The goal of a healthcare marketing consultant is to help increase revenue often by working on projects like getting more patients or selling more services to the existing patients.
As my services aren’t for sale these days, instead of making this article all about how I can help your startup, I’ll show you examples of other healthcare marketing consultants you could work with along with examples and benefits of how a consultant might be able to help your business.
Before we dive in, I know you are wondering if I’ve been paid for preparing this list. I have not – honestly, it’s not worth the money at this point.
15 examples of healthcare marketing consultants and agencies you can contact today
I’ve put together a list of healthcare marketing consultants and agencies that seem to specialize in the industry if you are looking to work with one. They are listed in random order and I’m sure there are more out there that I wasn’t able to find.
I haven’t had the opportunity to work with them, so they are not endorsed by me. I’m simply providing a list for your convenience.
Healthcare marketing consultants
- Healthcare Success – https://healthcaresuccess.com/ – A full-service healthcare marketing agency that delivers results
- Chief Outsiders – https://www.chiefoutsiders.com/ – Fractional CMOs for Healthcare Companies
- BTS Consulting – https://btshealth.com/ – a full-service agency
- Kristi – http://getkristi.com/ – She’s a healthcare marketing consultant
- Healthcare MC – https://healthcaremc.com/ – Healthcare Marketing Consultants help healthcare providers fill beds and increase patients with digital healthcare solutions
- EquiBrand – http://equibrandconsulting.com/ – EquiBrand is a brand and marketing consultancy with a 20-plus year track record helping companies grow
- GreyStone – https://greystone.net/ – Education and digital consulting for hospitals
- Practice Builders – https://www.practicebuilders.com/ – Agency for website design and digital marketing services
- Canton & Company – https://cantoncompany.com/ – Smart growth for healthcare companies
- Melani Hurwitz – https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanihurwitzhealthcaremarketing/ – 32 years experience as a healthcare marketing consultant
- Messenger Healthcare Marketing – https://messenger.md/ – SEO and PPC for doctors
- Levo Health – https://levohealth.com/ – Data-driven healthcare marketing and patient engagement services
- PrescriptionPR – https://prescriptionpr.com/ – A New York-based healthcare marketing company
- Elizabeth Hanes (Hanes Health Content) – https://haneshealthcontent.com/ – Freelance healthcare writer
- Hayley Hite – https://haleyhite.com/ – Freelance healthcare SEO content writer
Why hire a healthcare marketing consultant?
The benefit of hiring a healthcare marketing consultant is that they have worked on problems like yours, and likely already know how to solve them as they’ve experimented with different solutions in the past.
That way, you can either go directly to implementing the right solution or test the shortlisted ideas instead of starting from scratch experimenting. On some projects that can save the team several months of work as they avoid going down the wrong path.
For example, with patient acquisition that might be which digital marketing channels to activate to gain the first few hundred patients without a large budget, in order to validate product-market fit. And which channels to expand with when volume and CAC matter.
Another example is the challenge of “seasonal” or cyclical revenue since patients get sick and want care at random times, and that means the revenue is hard to predict. A healthcare marketing consultant can help stabilize it by introducing new or existing products to the customers like care as a service (similar to software as a service). It might even make sense to introduce payment plans or yearly premiums similar to what we know from the insurance industry.
That way, the business increases its customer lifetime value (LTV) and will be better equipped to predict patterns as it won’t only get demand-based sales and revenue but also recurring revenue.
In my experience, a good benefit of hiring a healthcare marketing consultant is that they can identify business problems that might have been invisible otherwise – both those that are there right now and those your business will run into as you grow, so you can prepare for them before they even hit. For example, going on a patient acquiring spree but attracting the wrong type of patient that will make upsells and high-quality care delivery difficult.
It could also be building a patient acquisition engine without preparing for the coming growth stages once the existing acquisition channels dry up. With investors wanting to see a return on their capital, I’ve found that it can help to have a growth plan so you don’t get surprised since marketing channels often don’t scale indefinitely.
One way to approach it is to build products that fit the key online marketing channels and have margins to acquire customers at a profit on a certain channel. For example, it’s hard to sell an on-demand patient care service through Facebook ads since patients only care when they are sick, and Facebook only allows us to target based on general interests and other data points – not what a patient wants right now.
Instead, we might tweak a version of the product and sell it as a subscription service that people want no matter the season so it better fits Facebook. If the service has low margins it doesn’t fit ads well since the cost can vary, so some healthcare startups find value in planning the estimated CAC into the product margin, so they know which marketing channels they can promote it on.
