Beyond Google: The Multi-Channel Playbook for Healthcare Marketers
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Compliance with HIPAA and state privacy laws is critical for highly visible healthcare organizations. But when compliance concerns force teams to remove ad tracking, they lose performance visibility and optimization power, driving up acquisition costs and eroding executive confidence in marketing.
Shortly after stepping in as Chief Growth Officer for OrthoCarolina, Blair Primis recognized a growing risk.
With more than 35 locations, and nestled between two enterprise health systems, visibility brings scrutiny and increased regulatory exposure.
OrthoCarolina’s multi-channel demand strategy – spanning search, programmatic ads, CTV, and paid social – was a primary driver of customer acquisition. Without a compliant tracking foundation, that engine risked being shut down overnight.
Blair needed a solution that would protect patient privacy, without sacrificing growth.
In early 2025, OrthoCarolina implemented Freshpaint to:
Within weeks, compliant tracking was restored. Ads were back online. Risk was mitigated.
And what started as a compliance safeguard quickly became infrastructure for growth. Freshpaint gave OrthoCarolina something it had never fully had before: a unified, privacy-safe data foundation capable of tying marketing activity to real business outcomes.
With downstream signals like booked appointments flowing back into ad platforms, OrthoCarolina began to optimize with precision. Within months of implementing Freshpaint, OrthoCarolina’s cost per lead (CPL) dropped 80%!
"We've been able to stitch together a partnership with Freshpaint and other technology platforms that will really allow us to drive our cost per lead down. I'm not kidding – 80% reduction in cost per lead."
- Blair Primis, Chief Growth Officer
Lower CPL improved budget efficiency – and validated to executive leadership that compliant marketing could drive measurable ROI. But CPL reduction was only the beginning.
By unifying performance data across Google, Meta, Bing, Trade Desk, and call tracking — within a compliant framework — Freshpaint gave Blair’s team full-funnel visibility for the first time.
The insights driven by Freshpaint quickly began shaping decisions across OrthoCarolina’s operations, expansion, and revenue strategy.
1. Budget Allocation by Real Demand Signals
By triangulating kiosk check-ins, booked appointments, and patient flow by location, the growth team identifies where demand is strongest and reallocates ad dollars accordingly.
Instead of spreading budget evenly, Blair’s team concentrates spend in high-performing service lines, age cohorts, and geographies – tracking performance directly to booked appointments. Marketing has shifted from a cost center to a revenue lever with predictive power.
2. Operational Improvements
By analyzing call conversion rates and booked appointment data, the team uncovered disparities in booking performance, including a 77% close rate at one office compared to 47% at another. At a separate location, physicians believed demand was declining; after assessing the data, the growth team identified the gap was actually a 67% close rate on inbound volume.
In the past, “more marketing” would have been the default response to such challenges, increasing spend without addressing the root issue.
Instead, armed with clear operational insights, OrthoCarolina improved its booking processes – ensuring existing demand translated into revenue.
3. Geographic Expansion Strategy
Perhaps most transformative: marketing data has begun informing real estate strategy.
By analyzing booked appointment volume and demand patterns by zip code, the team identifies underserved areas with strong orthopedic demand. Those insights guide decisions about where to open new offices — shifting expansion from operations-first to a demand-led growth strategy powered by patient data.
4. Multi-Channel Measurement Beyond Last Click
Orthopedics is often not urgent. It’s elective, relational, and often driven by pain tolerance. Blair describes it as a “courtship.” Patients may see a CTV ad, hear a Spotify placement, encounter community sponsorships, and only convert months later.
Traditional last-click attribution fails to capture that journey.
With Freshpaint insights, OrthoCarolina now maps user journeys and time-to-convert metrics across channels – quantifying how brand investments in CTV and programmatic audio turbocharge search and performance campaigns downstream.
Blair came to Freshpaint to solve a compliance problem. What he gained was:
Today, marketing at OrthoCarolina operates with a level of clarity and influence it didn’t have before. The growth team moves fluidly between channels, service lines, and locations — adjusting spend, diagnosing friction, and identifying opportunities with data that leadership trusts.
The next frontier is tying marketing investment directly to arrived appointments within Epic. With a 9-16% no-show rate, even modest improvements in arrival optimization can significantly influence incremental revenue, without increased ad spend.
Blair sees this as the natural evolution of the growth engine: moving from cost per lead → to cost per booked appointment → to cost per arrived appointment → to revenue per channel.
“Freshpaint sits squarely at the center of our optimization plan,” Blair explains. “We weave together a few other components of it. But at the end of day, without Freshpaint, there are no other components.”
Ready to turn compliance into a growth strategy? Book a demo with us.
