How to Set Smarter Healthcare Marketing Goals

Weak goals lead to wasted ad spend and missed growth opportunities. In this guide, we’ll break down how to set smarter, data-driven marketing goals that drive high-quality leads, optimize ad spend, and fuel real business growth.

When evaluating healthcare marketing strategies, time and again, we see a common issue: loosely-defined goals. Without clear, actionable objectives, even the most well-crafted campaigns can fall short. In this article, we’ll explore why goal setting is crucial for your overall marketing success, from digital campaigns to broader media strategies. We’ll also walk through key steps to help you set and achieve meaningful goals that align with your business priorities.

Why Goal Setting Is Important

If one thing has been evident again and again, it’s that ambiguous media goals lead to failure and wasteful spending for multi-location healthcare groups. In contrast, robust goal setting brings tangible direction to your overall marketing strategy, guiding everything from paid media and SEO to organic content and offline campaigns.

Maybe the best way to think about it is by considering what happens when you don’t engage in precise goal setting. A lack of clarity with your goals will result in several issues, including poor lead quality, misallocated budgets, under-served locations, and inefficient channel investments.

By setting specific, measurable goals tied to your business objectives, you create a roadmap for success. Whether you’re prioritizing paid search, social media advertising, or a broader mix of digital and traditional channels, each tactic works in tandem to drive the right results—like higher-quality leads, optimized capacity, and better return on ad spend (ROAS).

How to Set Realistic Google Advertising Goals

How can you set realistic goals to drive a successful marketing strategy? The following steps can help focus your efforts across digital and traditional channels.

1. Be Specific

In developing your overall marketing goals, ensure you are as detailed as possible. Having a clear direction for you and your team allows for precise, actionable objectives. Any ambiguity will only lead to inefficient media spending, misaligned efforts, and, ultimately, underperformance.

You also need to educate your agency and internal media teams on the details of your overarching business goals. If they don’t understand these nuances—like revenue targets, capacity constraints, or expansion plans—they’ll struggle to create campaigns that truly move the needle.

‘Even before looking at the road map, what we do here at Cardinal is try to understand the holistic business goals a client might have. Even if it’s not directly digital related, because digital is either supplementary to different parts or it’s a piece of the whole. Our goal is always to know how we can help digital marketing help your whole business meet your goal,’ says Evan Ilgenfritz, VP of Media at Cardinal Digital Marketing.

What might these goals look like? It could include increasing total new patient volume systemwide, improving return on ad spend (ROAS) across campaigns, or maintaining a flat cost-per-acquisition (CPA). When your media team and partners understand your exact objectives and expectations, they are better positioned to execute a mix of channels and investments that achieve real, measurable success.

2. Set Clear Goals By Need

Many marketers and agencies default to a basic formula: driving the highest number of leads for the total budget. While that might generate volume, it rarely solves for quality, channel efficiency, or long-term growth.

Instead of taking this cut-and-paste approach, set clear goals based on your business priorities and needs. Ask questions like:

• Is the priority to drive total new patient growth at the system level?
• Is it to fill capacity at specific locations experiencing a drop in volume?
• Is it to support openings for de novo locations and build awareness in new markets?
• Is it to promote specific high-value service lines or procedures? (e.g., joint replacements for orthopedics, crowns and implants for dental, etc.)

By identifying these priorities upfront, you ensure your marketing efforts focus on achieving the right results—whether through PPC, social media, organic content, or other channels. The goal isn’t just to hit arbitrary lead numbers but to drive quality leads that align with your broader business strategy and deliver the highest impact where you need it most.

3. Use Forecasting or MMM to See What’s Possible

When it comes to setting realistic marketing goals, relying solely on past performance or gut instinct can leave you flying blind. That’s where tools like media mix modeling (MMM) come into play. MMM uses statistical analysis to show how your marketing investments impact overall revenue. It allows you to make data-driven decisions and plan your strategy with confidence.

At its heart, MMM evaluates how each marketing channel contributes to your bottom line—directly and indirectly—while factoring in external variables like seasonality, location growth, or provider availability. This gives you a clear picture of how your current media mix is performing and what changes are needed to reach your desired goals.

