Why Multi-Channel Healthcare Marketing Fails (Even When Everyone Agrees) with Lauren Leone & Rich Briddock

Multi-channel strategy isn’t a foreign concept in healthcare marketing. Most teams know paid search has a ceiling. They’ve seen the case studies. They know brand investment matters. But when they give it a go, the channels hardest to defend get cut from the budget. 

It's a pattern that Lauren Leone and Rich Briddock know well. 

As Chief Growth Officer and Chief Strategy Officer at Cardinal Digital Marketing, a healthcare-focused agency, they've spent years building multi-channel strategies for health systems and specialty groups—and watching those strategies stall under the exact same pressures. Not because the strategies were wrong. Because the organizations running them lacked the frameworks to protect brand investment when things got hard, and the measurement infrastructure to justify it when finance came asking.

Their conversation with Freshpaint CMO and Marketing Rounds host Ray Mina is a practitioner's account of what actually blocks multi-channel growth—and what they've found that makes it stick.

1. Upper-Funnel Campaigns Have a Measurement Problem

The most common reason multi-channel campaigns fail isn't budget, creative, or channel selection. It's measurement. 

Organizations launch brand and awareness campaigns, judge them by the same metrics they use for paid search—cost per acquisition, conversions, new patient volume—and pull the plug when the numbers don't compare.

As Rich explained, this is an attribution problem masquerading as a channel performance problem. “A reason we stall out is because we're looking at it through the wrong measurement framework. Oftentimes we're using the intent-based demand capture yardstick to understand what these other initiatives should drive.”

Brand campaigns have a different job. They're not trying to capture in-market patients—they're trying to expand the pool of patients who will eventually come looking. Measuring them on CPA is like judging a billboard by how many people pulled over immediately after seeing it.

The better frameworks are the ones that can see holistic contribution: media mix modeling, incrementality testing, geo holdout studies. A geo comparison between markets running brand spend and markets that aren't is enough to surface leading signals.

Lauren pointed to some of those signals: branded search volume, click-through rates on paid search, on-site conversion rates. When a brand campaign is working, these numbers move in the markets where it runs. The spend shows up downstream in the channels that get all the credit.

What this means for you

Before launching any non-search campaign, define the metrics it will be evaluated on—separate from your intent-channel benchmarks. Consider:

• Branded search lift in markets running the campaign vs. those that aren't
• Click-through rate improvement on paid search ads (earlier exposure tends to drive more clicks when the need arises)
• On-site conversion rate changes as a proxy for audience quality improvement
• Geo holdout comparisons as a low-tech incrementality test

2. Your $200 CPA Is Quietly Becoming $1,000

One of the first things Cardinal does with new clients is challenge their perception of what paid search is actually costing them. A $200 blended cost per acquisition looks efficient on the surface. The agency's job is to show clients what's hiding beneath that number.

The issue is diminishing returns. At low spend levels, search captures high-intent patients efficiently. As budgets scale, you start competing in more expensive auctions, capturing lower-intent users, and bidding for queries that weren't going to convert anyway. The blended CPA stays flat. The marginal CPA climbs sharply.

Rich put it plainly: “The next dollar they're putting into paid search, their marginal acquisition cost is actually a thousand dollars. They're losing a ton of money on that dollar spent.”

That same dollar reallocated to an upper-funnel channel—even one with a weaker platform-attributed CPA—often performs better on a holistic basis. You build brand in a new audience segment, reduce future search CPCs by priming demand, and reach patients who weren't going to find you through search at all.

This is especially acute when entering new markets. If you've just opened five locations in a market where nobody knows you, search can only capture patients who already had a reason to look. You have to create the reason first.

What this means for you

Separate your blended CPA from your marginal CPA. The signals that you're on the wrong side of the curve:

• Rising CPCs with flat or declining volume
• Incremental spend producing proportionally fewer conversions
• Efficient averages driven by a small number of high-performing campaigns masking poor performance elsewhere

When those signals appear, the answer isn't a better bidding strategy—it's diversification. The question becomes where to allocate next, not how to extract more from a channel that's already running hot.

3. The Resilience of the 70/20/10 Budget Framework

Every organization Cardinal works with faces the same moment: a bad month triggers a budget conversation, and everything that isn't search comes up for review. The experiments get cut, the emerging channels lose funding, and the team starts over.

Lauren's answer to this is structural. Rather than arguing the case for upper-funnel investment in real time, build a budget framework that takes the discretionary decision off the table before the pressure arrives.

Her framework: allocate roughly 70% to your core, proven channels. Put 20% into your best emerging channel, the one you're actively building and measuring. Reserve 10% for experimentation—new channels or formats that might graduate into the 20% tier over time.

The key word is "reserve." Lauren was direct: the 20% and 10% buckets need to be treated as unavailable for the fires that come up. "Consider it not available for the fire that arises to get more patients in the door. It doesn't exist."

This framing—protected investment rather than discretionary spend—is what allows multi-channel strategies to accumulate the learning they need to work. The yo-yo pattern of starting and stopping channels resets progress every time. Consistency over six to twelve months is what separates organizations that move the needle from those that conclude multi-channel doesn't work.

Rich added a useful companion point: the framework doesn't mean every market or service line gets the same mix. A mature, well-penetrated market might warrant heavier search investment. A new location with low brand recognition needs the upper-funnel spend more urgently. The 70/20/10 is a starting principle, not a rigid rule.

What this means for you

Apply the framework at the service line and market level, not just organization-wide:

• Saturated markets or service lines: Diminishing returns signal a shift toward upper-funnel. Increase the 20% allocation.
• New locations or markets: Brand recognition is zero. Protect the upper-funnel budget aggressively.
• High-LTV or specialty service lines: Patients may not know they need you yet. Intent won't find them. The 10% experimentation budget is your starting point.
• Under capacity pressure: Before cutting brand spend, audit conversion rates, call center answer rates, and online scheduling. Often the leak is downstream—not in channel performance.

The Shift Healthcare Marketing Must Make Today

What Lauren and Rich have learned from years of pushing clients through this—and watching many of them revert—is that the failure is rarely strategic. The strategy is usually right. The failure is structural: no measurement framework for brand spend, no protected budget allocation, no internal stakeholder alignment on what success looks like before the campaign launches.

The organizations that stick with multi-channel do three things differently. They define separate success metrics for upper-funnel activity before the campaign runs. They treat the emerging-channel budget as locked—not a reserve fund for bad months. And they build internal alignment on the measurement framework before anyone asks whether it's working.

Without those foundations, the best multi-channel strategy will collapse under the first bad quarter. With them, it compounds.

Experience the full conversation where Lauren and Rich break down why last-click attribution keeps healthcare organizations trapped in search dependency, how claims data is emerging as a measurement tool for proving multi-channel impact, what "starting small" actually looks like when launching a pilot in a new channel for the first time, and how to have the budget conversation with finance before the pressure hits—not during it.