Developing an Effective Healthcare Marketing Strategy for 2025
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At EnticEdge, we are healthcare and wellness business consultants dedicated to helping companies clarify and align around their competitive advantage, which we call your authentic edge! Our team brings 30+ years of healthcare expertise in strategic advising, value mapping, business consulting, client experience, team and cross-departmental alignment, and more, all tailored to helping teams achieve mission-driven growth. Meet with a strategist to learn more!
Why is Healthcare Marketing Important?
Every day, people in your community need medical care or mental health support but don't know where to turn. Healthcare marketing bridges this gap, connecting patients with the care they need, when they need it most.
For many businesses outside healthcare, the downside to ineffective marketing would fall only on your company’s shoulders. Maybe you wouldn’t hit your growth goals, your investors would pull out, or you’d lose money.
But in healthcare, ineffective marketing has profound human consequences. If people don’t or can’t find you, they won’t receive care. This effect cascades through their lives, from worsening health conditions to missed work days to potentially even loss of life.
The impact of marketing strategies in healthcare systems isn’t to be taken lightly — if you’re here, you likely stand with us on this.
So how does the healthcare industry use marketing these days? Fortunately, as we approach 2025, healthcare providers have new, exciting opportunities to improve their healthcare marketing plans.
Ahead of the Curve: Healthcare Trends To Watch in 2025
The savviest healthcare organizations plan their effective marketing strategies in healthcare to get ahead of the curve, which requires a nuanced understanding of how today’s healthcare landscape is evolving.
Here, we’ll share some of the key trends shaping healthcare and the marketing opportunities they present.
Filling the Gaps With Telehealth and Virtual Care
Telehealth and virtual care have been on the rise since the “stay at home” recommendations of the COVID-19 pandemic spurred a digital revolution in healthcare.
And while digital solutions continue to ramp up, we predict that marketing for telehealth and virtual care options will be most effective when used to “fill in the gaps” that brick-and-mortar-bound care can’t meet, rather than completely supplanting traditional care models.
Let’s take a look at a few shifts in virtual healthcare coming up in 2025 and discuss the marketing implications of each.
Interstate Compacts in Healthcare
Interstate compacts have emerged for more and more healthcare professions, including the most recent Counseling Compact for licensed counselors. The compacts allow providers to treat patients in multiple participating states with only one license.
Apart from making it easier for providers to relocate across states, these compacts have also opened up great advantages for providers to stay in their home state or travel — all while providing virtual care to patients elsewhere!
Here’s how you can market healthcare services related to interstate compacts:
Do you have quality specialists on your team? Interstate compacts make it possible for patients to seek the best specialist for their care, no matter where they live. Target niche specialties across state lines through SEO, social media campaigns, or traditional media advertising.
Do you serve a highly mobile population? Like young adults prone to moving for career opportunities? Find messaging angles that speak to these patients, such as the idea that patients can move states or travel and still keep seeing their primary care doctor or specialist virtually.
Is your practice virtual-first? For practices that are nearly 100% virtual, your target market for potential new patients may have just exploded. Focus first on high-population states or cities that you can now serve, launching local campaigns to become known in those areas.
Remote Patient Monitoring
Remote patient monitoring shows a ton of promise, with many providers affirming its usefulness not only in reaching more rural populations but in better care overall for certain conditions.
One center in Michigan even found that patients who were treated via remote patient monitoring devices were 8.5 times more likely to enroll in a healthcare program than those who weren’t. As remote monitoring becomes more common, there’s a hope coming with it — that we’ll see more patient participation and better outcomes.
Here’s how you can use the increased adoption of RPM in your marketing:
Do you serve rural communities? Target these communities with messaging about convenient care management from home, reduced travel time, and more consistent connection with their provider.
Does your practice treat chronic conditions? Create educational campaigns showing how continuous monitoring leads to better health management and fewer emergency situations.
