Episode 56: Marketing Measurement the CFO Actually Cares About

How can marketing leaders move past vanity metrics and build a measurement engine that earns total financial confidence from their CFO?

In this episode of The Digital Clinic, host Aaron Burnett breaks down how healthcare and MedTech marketers can transform marketing from a perceived cost center into a proven business driver. Featuring insights from past episode guests, including Mari Considine, Mike Julian, Richard Chapman, Kevin Madden, Michael Wiegand, and Paul Weinstein, this compilation episode explores how to construct a privacy-compliant, composable data and reporting infrastructure that connects campaign performance directly to bottom-line profitability

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Why the CFO Relationship Now Defines Marketing Success

Aaron Burnett: Healthcare and med tech are under pressure. Every dollar that’s spent has to show a return. It’s never been more true than the dollars that are spent in marketing. In healthcare, dollars that are spent need to demonstrate contribution to new patients or increased revenue for existing patients.

In med tech, dollars spent have to show that they’re driving new customer starts and increases in lifetime value. So, now more than ever, the most important executive relationship for a chief marketing officer may well be the chief financial officer, the person who needs to have confidence that the dollars spent by marketing are dollars that are going to be returned to the organization, hopefully several-fold.

So how do you build a strong relationship with a CFO? How do you ensure that the data that you develop, that you deliver, that you make available to that CFO instills confidence?

In today’s show, we’re going to hear from guests on prior episodes who speak to exactly these issues, who tell us how to create the marketing infrastructure, the measurement infrastructure, and how to build the reporting infrastructure that is required to ensure that we are cultivating confidence and maintaining that confidence over time.

And then we’ll turn to experts who speak directly to how to develop the kinds of sophisticated and rigorous forms of analysis that deliver true insight and enable us to outperform our competitors and deliver what the organization needs.

I’m Aaron Burnett. Welcome to “The Digital Clinic.” Thanks for listening.

I hope you enjoy this episode.

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. 

The Ad Platforms Aren’t Optimizing for You

Aaron Burnett: You could think of the data that ad platforms provide to you as an expression of their own self-interest. They’re going to give you data that makes their performance look good, and incentivizes you to spend more money. So they’ll tell you the number of clicks that they generated for you.

They’ll tell you the number of form fills, the leads that they generated. They’ll give you data on ROAS. But if you’re in healthcare or med tech, leads aren’t actually what you need to drive. What you need to drive are new customer starts. You need patients who actually show up for appointments. You need to measure and drive for and optimize for something that is not available to you in the platforms.

This is a point that Michael Wiegand makes so well in this clip.

Michael Wiegand: Out of the box, the ad platforms are incentivized to have you buy more clicks at a higher cost per click. That’s the name of the game for them. That’s what’s moving the needle for their shareholders of the ad platforms, right? So I think a lot of that approach and what helps them run their business runs counter to what you as a business are trying to do as an advertiser of that platform, right?

You’re trying to get more leads in your pipeline that are of a higher quality, and you’re trying to optimize your cost to get those leads into your pipeline, right? So in a lot of ways, the default tools that the ad platform makes available are designed to maximize the amount of clicks that you’re buying from the platform and maximize the number of conversions that you’re getting, but not necessarily the quality of those conversions and how efficiently you’re getting them, right?

So I think what our propensity model tries to do is, it tries to reclaim some of the power that the ad platform has over you in the way that their algorithms typically run, and put that back in the hands of the advertiser, and back in the hands of the marketer.

Media Mix Modeling and Why Static ROI Reports Aren’t Enough

Aaron Burnett: As Michael points out, you need a much more sophisticated means of measuring and optimizing your campaigns. You’re not optimizing for leads, you’re optimizing for the point of meaningful business value creation: a new customer start, a patient who actually shows up for an appointment, and ideally, the lifetime value for both of those things.

So you need something like real-time propensity modeling. Now, take a look at this clip from Mike Julian from Definitive Healthcare, who is talking about an even more sophisticated approach that he has used and we use at Wheelhouse: media mix modeling, a way to understand the direct, indirect, and joint effects of all of your marketing activity, whether paid, unpaid, whether it’s your own direct action, a competitor’s action, what’s happening regulatorily, what’s happening in the environment.

How do you understand all of that? How do you understand its impact? How do you incorporate that into your media strategy? And then how do you understand the value that’s been driven by your actions, by what you spent, what you didn’t spend, and where you did it?

You also spoke about media mix modeling, which I think is fascinating: being able to almost gamify scenarios about where we should spend our media dollars in order to get the best results, not only results from clicks, clickthroughs, impressions, and form fills, but if you think about it in the care of how can we take a lens of empathy, understanding what our consumers are and model our media mix to be able to get the patients or prospective patients the care that they need.

I think that’s huge because it goes beyond performance metrics and then not only modeling what the media placement should be. But ultimately when we are serving media, how are we able to account for contribution, margin and revenue from these efforts, in a way that is clear to the organization and defensible going beyond the static offline ROI reporting that I saw when I first came into healthcare.

Every three or six months, here’s a report. We can’t drill into it, but we’re showing you that all this revenue came from these efforts and it’s very hard for your CMO stakeholder and partner to take that to their leadership team and stand behind it a hundred percent. Because as soon as it starts getting questioned, and you see there are leadership and clinician leaders that they are data driven.

They are, they’re more savvy. They’re going to drill into it. So if it’s not explainable, defensible, and you can’t be able to analyze in real time, I think that it’s a detriment to the overall mission of going from stage one to the ultimate maturity model that we’re discussing here.

