Episode 50: Industry Experts Share Their Best Advice for MedTech and Healthcare Marketers 

For the 50th episode of The Digital Clinic, host Aaron Burnett revisits the most actionable advice from 49 episodes, organized around six questions healthcare and MedTech marketers are actually asking right now.

The conversations cover what makes healthcare and MedTech marketing genuinely different, how to operate in a privacy-first environment without sacrificing performance, and why the shift to first-party data tends to help more than it hurts. They also dig into how AI is reshaping search and brand visibility, where AI actually earns its place in a marketing workflow, and the best advice these experts have for anyone doing this work.

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Celebrating 50 Episodes of The Digital Clinic 

Aaron Burnett: Welcome to The Digital Clinic, the show where we dig into what actually works in digital marketing for healthcare and med tech. The strategies, tools, and thinking that drive performance when the rules are tighter, the stakes are higher, and “that’s just the way we’ve always done it” is no longer a viable answer. 

This is our 50th episode, and we’ve truly had some exceptional guests on The Digital Clinic. Marketers, innovators, and thought leaders who shared their experiences, challenges, insights, and expertise with all of us. To celebrate our 50th episode, we’re revisiting some of the most interesting moments from those conversations, organized around the questions healthcare and med tech marketers are actually asking. 

Let’s get into it. 

This podcast is sponsored by Wheelhouse Digital Marketing Group. Wheelhouse provides exceptional performance marketing for healthcare and medical device manufacturers. Every Wheelhouse client saw record performance in 2025, even after implementing HIPAA-compliant data solutions. Find out more at wheelhousedmg.com. 

How Healthcare and Med Tech Marketing Differs from Other Industries 

Aaron Burnett: How does marketing in healthcare and med tech differ from other industries? 

Bridget Linebarger: We’ve stopped calling people patients. I’m saying that right now. We call them consumers, as the decision-makers in their healthcare. 

John Lynn: IT and marketing feel like things that they can cut without damaging it. 

I would describe it as an uncertain environment. Constraint actually encourages creativity. On the health IT side, though, versus the provider side, you can’t just do the targeted marketing. The targeted marketing can get you the internal person who’s going to essentially advocate for your solution, but guess what? 

If the other 10 people don’t know about you, then you’re still screwed. You have to do very targeted outreach, and you have to do broad-based marketing so that the CISO doesn’t say, “Who is this company? I’ve never heard of them. I don’t trust them.” Because if they say that, I don’t care what kind of advocate you have. 

In a healthcare organization, you’re not going to make a sale. 

Kevin Madden: It’s not like e-commerce where somebody might try some healthcare and return it if it doesn’t fit. It takes a pretty high commitment, so generally when people come to our site, they’re looking to complete an action. 

Catherine Carr: When you look at a lot of healthcare brands, everyone is improving patient outcomes. 

And it’s important, but you just start to understand how these phrases that people want to go to make it difficult for your brand to stand out. 

Marketing in a Privacy-First, Regulated Environment 

Aaron Burnett: You’re marketing in a privacy-first, highly regulated environment. What’s the approach you use that enables you to be effective while still respecting privacy and keeping your organization safe? 

Nirmal Vemanna: The problem everybody seems to be thinking about and hyper-focused on is compliance, which is very important. That should simply be step one. Before you know it, there will be a need for personalization. There will be a need to cater to the customer, as customers are bringing in what I like to call an online shopping mentality. 

They want that curated experience that takes their pain points into account. They want that specially curated journey that takes their medical history into account, their preferences, how they want to be communicated with, and what channel they want to be engaged on. 

That is not a compliance problem. Compliance is part of that, but you need data orchestration capabilities to be able to do that. So don’t just be happy with becoming HIPAA compliant. Use that as an opportunity. This is not a challenge, it’s an opportunity that you can then use to think beyond. 

Compliance and personalization — you should be thinking about both. 

K Royal: You do the right thing. I know that sounds very simple, but almost everything you want to do marketing-wise, you can do with consent and with notice. If you tell people what you’re doing and you do what you say you’re doing and nothing else, and then you tell them you did it and you show them what it is and you give them rights for it, most people are not going to opt out. 

You might have to wind up breaking some of your revenue streams, no doubt about it, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other revenue streams available to you. Most people actually don’t mind being marketed to. 

Adam Putterman: There’s nothing wrong with the collection of data if you have proper consent. The problem is where you share it. 

The Shift from Third-Party to First-Party Data 

Aaron Burnett: What’s been the practical impact of shifting away from third-party tracking and data to a first-party strategy? 

Nirmal Vemanna: The end of third-party data doesn’t need to spell doom and gloom. Patients will trust you with their data if you prove the value to them. When you do it in a way where they feel listened to, the insights that come from the patient are more valuable than some third-party data. 