Do you have a tech-savvy patient base? Modern RPM integrates with smartphones and wearable devices many patients already use. Create messaging that highlights how RPM fits seamlessly into patients' wellness lifestyles while providing medical oversight.
Virtual Primary Care
Virtual primary care is another pandemic-era trend that seems to be here to stay.
The benefits of virtual primary care for patients are immediately clear. As Kelly Bliss, president of U.S. group health at Teladoc Health, puts it: Virtual primary care and other telehealth efforts are “... bringing the healthcare system to the individual, where they want to receive care. And most of the time, that is at home.”
In a world where nearly one-third of Americans don’t have access to a regular primary care provider, adopting or amplifying virtual primary care solutions is a smart business move and a generous act for patients.
Here’s how you can advance virtual primary care through your marketing:
Do you serve areas with primary care shortages? Develop regional campaigns highlighting how virtual care provides consistent access to medical professionals, without patients needing to take time off work or find childcare to travel to an appointment.
Are you launching or expanding your virtual primary care services? Focus your marketing on convenience and accessibility. Create campaigns that emphasize messages like "healthcare on your schedule" and "skip the waiting room." Target busy professionals, parents, and others who value their time.
Does your practice focus on preventive care? Virtual primary care is a gateway to more preventive treatment, as it makes regular check-ins more convenient. Create messaging that emphasizes “how easy” it is to stay on top of health maintenance through virtual visits.
Standing Out With Hybrid Care
The epidemic of loneliness deepened during and after the pandemic, as social isolation grew. Some healthcare and mental health thought leaders point to this as predictive of a renewed interest in in-person care, particularly for those practices that went completely remote during the pandemic (like talk therapy). Some recent surveys seem to support a comeback in face-to-face mental health care.
Yet, the convenience and access provided by online care options are likely still key for many patients. In 2025, we suggest embracing the hybrid model, balancing streamlined virtual care with feel-good, in-person patient experiences.
Here’s how you can market amidst the resurgence of in-person care and hybrid models:
Do you have a physical space? Invest in making your in-person location(s) an extension of your welcoming and warm online brand, standing out as a breath of fresh air among the sterile office environments of competitors and maintaining a consistent brand across facilities.
Do you offer both virtual and in-person options? Highlight your practice's flexibility in meeting patients where they are — whether that's through a screen or in your office. Create campaigns that emphasize patient choice and personalized care journeys.
Are your physical locations welcoming and inviting? Showcase your welcoming office environment as a sanctuary for healing and connection. Use visual marketing (like video walkthroughs and professional photography) to highlight the comfortable, professional atmosphere patients can experience during in-person visits while emphasizing the availability of virtual options for between-visit care.
Is your practice mostly virtual? Provide the benefit of face-to-face community by hosting or sponsoring in-person community events, which can double as marketing for your practice or healthcare organization.
Increased Focus on Patient Experience
Patient experience remains an important focus for 2025. Reports say that large groups of people still suffer from negative experiences in healthcare, particularly non-white patients and younger patients.
Thus, if your organization has invested in your patient experience across all demographics (and you have the data to show outcomes!), make your stellar patient experience record known to the public.
Here’s how you can showcase positive patient experience in your healthcare marketing:
Do you have strong patient satisfaction data? Create campaigns that bring your satisfaction scores to life through patient testimonials, outcome statistics, and real-world success stories. Focus particularly on highlighting positive experiences from traditionally underserved populations.
Has your organization invested in cultural competency? Showcase your commitment to culturally sensitive care through targeted messaging that resonates with diverse communities. Highlight staff diversity, language capabilities, and specific programs designed to serve various cultural needs with authenticity and respect.
Have you implemented feedback systems? Share how you actively listen and respond to patient input. Develop marketing materials that show your "feedback loop" in action — how patient suggestions lead to real improvements in care delivery and service quality.
Start with Marketing Foundations
Trends aside, the most effective marketing strategies for healthcare always start with a strong foundation: clarity on your audience, your positioning in the market, and your brand.
