Why Healthcare Marketing Strategy Feels Harder Than It Should

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Healthcare marketing leaders have more ideas than time, budget, or organizational patience.

They are surrounded by an unending stream of requests. Service lines need volume. Leadership wants proof of ROI. Teams want the next campaign, landing page, or website update to move faster.

With all these competing and seemingly urgent priorities, strategy feels harder than it should.

Too many strategic decisions are made under pressure, with a narrow field of view, and after the work is already starting to move.

To unpack this challenge and understand how to address it, I reached out to Laila Waggoner, an independent consultant who describes herself as a “Chief Dot Connector.” Laila has worked across agency, provider, vendor, and association spaces. That gives her a useful vantage point on why strategy gets messy inside real healthcare organizations.

Her framing was simple: “Strategy is about pausing.”

That sounds obvious until you look at how little room most marketing leaders are given to do it.

Strategy is about pausing

Healthcare marketing is under pressure from every direction. Financial pressure. Competitive pressure. Regulatory pressure. Internal pressure to prove that marketing is producing measurable value.

The natural response is to do more, faster.

Launch the campaign. Build the landing page. Update the service line content. Show the dashboard. Move the work forward so everyone can see progress.

The problem is that motion can start to masquerade as strategy.

“Pause for poise.”
Laila Waggoner, Strategy For Hire

Pausing is not delay or indecision. It's the moment where leaders step back long enough to see the full picture before the organization starts spending time, budget, and credibility.

That matters because healthcare marketing is full of legitimate requests. A request can be urgent and still be unclear. A service line can be important and still not be ready for promotion. A website update can be needed and still be trying to solve the wrong problem.

Without that pause, tactical work becomes the strategy by default. The team stays busy. Stakeholders feel heard. Reports get produced. But the work slowly drifts away from the harder questions.

What are we actually trying to change? Which goal matters most? What should we stop doing? What happens if this campaign succeeds, but the patient experience behind it does not?

These questions are not abstract reflection. They are the essence of strategy.

Strategy lives in the how

The goal is rarely the hard part. The hard part is deciding how the organization should pursue it.

“All revenue is not created equal.”
Laila Waggoner, Strategy For Hire

A campaign can drive more volume and still create the wrong business outcome if the payer mix is poor, the service line is not ready, or the operational path cannot support the demand.

Strategy forces leaders to ask better questions before jumping to tactics.

What kind of volume are we trying to grow? Is the service line ready for more patients? Is the decision path consumer-driven, referral-driven, or both? Can access support the promise we are about to make?

And, often most importantly: are we solving a marketing problem, or are we trying to market around an operational one?

This is also where strategy gives marketing leaders the ability to say no with more clarity.

Laila made the point that strategy is as much about what an organization will not do as what it will do. That is a hard discipline in healthcare because most requests are reasonable and come from smart people trying to solve real problems.

But resources are finite. Attention is finite. Patient trust is finite.

Strategic frameworks guide decisions

A strategic framework helps make prioritization less personal. It gives the team a shared way to decide what gets investment, what gets delayed, what needs to be fixed first, and what should not move forward at all.

That framework also helps marketing push upstream.

Too often, marketing gets pulled in after the decision has already been made. The service is defined, the operational model is set, and the access issues are still there. Then marketing is asked to promote it.

Marketing is not decoration

Marketing should not be brought in at the last minute to “make it pretty.”

At its best, marketing helps the organization understand the audience, clarify the promise, pressure-test the path, and decide whether the thing being promoted is ready for attention.

Healthcare websites show this tension all the time.

A service line page gets asked to create demand for a service that is hard to access. A campaign landing page promises ease but the scheduling path adds friction. A content update becomes the substitute for a decision nobody has made yet. The website becomes the place where unresolved priorities go to fight.

Strategy needs second opinions

Leaders need to test judgment before decisions are finalized.

Healthcare has a useful phrase for this: get a second opinion.

Marketers need one too.

Some second opinions should come from inside the organization. Laila recommends building intentional bridges with other functions before something is on fire. Clinical leaders, operations, IT, finance, access teams, service line leaders, and frontline staff all see parts of the problem marketing may not see from its own seat.

One stakeholder may think the problem is awareness. Another may think it is access. Another may think it is referral leakage. Everyone may agree on the general destination while picturing a completely different trip.

The patient should be part of this wider view too, even when the patient is not in the room.

Marketing is often the function closest to the promise being made to patients. That gives marketing leaders a responsibility to bring patient context into strategic decisions through research, search behavior, call center patterns, form data, qualitative feedback, and whatever else helps reveal the real journey.

Then there are the second opinions outside the organization.

Peers, mentors, associations, regional groups, national healthcare marketing communities, vendors, and leaders from other systems can all help marketers see beyond their own walls.

The value is not networking for its own sake. The value is pattern recognition.

Professional networks help leaders learn from the mistakes of others, not just their successes. They help leaders pressure-test assumptions, recognize where an idea has worked elsewhere, and spot when their own organization’s context is distorting the decision.

A second opinion does not make the call for you. It gives you a better view before you make it.

Protect the pause before the work locks you in

Healthcare marketing strategy is getting squeezed from multiple directions.

Urgency, service line demands, limited patient insight, internal assumptions, and the constant need to demonstrate progress all narrow the space for thoughtful decision-making.

The answer is not more strategy theater. It is not a bigger planning deck or another round of vague alignment meetings.

The practical discipline is simpler... and harder.

Pause before the work starts moving too fast. Define the how before choosing the tactic. Get the right second opinions before the decision hardens.

That rhythm will not remove the pressure from healthcare marketing. Nothing will.

But it gives leaders a better way to work inside it.