This is something that is your own. They’re giving it to you. You should be using more of it, not less of it. 

Ashley Anderson: Being able to see the full 360-degree view of our communications with patients and what we’re doing. At the end of the day, it’s going to create a better experience. You can’t just live in a silo where you’re thinking about tools and making things efficient. 

It’s about how this is actually helping the everyday person who’s coming in. And not just what we think, but how can we actually validate those things and utilize surveys and talk with our patients to say, “Is this really going to make a difference?” 

AI’s Impact on Search and Digital Strategy 

Aaron Burnett: The impact of AI on search is undeniable. How are you factoring AI into your digital strategy? 

Mari Considine: We’re working with two different internets now. Most of us are still doing search through Google, even though I think that’s changing rapidly. We still need to make sure we’re there. But the searches in ChatGPT are much more personal, much more custom, much more specific. Where somebody might search “anxiety” on Google, they’re searching, “How do I know if I have anxiety disorder? How do I know if my child has an anxiety disorder?” So it’s much more nuanced in chat than it is in Google, and you have to deliver to both. 

Abby Lovett: The PR people always go last and you get five minutes, rushed at the end or whatever. Now that’s inverted, and there’s a lot more appetite to understand: wait, how do I ensure that all of this equity I’ve built over all these years is actually protected? 

What do I need to get out there in terms of citation-worthy content, data, et cetera, that will help me defend this brand that I built? 

David Mihm: I don’t think that ceding the SEO game is necessarily a good strategy. I think you should still be trying to be one of the sites that is pulled in as authoritative for the AI overview, for example, or making sure that you are mentioned as a source in ChatGPT as a domain expert in this particular topic.  

Even if that doesn’t lead to a click, I think, again, to your point about brand, you still want your brand to be out there as being an expert in this particular thing. 

I think you should still be very much paying attention to search visibility. In fact, I would say maybe visibility is even more important than it has ever been, but I don’t know that traffic is really the right way to measure that anymore. 

David Niu: We looked at the top questions that people cared about, and then we said, “What data can we have that will check off those boxes?” So for example, how much does it cost? Is the cost going up? What are the inflationary pressures on surrogacy? How long does it take? What are the legalities of it? 

Then we created these reports like the State of Surrogacy. By using that, not only did we get press to cover it because they wanted the data points, but we also got backlinks from other people, and now even AI will also cite those data points. 

What Marketers Misunderstand About AI 

Aaron Burnett: What do you think is commonly misunderstood about AI, and how do you frame the opportunity it represents? 

Al Lindsay: Everybody has it in their strategic plan to figure out how to leverage AI to be more efficient, to create durable differentiation versus their competitors, to win new markets, to do more with less. But none of them know how to do it or where to begin. I think a big part of that is not understanding what it even is, what its shortcomings are, and how to overcome them. 

A lot of companies don’t even begin because they heard the word “hallucination” and then got scared. They worry their brand will be diluted by something AI might say that they can’t control, and therefore they’re out. 

So some expertise is needed in companies in order to figure out how to leverage technology in a meaningful way. A lot of people bolt it on, “Yeah, we’re going to hire a team of folks and we’ll set them over here on the side and we’ll tell them, ‘Your mission is to do innovative things with AI,'” when it really needs to be working backwards from the core business. 

What are the problems you’re trying to solve for your customer, for your business? Now let’s look at how those problems might be enabled with AI. 

Todd Weinstein: I think AI can do the bulk of the heavy lifting, but I’ve received emails before where I’ll read them and say, “This is AI with zero human element put in.” They just took it from AI and there it is in front of me. 

So I think that’s the part that, whether it’s healthcare or not, folks just need to be mindful of and careful of, so that they’re putting their handprint on it to make sure that it’s got some human touch. 

Abby Lovett: AI broadly takes the best average of everything. But brands today are operating in a landscape that’s ever more competitive, ever more cutthroat, and moving more quickly than ever before. 

So they don’t need the best average. They need the best, full stop. 

Ian Lurie: The question is whether having tools that handle the basic 90% of problem-solving and communication frees us up to get even better at the 10%. And this is where I’m the cynical idealist. I think tools like this should free us up to do more and more amazing things. 

Advice for Healthcare and Med Tech Marketers 

Aaron Burnett: What advice do you have for marketers in healthcare and med tech? 

Bridget Linebarger: The idea is to really be, as I said, the problem solver. How does this product solve that problem, and what are the pain points? And quite frankly, simplifying that message as much as possible. As a marketer, I’m sometimes the most annoying person in the room with the engineers, the clinicians, and everyone else, because I’m asking why over and over again. 

Why does this matter? Why do they care about this mechanism? Why would they change their practice for this? And so I simplify it down for me, and then I can build it back up for a clinician or a patient. 

