Introducing Freshpaint Audiences: Better ROI with Audience Targeting Built for Healthcare

Healthcare marketers are forced to run the same marathon as marketers in other industries, but with heavy ankle weights strapped on. Proven tactics like retargeting, lookalike audiences, and exclusion lists have been off-limits, making it nearly impossible to compete on equal footing.

That changes today.

Today, we're introducing Freshpaint Audiences. It gives healthcare marketers the power to run targeted ad campaigns that cut wasted spend, reach the right audience faster, stay fully privacy-compliant, and, most importantly, improve ROI.

Audience Targeting in Healthcare is Broken

In most industries, audience targeting is a foundational tactic. Marketers build retargeting lists, find new prospects with lookalikes, and exclude existing customers in just a few clicks. 

For healthcare marketers, that playbook has been off-limits because HIPAA and other privacy laws treat digital behavior as protected health information (PHI). And with class action lawyers actively scanning healthcare websites for violations, the risks are higher than ever.

That's what makes common ad tools like the Meta Pixel or Google Ads' native tracking so dangerous. These tools send raw user behavior straight to ad platforms. And if even a single piece of PHI slips through, it can trigger serious consequences:

• Regulatory penalties from OCR and the FTC, with fines reaching into the millions.
• Class-action lawsuits from law firms actively scanning healthcare websites for tracking tools that collect PHI.
• Marketing restrictions imposed by regulators, including bans on using data for advertising.
• Damaged consumer trust that can take years to rebuild.

Those consequences leave healthcare organizations with an impossible choice: sacrifice performance or risk compliance. And too often, marketing teams are forced to give up performance in the name of privacy.

Why Healthcare Marketing Falls Behind

The reason so many healthcare organizations choose privacy, while sacrificing marketing performance, is clear: the price of getting privacy wrong is staggering. In just one example, MarinHealth agreed to pay $3 million to settle a class action over data being shared with Meta earlier this year.

To avoid that kind of risk, many healthcare organizations block marketers from using any data in audience targeting. But that caution comes at a cost. Without audience targeting, healthcare marketers:

• Waste budget advertising to the wrong people. Without the ability to segment and target, campaigns often cast too wide a net. That means ad dollars are spent on people who are unlikely to ever become patients or members. Over time, this inefficiency erodes budgets, forcing marketers to do more with less while delivering fewer measurable results.
• Lose high-intent prospects. Many prospective patients show strong interest, such as visiting key service pages, starting appointment bookings, or filling out forms, but never complete the journey. Without retargeting capabilities, those warm leads go cold, and competitors may be the ones to convert them. Re-engagement campaigns are often the difference between a lost lead and a scheduled appointment.
• Struggle to prove ROI. Healthcare marketers are under growing pressure to tie spend directly to measurable outcomes. Without audience targeting, performance data is muddied, and it's harder to connect campaigns to conversions. That lack of clarity makes it difficult to secure future budget and demonstrate marketing’s strategic value to the organization.

Outside of healthcare, audience targeting routinely delivers 20-50% higher conversion rates, 25-40% lower CPA, and 100% higher CTR. For a healthcare organization spending $100,000 per month on digital ads, that could mean driving 200 more booked appointments, reducing acquisition costs from $100 per patient to $65-$75, and doubling the number of high-intent prospects reached — all without increasing spend.

But until now, those results were out of reach for healthcare.

Freshpaint Audiences: Built for Healthcare from the Ground Up

This is a new era for healthcare organizations. Freshpaint Audiences is the first targeting platform built specifically for healthcare, and powered by the same privacy controls in our BAA-supported Healthcare Privacy Platform. Features like Safe by Default, Secure Server-Side Connections, and Event Verification ensure ad platforms never receive PHI, giving marketers the confidence to unlock audience targeting. 

With Audiences, healthcare marketers can use the same proven tactics their peers in other industries have relied on for years: retargeting, lookalikes, and exclusion lists. All of it has been rebuilt from the ground up to meet HIPAA and modern privacy standards..

These are the building blocks of modern digital marketing. And now, they're finally available to healthcare marketers.

Retarget Engaged Leads

Retargeting serves ads to users who showed interest but didn't take the next step. It's one of the most effective ways to turn high-intent prospects into patients.

• When to use it: Re-engage patients who visited a service page, started filling out a form, or even booked an appointment but didn't attend.
• Why it matters: Without retargeting, warm leads go cold and competitors win them over. With Freshpaint, you can bring them back safely.

Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike modeling helps you find new patients or members who resemble your best existing ones. It expands your reach to people who are most likely to convert.

• When to use it: Target prospects similar to patients who booked online, called directly from your website, or converted after seeing a paid ad.
• Why it matters: Lookalikes are one of the fastest ways to scale patient acquisition while protecting privacy.

Exclusion Lists

Exclusion lists ensure you're not wasting budget on people who have already taken an action. They cut redundancy and improve campaign efficiency.

• When to use it: Suppress patients who have already booked an appointment, called within the last 30 days, or filled out a lead form and received follow-up.
• Why it matters: No more bombarding patients with ads for actions they've already completed. It saves budget, reduces fatigue, and creates a better patient experience.

All of that can be done without sending PHI to ad platforms. Healthcare marketers no longer have to choose between privacy and performance. With Audiences, you get both.

How Marketers Are Using Audiences

Freshpaint Audiences unlocks campaigns that were once impossible in healthcare. Here are a few examples of how marketers can put it to work:

• Increase Primary Care Appointments: Build an audience of people who visited your primary care provider page or started an appointment request but didn't complete it. Retarget them with ads promoting convenient scheduling or same-day availability. Capture more new patient visits while lowering acquisition costs and protecting privacy.
• Stop Wasting Budget on Converted Patients: Suppress anyone who has already booked an appointment or logged into your patient portal. Improve efficiency, save budget, and deliver a better patient experience.
• Drive Flu Shot Appointments: Create an audience of people who visited your flu shot information page or location finder but didn't schedule. Retarget them with reminders about availability and convenience, and build lookalikes to expand reach.
• Boost Direct-to-Consumer Med Device Adoption: Build an audience of consumers who visited product education pages or started, but didn't finish, a “request more information” form. Retarget them with ads highlighting patient stories or financing options, and create lookalikes to reach more people with similar profiles.
• Improve Payer Enrollment Campaigns: Segment visitors who started but didn't complete an enrollment form during Annual Enrollment Period (AEP). Retarget them with reminders across digital channels, and build lookalikes of members who successfully enrolled last year. Reduce abandoned applications, increase sign-ups, and prove ROI on AEP marketing spend.

From routine campaigns to high-stakes enrollment periods, Freshpaint Audiences opens the door to marketing strategies that were once off-limits in healthcare. It's a new playbook. One where privacy and performance work together.

A New Path Forward for Healthcare Marketers

For too long, healthcare marketers have been forced to do more with less. You've been caught up by regulations and risky tools never built for this industry. Freshpaint Audiences changes that. By combining proven tactics like retargeting, lookalikes, and exclusions with a privacy-first foundation, we've made compliant audience targeting possible. Ready to see it in action? [Schedule a demo →]