Common problems that a healthcare marketing consultant might solve for your startup:
- New patient acquisition
- Retention and upsells
- Increasing the share of the customer’s wallet by bringing new products to market
- Balancing doctor availability/inventory with patient bookings so there are enough slots for the patient to want to book but without keeping costs unnecessarily high
Business problems based on different startup funding stages
Another way to look at it is based on which problems healthcare startups face depending on which funding stage they are at.
For example, if the business is at an early stage before seed funding, it’s probably too early to hire a healthcare marketing consultant as work on the product and product-market fit tends to be what matters.
With seed funding, a marketing consultant can help get the crucial first 500 patients beyond friends and family, to better test out the product and move towards series A.
With series A in the bag, the consultant can help build a patient acquisition engine as part of the foundation for strong growth.
Post series B they can help expand the growth engine with go-to-market strategies for new products, service upsells of the product portfolio to existing customers, and market expansion.
After that? Things like data across departments become more important as there will be more of it and it can help make business decisions. Consultants can help make sense of it, figure out what data is there that you didn’t know, and extract the insights to help the management with the business direction.
As a founder at the earlier stage, you might be better off with a hands-on freelancer who can give high-level recommendations but also directly execute to move fast.
I’ve found agencies tend to be a better fit slightly later, where you’ve got to focus the internal team on more important tasks and you have a performance benchmark for the key marketing channels. The team might already know from experiments that Google ads are what they want to focus on along with general CAC numbers. Since this is performance marketing they can now set up a good situation for themselves by hiring an agency with specific targets they know will fit the internal KPIs, while they focus on more important tasks like opening up new channels.
Down the road, you might want to bring it back in-house for better control and performance.
A marketing agency tends to fit the best when we know where we are going and need help implementing. I know that there are creative agencies out there to help with higher-level stuff too but in my experience, startups often need to pivot often so there will be a ton of time spent recalibrating the agency to the goals. And because the healthcare industry is so regulated, they need to be well versed in what’s possible considering the limitations.
A consultant, on the other hand, can help guide the direction or help the team solve a specific challenge by sharing previous experiments they’ve done and what the best solution has been. A freelancer tends to be more hands-on and helps them implement a solution to the challenge.
Sometimes it can also be interesting to work with consultants from other industries with similar problems such as the insurance industry for strong retention and fintech for their focus on customer activation rather than acquisition.
Other relevant questions
Now, let’s dive into some common questions related to healthcare marketing consultants.
Where to find healthcare marketing consultants?
A google search like the one you’ve done is a good place to start. Another option is to look for someone on Upwork, Fiverr, Freelancer.com or by searching on LinkedIn.
From time to time, you might also be able to get recommendations via my private healthcare marketing newsletter (you’ll be able to sign up for it below).
The biggest challenge I’ve noticed when working with consultants is not defining a goal clearly enough so that the business knows exactly which problem is being solved with the deliverables.
Another approach is to look for the offline at networking events or through other interests like getting in shape playing badminton. It’ll be more difficult to find them but you’ll likely build a better relationship with the offline combonent.
What is healthcare marketing consulting?
Healthcare marketing consulting is the process of consulting businesses in the healthcare industry on their marketing projects, often to solve a specific challenge or define projects that can increase the bottom line.
It is usually done by an external consultant who works specifically with the healthcare industry and specializes in solving problems unique to that industry. For example how to navigate the regulations in regards to promotions and advertising. Some healthcare marketing consultants specialize even deeper in problems specific to hospitals, others to doctors with their own practice while others help startups like me.
What are healthcare marketing objectives?
Healthcare marketing objectives vary from business to business but they typically revolve around revenue growth, attracting new patients, or upselling services to existing patients.
Examples of healthcare marketing objectives could be:
- New patient acquisition
- Retention and upsells
- Increasing the share of the customer’s wallet by bringing new products to market
- Balancing doctor availability/inventory with patient bookings so there are enough slots for the patient to want to book
What are the 5 P’s of healthcare marketing?
The 5 P’s of healthcare marketing are Physicians, Patients, Payers, Public (some also refer to this as Professional Healthcare Administrators), and The Presence of Politics (or Policy Makers).
They are adapted from the traditional 5 P’s of marketing: People, Product, Price, Place, Promotion. They exist to help remind us which areas to cover when we analyze a business’ marketing efforts compared to the market and competitors.
For example, Payers refers to the person paying since that is not always the patient itself and instead might be insurance or a version of co-pay. Physicians can help sell a particular service or idea to the patient and the Payer since they are the expert – we go to the physician for advice on our health and wellbeing.
Takeaways
- The key benefit of working with a consultant is that they have solved problems like yours before and can help find the right solution fast
- That can help your team avoid moving down the wrong path for months as consultants likely already have a shortlist of ideas they know work to solve your problem