For example, you may want to grow patient volume by 20%. MMM can simulate different investment scenarios to determine the strategies, channels, and budgets required to get there. What you uncover might surprise you—achieving that goal may demand more resources than you have today. While that can sound like bad news, it’s actually a realistic view of what’s possible and what adjustments are needed.

If your existing investment strategy can’t scale to meet your targets, MMM can help you identify where to shift resources or diversify your media mix. Maybe that next dollar spent in search delivers diminishing returns, while social media or programmatic could drive better incremental revenue. With MMM, you can test these “what if” scenarios before making big decisions.

Ultimately, forecasting and MMM provide clarity and control, helping you set goals that are both ambitious and achievable. They eliminate guesswork, align strategies with actual business outcomes, and allow you to allocate your budget where it will drive the highest impact.

Learn more about Cardinal’s MMM solution, RevRx™.

Build a Media Mix to Meet Your Goals

Achieving your marketing goals starts with understanding where you stand today and how to refine or expand your media mix to move forward. This process combines analyzing your current lead sources, evaluating your marketing maturity, and accounting for external market factors.

Start with Your Current Lead Sources

Before you can optimize, you need a clear view of where your leads are coming from:

• Digital Channels: What percentage of leads come from paid search, social, programmatic, or SEO?
• Referrals: How reliant are you on word-of-mouth or provider recommendations?
• Traditional Outlets: Are channels like TV, radio, or print still driving meaningful results?

Breaking this down gives you a baseline to measure what’s working and what needs adjustment.

Evaluate Your Marketing Maturity

Your media mix strategy will also depend on the sophistication of your current campaigns. Ask yourself:

• Are your Google Ads campaigns fully optimized?
• Have you reached the point of diminishing returns or maxed out impression share?
• Is increased competition making it harder to stand out in search results?
• Do you need to build brand affinity with top-of-funnel social campaigns to differentiate?
• Do you have an integrated tech stack to track leads all the way to booked appointments?

If you’re hitting a plateau, it might be time to diversify your channels—whether that’s expanding into paid social, display, or exploring new platforms.

Account for Market Trends and External Factors

Sometimes, growth challenges stem from forces beyond your control. You need to evaluate market conditions and their impact on your ability to meet goals. Examples include:

• Regulatory Changes: HIPAA updates or state-specific regulations might restrict tracking or targeting.
• Competitive Pressure: New competitors in the market may increase ad costs and make standing out harder.
• Economic Trends: Rising inflation or economic uncertainty could prevent patients from booking higher-cost elective procedures.
• Mergers & Acquisitions: Competitor consolidations can create stronger, well-funded players in your space.

By regularly assessing both internal performance and external trends, you can identify gaps in your strategy and adjust your media mix to align with your goals. Diversifying your channels and staying agile ensures you’re positioned to adapt and grow, even as market conditions evolve.

Tying Performance to Goals

Let’s segue into how you can most effectively correlate performance to your marketing goals. Data, no matter how detailed, means nothing if it lacks context. You must connect your marketing performance across all channels to your overarching goals. Too often, marketing teams and agencies focus on delivering insights that sound impressive but have little connection to what truly drives business success.

For example, they might say: “At Location A, we generated 35 leads at a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) of $150. This resulted in a 7% improvement in lead volume month-over-month and a 5% reduction in CPA.”

But what does that really mean?

This statement fails to explain key factors:

• What type of leads were generated?
• Were they qualified leads or just surface-level conversions?
• How many leads turned into appointments, sales, or revenue?
• Did the campaign generate enough leads to hit your growth targets?

To truly understand if your overall marketing strategy is supporting your business goals, you need insights that align with the metrics that matter most.

How to Tie Performance Back to Goals

1. Start with Conversions That Matter: Ensure the “conversions” you’re tracking are tied directly to actions that move the needle—appointments booked, revenue generated, or service line growth—not surface-level engagements.
2. Clean Up Your KPIs: Focus on the KPIs that are directly aligned with your business goals. Strip away vanity metrics like clicks or impressions if they don’t contribute to outcomes that matter.
3. Refine Through Dialogue: If your internal team or agency isn’t delivering this level of clarity, open the conversation. Collaborate to ensure reporting aligns with measurable, meaningful goals.