David Patton: Most of the folks who are text-based writers, journalists, reporters, however you want to describe them, are very much accustomed to having a byline and are very proud of the byline. 

But they’re very uncomfortable being visible as the active storytellers. Part of the dynamic storytelling evolution is turning those people into faces that can be trusted. The byline has certainly traditionally been the place where it drives that trust, and now it’s going to be: “Hey, I’m an expert in content and storytelling, talking to another expert who’s an expert in research or DNA or immunotherapy. 

Together we’re going to draw that story out, and you’re going to trust me because you see who I am or you’re hearing me, as the case here. We’re both of those things, and that’s how I think about the trust piece. Because you need to have that face piece, or at least the distinctive personality, much more than you ever did. 

Because institutions are not trusted. Fred Hutch is a very well-trusted institution, but it’s still an institution. 

Mari Considine: We have developed all of our KPIs to align with our strategic plan, so there is no ambiguity in how we drive business value. For some of those, it’s like, how do you show that? It’s really problem-solving, but we’ve been able to do it. 

That was a challenge: literally taking the actual organizational plan, and instead of doing what we’ve done in the past, which is somewhat operating in a vacuum, looking at our own metrics, our own KPIs, all of those traditional things that everybody else is tracking. We still do that and a lot of those are in these KPIs. 

But we’ve created things like indexes, where we’re combining different KPIs to really help show how we’re showing up as a brand. So we have this brand performance index that we’ve created. A lot of individual things, but it aligns directly with the strategic plan, in the same language as the strategic plan. 

So when I go into a meeting, I show our organizational plan, I show our KPIs, and I’m able to show our success. It really is as simple as that. It did take a lot of work. It sounds very simple, and it’s simple now. 

But it did take a lot of work because obviously the organizational plan of a healthcare organization doesn’t necessarily fit into marketing. 

We’ve been able to create some custom metrics, rolling up some of our more traditional metrics into things that are really valued by the organization, and we’re able to show growth and show success that way. That literally is the way we’ve been able to show impact and show ourselves as not a cost center, but really a revenue and business driver, which is always the challenge, I think, for marketing, and even more so for comms. 

Ashley Anderson: I really think that it does start with just making sure you do the work ahead of time to make sure that you’re comfortable with the material that you’re sharing. And that’s one part of it. But I think it’s also just like being true to yourself, being true to the time, being true to the question, and just bringing your most authentic self and leadership and all those other things to the table. 

And for storytelling it really is the same, because it’s those really fine moments of connection where you can say, “Oh, I see that in myself,” or, “I know that. I can relate to that.” Those are the things that are really going to touch and move the needles. People remember how they felt, not necessarily just what you said. 

Kevin Madden: The biggest next evolution for us is going to be our website’s ability to guide patients to their next step. Too much of it right now is find a location, find a service, find a clinic, find an offering, and I don’t know, guess, pick up the phone, call, see if they’ll take you. What we don’t do is get more context from users. 

Ask them one or two qualifying questions to help triangulate where they need to go, whether they have an image already or a diagnosis or a referral. All of these things need different behaviors, and those are patients that need to be steered. Where we’ve been really successful is just by asking one or two preliminary questions rather than saying “Schedule an appointment” or “Fill out a form, and we’ll get back to you.” Instead, we say, “Do you have a primary care doctor? 

Have you been referred? Are you a referring provider?” These little things can give us what we need to know to tell the patient what to do next. As soon as they’re given a prompt or a cue, their next step is maybe an orthopedic specialist before they see a surgeon, or maybe a primary care doctor, or maybe they just need to go to a same-day care clinic. 

All of those — as soon as we can give the patient that prompt, they now have a task to complete, and they will do so at unprecedented rates for our website. 

Key Takeaways from 50 Episodes 

Aaron Burnett: Across nearly 50 conversations with guests, I heard the same themes repeated. Build your privacy-first strategy on a foundation of consent. 

You can do most of what you want to do if you’re transparent about what you’re doing and you give people a real choice. Approach your first-party data strategy as a chance to get closer to the people you serve and an opportunity to build trust. Brands that successfully navigated the shift to first-party data engaged directly with their patients, prospects, and customers, and they ended up with data more valuable than anything they could have gotten from a third party. 

GEO, AEO, AIO — pick your acronym. The impact of AI on the search landscape is undeniable, but it’s also true that many of the same things that have long fueled strong digital marketing performance in general, and SEO performance in particular, continue to be a good starting point for strong performance in the age of AI. 

And speaking of AI, because everyone is speaking of AI these days: those finding the greatest success with AI are using it as a means of achieving efficiency and scale. Importantly, they’re leaving strategy and discernment to humans. You’ll find every one of these conversations and themes in full wherever you get your podcasts. 

I’m Aaron Burnett. I’ll see you next time on The Digital Clinic. 

Sponsored by Wheelhouse DMG