Webinar recap: Clear data, clear strategy—Practical steps to drive growth and results

Marketers face the challenge of leveraging consumer data to not only drive immediate conversions, but also to build long-term brand equity and patient loyalty. Learn how to use data to gain clarity, control, and growth in this recap of our recent webinar.

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The economic terrain is rough, your stakeholders' expectations are higher than ever, and there are only so many hours in a day-so who's to blame a healthcare marketer for looking for easy wins?

Low-funnel wins are necessary and good on paper, but marketing strategies that over-emphasize conversion at the cost of consideration will likely struggle to achieve long-term growth objectives.

In our recent webinar, "Clear data, clear strategy: Practical steps to drive growth and results," we explore how healthcare marketing teams can balance short-term key performance indicators (KPIs) with long-term success.

Keep reading for a recap of the session.

Don't get caught in the bottom of the funnel trap

Digital advertising platforms from Google, Meta, and Microsoft aim to offer a streamlined marketing experience. Choose your copy and creative, set a budget and targeting filters, then sit back and watch those wins roll in.

Of course, that's rarely how it works in practice. When set to automatically manage your ad campaigns, these platforms tend to prioritize quick wins: fast clicks and cheap leads, all aimed at the most online consumers (i.e., not necessarily the most relevant ones).

As a healthcare marketer, you're expected to demonstrate short-term conversions while building brand equity and loyalty at a larger scale. Many of these quick conversions can be gained with low-funnel marketing.

About 5% of your prospective patient base is already in-market, actively looking for a provider. By targeting and building awareness among these bottom of the funnel consumers, you can position your brand as a viable choice and attract new patients with relatively little effort.

However, 95% of your prospective patient base is still out there, just a little higher up the funnel. By limiting your marketing to consumers ready to make a choice-that is, where most digital ad platforms tend to target, and where your competitors are also most active-you lose out on opportunities to build brand equity and long-term growth.

The bottom of the funnel trap is busy, crowded, and expensive to operate within. While you shouldn't ignore these five-percenters altogether, you need to broaden your strategic horizons to include the quiet majority who are most likely to come to you tomorrow if you show up for them today.

Growth comes with clarity and control

Neither sheer conversion volume nor brand awareness alone will guarantee success. To manage the healthcare marketing balancing act and achieve growth, you'll need to gain clarity and exercise control with the help of data.

In these terms, clarity means understanding who to reach, when, and how. You can answer these questions by establishing a data-driven understanding of several factors, including:

• Your market, including patient demographics and competitor performance
• Your target population
• High-risk and high-need cohorts
• High-impact service lines

With a combination of in-house research, third-party consumer and market data, and careful analysis, you can develop actionable insights into these critical factors.

Control is all about acting on those insights deliberately. With the right data, you can determine top-priority audiences, reduce waste and redundancies, and align your teams toward clear goals that ultimately drive margins and improve long-term value:

Build brand equity

Sustainable growth begins with visibility and trust. To capture attention in a crowded market, you need a clear picture of who your audience is and what drives their decisions. Combining clinical patterns and propensity data with consumer behaviors-like lifestyle factors, social determinants of health, and preferred communication channels-gives you the insights to design outreach that resonates and builds lasting credibility for your brand.

Predict patient need before it surfaces

Patients rarely begin their search for care at the moment they need treatment. By using predictive models, you can anticipate health needs before they fully emerge. This allows you to prioritize outreach to at-risk groups, positioning your organization as a trusted partner long before a medical issue brings them through the door.

Retain patients

Winning a new patient is only half the battle-keeping them is where long-term value is created. Advanced population insights can highlight which patients are disengaged or considering other providers. With that knowledge, you can tailor personalized communications that strengthen loyalty, reduce churn, and maximize the lifetime value of your existing patient base.

Strategically invest with payor mix

Not all patient segments deliver the same financial impact. By layering in payor and reimbursement data, you gain a clearer view of which populations are most favorable for margin growth. These insights help you focus investments on service lines and markets where financial outcomes align with patient needs, ensuring stronger returns on every growth initiative.

Get data-driven clarity today

You can let an automated advertising platform burn your marketing budget at the bottom of the funnel (along with all your competitors) for a short-lived KPI boost, or you can start controlling your strategy to score wins that truly matter to your organization's long-term success.

Looking for clarity into your market today, tomorrow, and 12 months down the line?

Definite Healthcare's data and analytics deliver insights into your market, your patients, and your competition, giving you unmatched clarity and control over your marketing strategy. With our Population Intelligence, Market Intelligence, and all-payor claims data, you can identify high-value service lines, in-need patient cohorts, lucrative referral pathways, and other opportunities for growth.

Sign up for a demo today to learn more.