Ultimately, vanity metrics and unrelated KPIs won’t help you assess—or communicate to the C-suite—the true value of your marketing strategy. Keep the focus on outcomes that demonstrate progress toward your business goals and use those insights to refine your approach.

Overcoming Operational Roadblocks to Achieve Marketing Goals

Operational challenges can often stand in the way of achieving your marketing goals, no matter how well-optimized your campaigns may be. The right technology and collaboration with operations can help you identify and resolve these hurdles before they derail your success.

Let’s explore common operational roadblocks and how you can address them.

1. Limited or Non-Existent Online Booking

The demand for online booking is on the rise. Today’s patients expect the convenience of scheduling appointments without picking up the phone. A lack of online booking options can cause frustration, leading potential patients to abandon your website and choose competitors who offer a seamless experience.

Recent trends indicate that over 60% of patients now prefer booking appointments online. This expectation cuts across all demographics but is especially prevalent among younger audiences who value digital convenience. Integrating a robust online booking system that is simple, user-friendly, and mobile-optimized can meet these expectations and reduce the risk of patients abandoning your site.

To gauge its effectiveness, track conversion rates and analyze where patients may be dropping off during the booking process. If abandonment rates are high, evaluate the user flow for friction points or usability issues and make adjustments to ensure a seamless experience.

2. Contact Center Performance Issues

A marketing campaign may drive a surge in leads, but poor contact center performance can prevent those leads from converting into patients.

Issues like long hold times, unanswered calls, and inefficient scheduling systems often frustrate potential patients, leading them to seek care elsewhere. Additionally, poor customer service can leave a negative impression, eroding trust and damaging your brand reputation.

To address these challenges, implement call tracking and analytics to monitor how calls are handled. These tools allow you to identify key issues such as call drop-offs, excessive wait times, or missed opportunities, providing actionable insights for improvement. Combine this with staff training focused on delivering exceptional customer service and equipping teams with efficient scheduling tools.

3. Poor Digital Front Door Experience

A poor digital front door experience can quickly drive potential patients away. Common signs include hard-to-find essential information like hours, location, or services, as well as non-intuitive site navigation that leaves users frustrated. Slow loading speeds, broken links, and overly complicated booking processes only add to the problem, increasing the likelihood of drop-offs.

To resolve these issues, you can:

• Conduct click analysis to track user navigation and identify where visitors drop off.
• Use tools like heatmaps and session recordings to pinpoint problem areas and gather data-driven insights.
• Regularly test and optimize your site’s user experience (UX) to create a seamless, intuitive journey.
• Focus on key goals: Ensure patients can easily:
  • Find essential information (hours, location, services)
  • Book an appointment
  • Contact your practice without obstacles

4. Lack of Testing and Continuous Improvement

The digital experience is not a one-and-done task. To ensure marketing success, you need to consistently test, evaluate, and optimize the patient journey.

To optimize the patient experience and improve conversions, regularly test key elements of your digital strategy. Start by evaluating online booking flows to ensure they are simple and intuitive for users. Assess landing page effectiveness to identify which designs and content drive the most conversions. Additionally, analyze the placement and messaging of your call-to-action (CTA) buttons to maximize engagement.

The solution is to implement A/B testing on these key areas. By comparing variations, you can identify what works best, refine designs, adjust messaging, and streamline booking processes.

Why Operational Alignment is Essential

So many elements of your marketing success hinge on collaboration with operations. Without close alignment, hurdles like poor contact center performance or a frustrating booking experience can undo even the best campaigns.

Want more tips on building synergy with operations? Read our full article on Marketing + Operations Alignment.

Aligning Budget with Capacity Data

Finally, multi-location groups should consider utilizing capacity data in their media strategy. Spending the same amount for every location could be a waste of your advertising budget. As Mari Considine, Chief Marketing & Development Officer at Acenda Integrated Health, explains:

“We need clear communication about capacity limits, resource availability, and potential bottlenecks. It’s about setting realistic targets and avoiding overextension by working closely with our ops and programming crews.”

When developing your media goals, look at how each location is performing:

• For example, what locations have low patient volume?
• Do you have new practice openings that will need special attention?
• What locations have maxed capacity or long wait times?

Understanding the capacity challenges at each location in the system will allow you to optimize your budget allocation, spending more at a location with a lower capacity or less at locations that are booked out.