Recently, I was on a panel that discussed turning healthcare data into measurable growth and we talked a lot about the challenges facing healthcare marketers today. It was a great conversation with Alex Pina from Baptist Health South Florida and Ray Mina from Freshpaint and I encourage you to check out the full recording.
During our conversation, we ran 3 poll questions, and I found the responses very insightful. Since I found the responses insightful, I wanted to recap the responses to those questions and add some brief thoughts on each for all of you. The questions were:
- Which of the following do you see as the biggest shift impacting healthcare marketing in 2025?
- When it comes to balancing privacy and performance in marketing, what’s your biggest challenge?
- Which areas of measurement were your biggest challenge?
Here are the responses:
We continue to hear about the many competing forces and demands on healthcare marketers. The responses to this question clearly show that. However, here are a few insights based on conversations we’ve had tied to the top 3 responses:
- Shrinking budgets and tighter privacy regulations: There are options to use tools like Freshpaint to ensure compliance while also integrating tracking deeper into your website for improved optimization of advertising campaigns (to help with the efficiency of your budget).
- Shrinking medical workforce and accessibility challenges: While marketing can’t solve this challenge, we can help with creative strategies such as:
- Shift efforts away from services that don’t have capacity to those that do
- Shift resources towards proactive health and wellness efforts, helping keep people out of the hospital while also building your brand for when they do need care
- AI’s growing role in healthcare and marketing: There are impacts here and will continue to be. From how AI is impacting consumer behavior and their path to care (and post-care) as well as tools that can help make us more efficient and effective as marketers. This space continues to rapidly change, so it’s important to be testing and learning.
Tracking, measuring ROI, and personalization while staying compliant are clearly the top performance challenges. While this will continue to be a challenge as privacy laws evolve at the state and federal level, there are plenty of solutions that exist now to help mitigate the risks while also continuing to maintain tracking and personalization efforts. If you’re not sure how to approach this, please reach out, we would love to help!
I would also caution organizations from over-focusing on personalization. While there are many things that can and should be done with personalization, I sometimes see organizations trying too hard to control the consumer journey. There needs to be a balance between providing a personalization, while also giving people the option to choose their own pathways. This often requires a thoughtful approach to information architecture and content strategy.
