the cost of website trackers (2024 to 2025)
In April 2024 Kaiser Permanente reported to federal regulators that tracking code from Google, Microsoft Bing, X and others on its websites and apps may have shared information about 13.4 million people. In December 2025 it agreed to a preliminary class settlement of $46 million, up to $47.5 million, while denying wrongdoing (BankInfoSecurity, December 2025). In July 2023 the FTC and HHS had warned about 130 hospital systems and telehealth providers that the Meta pixel and Google Analytics may disclose patients’ health data (FTC press release, July 2023).
The core components of a healthcare marketing strategy
| Component | What it involves | Metric |
|---|---|---|
| Website and access | Fast mobile pages, provider and location pages, online self-scheduling, tested phone routing | Booking completion rate |
| Search and local SEO | One page per service and location; accurate Google Business Profile | Calls and bookings from search |
| AI search visibility | Clear, quotable answers to patient questions | Mentions in AI answers |
| Content and clinician expertise | Articles and video built from contact-center questions | Organic visits that convert |
| Reviews | Asking every patient; replying without health details | Rating and volume by location |
| Physician referrals | Liaison visits and referrer updates by service line | Referral volume, referrer churn |
| Social and patient stories | Education and testimonials with written consent | Engagement reaching a booking step |
| Paid search and programmatic | Search ads for high intent; display and streaming for awareness | Cost per booked appointment |
| CRM, email and retention | Preventive reminders and follow-ups by segment | Return visits |
| Brand and accessibility | Consistent naming; WCAG 2 AA websites under the ADA | Awareness; accessibility errors |
Single-location practices lean on local SEO. Reputation programs scale with review management software, and tools that track mentions in ChatGPT show how AI assistants describe a provider. For retention, this marketing automation case study shows automated follow-ups at work, and a shortlist of CRM software helps with the platform.
HIPAA and FTC rules that shape healthcare marketing
- Authorization. The HIPAA Privacy Rule requires a patient’s written authorization before protected health information is used for most marketing, testimonials included.
- Review replies. In June 2023 a New Jersey psychiatric practice, Manasa Health Center, paid $30,000 after answering negative reviews with patients’ diagnosis and treatment details. “Simply put, this is not allowed,” said the OCR director (HHS Office for Civil Rights, June 2023).
- Tracking. HHS guidance from 2022, updated in March 2024, treats pixels on many provider pages as a HIPAA issue. A federal court vacated part of it in June 2024, but the FTC letter and class actions keep the risk alive.
- Reviews and endorsements. The FTC’s 2024 rule bans fake reviews and review suppression; its Endorsement Guides require paid influencers to disclose the relationship.
- Referrals. The Stark Law and the Anti-Kickback Statute limit anything of value offered to referral sources, so liaison programs need legal review.
Involve compliance at planning, not final approval.
The 4 Ps, 5 Ps, 7 Ps and 4 Cs in healthcare
| Framework | Elements | Healthcare reading |
|---|---|---|
| 4 Ps (McCarthy, 1960) | Product, price, place, promotion | Service line, out-of-pocket cost, location and telehealth, campaigns |
| 5 Ps | The 4 Ps plus people | Clinicians and staff |
| 7 Ps (Booms and Bitner, 1981) | Adds people, process, physical evidence | Scheduling and wait times; facilities, reviews, outcomes |
| 4 Cs (Lauterborn, 1990) | Consumer, cost, convenience, communication | Patient need, total cost, access, two-way contact |
The 7 Ps fit best because care is a service. There is no standard “5 Ps”; most versions add people to the original four.
How to build a healthcare marketing strategy
- Pick service lines by capacity and margin, with a volume target for each.
- Define both audiences with short patient and referrer personas.
- Study local competitors’ rankings, reviews and messages; competitor analysis tools speed this up.
- Name the differentiator from reviews, outcomes data and staff interviews.
- Fix access before spending: booking, phone routing, wait times.
- Budget by assignment, holding back about 10% to reallocate.
- Measure to the completed visit with HIPAA-compliant tools.
A 90-day sequence: month one, audit access, listings and tracking code; month two, launch search and review programs for priority service lines; month three, add referrer outreach and one patient-story campaign. Access and search fixes tend to show within a quarter, referral work in about two, brand over years. The full document can follow this marketing plan template.
Healthcare marketing trends for 2026
Four shifts run through the examples: patients asking AI assistants about providers; self-pay memberships turning price into marketing; privacy-first measurement replacing browser pixels; and reporting bookings, not views.
The decision rule
Spend on promotion only when three things are true: a patient can book within a reasonable wait, the tracking on the booking path is compliant, and the campaign reports to an appointment number. If any is missing, the next dollar belongs there.