The beginning of a new year is the perfect time to revisit your marketing foundations and align your team around them — before jumping into specific trends or tactics.
Identify Your Target Audience
You must start with knowing the answer to the question: “Who are we speaking to in our marketing?”
Marketing healthcare has become increasingly patient-centric, meaning you need to deeply understand what it’s like to be your patients and create a healthcare marketing plan that powerfully addresses their fears and desires.
Patient Personas
Understanding your "champion patients" — those who find your services accessible, appealing, and aligned with their needs — is crucial for targeted healthcare services marketing.
However, in addition to your one “champion patient” persona, you should also have multiple other distinct patient personas for different markets you support or are trying to access. Here is what should be included in each patient persona:
Demographics (age, gender, socioeconomic status, occupation, and education)
Healthcare behaviors (frequency of visits, preferred care settings, treatment adherence, preventive care habits, and insurance status)
Pain points (health concerns, care barriers, transportation access, financial constraints, and support system)
Goals and motivations (health objectives, quality of life priorities, treatment preferences, self-management abilities, and desired outcomes)
Non-Patient Personas
Suppose you’re doing outreach to other professionals or organizations. In that case, creating personas for these groups can be immensely helpful, as each will have distinct needs and ways that messaging needs to be tailored. For example, your non-patient personas could include …
Referring physicians
Educational institutions
Community organizations
The information included in these non-patient personas will be similar to that in your patient personas:
Demographics (age, specialty, years in practice, practice setting, and geographical location)
Behaviors (referral frequency, preferred communication methods, decision-making process, and care coordination style)
Pain points (scheduling challenges, communication barriers, information gaps, administrative burden, and resource limitations)
Goals and motivations (patient outcomes, practice efficiency, professional development, collaborative relationships, and quality metrics)
Refine Your Unique Value Proposition
Your unique value proposition (UVP) should clearly articulate not just what you do, but why patients should choose you over other options. Sometimes, this is referred to as a competitive advantage or an edge.
For example, we helped one of our clients develop their UVP (or competitive edge), by conducting a market analysis of the other organizations in their service area. What we uncovered was that their referral process was unique among other options patients have.
If you’re too close to your practice to see clearly what makes you different, it’s worth it to partner with a healthcare messaging expert to help you identify your UVP and create a marketing plan for your healthcare clinic. This one thing underlies every marketing effort you do, and getting it right can be transformative.
Build a Strong Brand Identity
Once you understand who you’re speaking to in your marketing and what sets you apart, the final foundational piece is to create a strong brand identity.
Your brand identity is how patients, referral partners, staff — anyone — perceive your organization. There should be clear alignment on your mission, your UVP, your audience, and your values. On a practical level, your brand identity includes three key elements:
Brand messaging
Brand visuals
Team alignment
Bring It All Together in Marketing Channels
When you have your marketing foundations in place for 2025, that’s when you can begin rolling out campaigns through your chosen healthcare marketing tools and channels. Take advantage of the trends we explored at the beginning of this article and start seeing your reach expand.
We recommend leveraging both digital channels and traditional channels to reach patients of all demographics:
Digital marketing channels:
Social media marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Content marketing (blogs, videos, podcasts)
Email marketing strategies
Traditional marketing channels:
Billboards
Television and radio advertising
Print advertising
Hard-copy materials
Referral networking
Pursue New Opportunities With a Solid Foundation
To succeed in your healthcare marketing in 2025, you need carefully constructed healthcare marketing guidelines that both embrace new trends and maintain strong marketing foundations.
While telehealth, interstate compacts, and virtual care create exciting opportunities to reach more patients, success still hinges on understanding your audience, clearly communicating your value, and building a trusted brand.
These foundational pieces are what we do best at EnticEdge, where we help hospitals, healthcare organizations, and private practices grow their business and strengthen patient experience. Get in touch today to start planning for your best marketing year yet in 2025.
