Healthcare marketing leaders are confident in their ability to drive results, but the data they rely on is only telling half the story.

We surveyed 200 healthcare marketing leaders across providers, payers, DSOs, and urgent care organizations to understand how teams are performing and what’s actually working. What we found is a market full of capable marketers… operating with incomplete visibility.

For years, healthcare marketers have depended on accessible metrics like clicks, impressions, and cost per lead to demonstrate value – metrics that capture engagement, but not behavior changes. As a result, only 1% of healthcare marketers can connect more than half of their spend to patient conversions.

The teams breaking through this gap are moving beyond surface-level metrics and integrating privacy-first marketing infrastructure that connects the full conversion journey, our research shows. That shift – in how organizations approach measurement, attribution, and privacy – is what separates teams stuck reporting on activity from those proving real business impact.

Here are the five trends defining healthcare marketing today, and what leaders can learn from them.

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Trend 1: The Defining Gap of Confidence vs. Reality

At first glance, Freshpaint’s trends data shows that healthcare marketing leaders are confident in their ability to drive results.

• 49% say they can consistently improve ROI at the appointment level
• 91% say they’re making data-driven decisions

But beneath that confidence lies a critical gap: Only 1% can connect more than half of their marketing spend to actual patient outcomes

Healthcare marketers are optimizing based on what they can see, but the issue is that their measurement systems – built for a less regulated, pixel-driven era – only capture part of the patient journey. 

The result is smart decisions made on incomplete data, which handicaps how marketing can contribute to downstream business outcomes that capture executives’ attention, like attended appointments and enrollments, patient lifetime value, and revenue.

Trend 2: The Hidden Cost of Google Dominance

Our data reveals that search is no better than your old classmate who barely contributed to the group project, yet somehow managed to take all the credit: 

• 64% of organizations rank Google Ads as their #1 channel
• Google closes 58% of conversions initiated by other channels

That last stat is the key. Awareness channels like Connected TV (CTV) and programmatic are often doing the initial work – introducing patients to healthcare entities – but last-click attribution gives all the credit to search.

This creates an inaccurate feedback loop for budget allocation decisions:

1. Google gets the credit
2. Budgets shift toward search
3. Awareness investment shrinks
4. Google looks even stronger

As a result, upstream channels that create demand remain underfunded and undervalued. The organizations that figure out how to measure and intelligently leverage those channels as part of multi-touch attribution, though, stand to gain significant advantage against the competition. More on this in trend 3.

Trend 3: Awareness is the Most Underutilized Growth Lever

Only 21% of healthcare marketers invest in Demand-Side Platforms (DSP) or CTV channels. But among those who do, awareness channels drive 37% of first touches.

If DSP and CTV are effective at driving a high volume of first touches, why are only one in five marketers using them? We found that marketers are avoiding these channels because they cannot prove they work, demonstrating a measurement impediment as opposed to a channel performance issue. 

In a budget-constrained environment, anything that can’t be easily proven and defended on a spreadsheet doesn’t earn its keep. To prove DSP and CTV are effective, these marketers use multi-touch or hybrid attribution models that capture influence across the full funnel, and are able to integrate downstream data sources like CRM, EHR, and call center data to connect impressions to appointments.

Trend 4: Privacy Isn’t the Barrier; Infrastructure Is

Ask healthcare marketers what’s holding them back, and the answer is nearly unanimous: 82% cite compliance and legal constraints as their biggest obstacle. In today’s landscape of HIPAA regulations, new state privacy laws, and stricter internal compliance requirements, this is hardly surprising.  

But what is surprising is the tactic that advanced marketing teams are using to run more effective and cost-efficient campaigns: rather than working around privacy and compliance, they’re using privacy as the foundation. Consider:

• Organizations that treat privacy as a blocker tend to have slower execution and fragmented data insights into marketing outcomes. If 82% of healthcare marketers cite compliance and legal constraints as their primary measurement barrier, yet only 23% have fully embedded collaboration across marketing, IT, and compliance – there’s a clear industry opportunity to increase internal alignment.
• Meanwhile, organizations that build privacy into their infrastructure move beyond last-click attribution, integrate more data sources, and achieve materially higher visibility into what’s driving patient acquisition.

The difference between high-performing teams and those stuck with surface-level KPIs is simple: they’ve built systems to operate within the privacy environment, not against it.

Trend 5: A Market Under Pressure to Prove Value

Ask any healthcare marketing leader what happens when budgets tighten, and they’ll undoubtedly say that marketing is first in line for reductions.

Our survey data puts a fine point on this: only 37% of executives see marketing as a strategic growth driver and nearly 20% still view it as a cost center. Alarming, right?

Perhaps as a result, marketers are being asked to do more with less: 87% are focused on improving efficiency and 57% are investing in analytics and measurement.

Marketers who are successfully defending their budgets can prove their strategies drive real outcomes. And interestingly, the organizations pulling ahead aren’t necessarily spending more (in fact, many are driving better outcomes without increasing spend). They simply have the infrastructure to measure better.

The Path Forward: From Cost Center to Growth Engine

Across our survey data and in our conversations with marketing leaders who are driving results, a consistent playbook emerges:

1. Fix attribution, most importantly by moving beyond last-click as a core metric
2. Integrate data across the full patient journey
3. Build alignment across marketing, IT, and compliance
4. Invest in awareness channels once measurement is in place
5. Connect spend directly to patient outcomes

A small percentage of teams – roughly 1-3% – have reached this level of maturity today. And they’re already seeing the payoff: better budget allocation, stronger executive alignment, and scalable growth.

Where Privacy Fuels Performance

Budgets are under scrutiny, privacy regulations are tightening, and executives are asking questions that make marketers squirm: What is marketing actually driving? Today, the mandate is clear: prove marketing’s impact on patient acquisition, revenue, and growth – or risk resources.

The gap between what marketers believe they’re driving and what they can prove is now the defining challenge of the industry.

And without consistent visibility into the full funnel – from awareness through attended appointment and revenue – marketers risk ongoing challenges in proving performance and protecting critical resources.

The good news? That visibility becomes possible with privacy-first performance marketing infrastructure, and the path forward is already being charted by leading healthcare organizations. Even better: Freshpaint has the (free!) playbooks, events, and insights for you to learn from their strategies.

Go Deeper Into the Trends Defining Healthcare Marketing

This blog only scratches the surface on the state of the industry.

Inside our full report, you’ll find:

• Benchmarks for ROI visibility and attribution maturity
• Detailed breakdowns of channel performance and bias
• Real-world examples from leading healthcare organizations
• A step-by-step framework for closing the measurement gap

Download the full report to turn your marketing data into measurable growth.