Every Department Has to Justify Its Spend

Aaron Burnett: As we heard from Mike, media mix modeling provides a high degree of sophistication. The other thing that it does is it helps to satisfy the understandable and increasing need by senior executives to have access to the same data with the same frequency and the same opportunity to drill down into that data that they expect from all of the operational elements in their businesses.

And as we hear now from Richard Chapman, this sort of need for close to real-time reporting and reporting that doesn’t just speak to vanity metrics, vanity marketing metrics, but speaks to the real financial contribution that investments in marketing are making for their organizations, is now just a common part of what it means to be a CMO and what it means to be an effective marketer in 2026 in healthcare or med tech.

Richard Chapman: When I worked in an academic medical center, of course, we always thought every other group was better funded than our group. And the more I’ve gone to marketing conferences, I hear from so many different marketers about how they’re having to justify their existence. They’re having to justify the tools that they’re requesting in order to try to drive new customers, new patients, new people to the website.

I hadn’t really thought about it from their perspective, but they’re being required to produce information as to why they have these expenditures just the same as every other group.

Building KPIs That Map to the Strategic Plan

Aaron Burnett: So how do you do what Mike Julian and Richard Chapman have described? How do you create the data, how do you deliver the data that enables your senior executives, and particularly your CFO, to be confident that the money that’s being invested in marketing is delivering a return for the organization?

Well, ideally, you do what Mari Considine did for Ascenda Integrated Health. Mari is chief brand and marketing officer for Ascenda, and as you’ll hear in this clip from her, she has created an entire data infrastructure that maps back to the strategic plan for her organization and ensures that every day, on an ongoing basis, her organization is producing the data that gives her CFO and her CEO absolute confidence that marketing isn’t a cost center. It’s a source of ROI.

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.

And so for some of those, it’s like, how do you show that? It’s really kind of problem solving it, but we’ve been able to do it. And so that was a challenge. It’s 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 and we still do.

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, the same language of the strategic plan.

And so when I go into a meeting, I show our organizational plan. I show our KPIs, and I’m able to show our success, and 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. We’re able to show growth. We’re able to 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.

Aaron Burnett: Okay, Mari has helped us understand how we can create a data and reporting environment that clearly demonstrates the value, the financial value of marketing. Mike Julian, Michael Wiegand, and Richard Chapman helped us understand how important it is to focus on the moment of true value creation: a new customer start, a patient who actually shows up for an appointment, the lifetime value of both of those people to an organization.

So what can you do when you have that information, when you have clarity around the outcome you’re trying to drive? You know what’s working and you know what isn’t working. Well, for that, we turn to Kevin Madden, who is AVP of web experience at Providence.

And as we hear from Kevin, you get clarity with regard to what is actually needed by your users and what’s working and what’s not: the instances in which you’re providing a, quote unquote, conversion path to your patients that turns out to be nothing but a frustration.

You learn what elements of your marketing, and in Kevin’s case, web experience, need to be re-tuned so that in some instances you’re deflecting people from the wrong point of conversion. You’re guiding them to the right point of conversion so that the people who actually sign up for an appointment, the people who are looking for a physician, find the right physician, get the care they need, and show up to that appointment and become revenue generating for your organization.

Turning Web Behavior Data Into Patient Guidance

Kevin Madden: One of the biggest learnings we’ve had over the last few years is that no matter how hard we’ve tried, we haven’t been able to make people do things that they don’t want to do.

It’s not like e-commerce where somebody might try on some health or try some health care and return it if it doesn’t fit, or there’s a special financing incentive and generous return policy or things like that. It takes a pretty high commitment. So generally, when people come to our site, they’re looking to complete an action.

And as we’ve evolved in scheduling, lead capture, register, and seminar registration, and a lot of other capture and intake methods, we’ve found it’s actually, we have to do a good job, better job of screening people and qualifying them and getting them to the right place. 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 guess: pick up the phone, call, see if they’ll take you. But what we don’t do is get context, 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, a diagnosis, or a referral.

All of these things need different behaviors, and those are patients that need to be steered. So, 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. 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. And as soon as they’re given a prompt or a cue, your next step is maybe an orthopedic specialist before you see a surgeon, or maybe a primary care doctor, or maybe you just need to go to a same day care clinic.

All of those, as soon as we can give the patient that prompt, they will, they now have a task to complete, and they’ll do so at what are unprecedented rates for our website. Yeah. What gave you the insight? What data gave you the insight that enabled you to begin to make these pivots and these changes?

Appointment cancellations and rebookings, and watching, it was early on, when we started scheduling, we saw success as a scheduled event, then a completed event, but we also saw generally 30, 40 percent cancellation and reschedule rates, and we were seeing those patients elsewhere, just not where they intended to book. So we knew that there was more force behind patients trying to get in than we could align to the paths, to the right path to get in, and they were over-putting too much pressure on our intake methods when they were often unqualified or just weren’t in the right place.

Yeah. Okay, that’s very interesting. And so it sounds like you have tested this new guided… Yeah. And that you’re seeing very significant performance gains.

Do you have a sense for the sort of gain that you’re seeing? We do. So, I guess the first thing to talk about there is success wasn’t measured by how many people get through, because, and often in cases like with a surgical center or a women’s health clinic, people are able to get through to do that anyway.

Success is measured in how many people can we deflect, how many people are in the wrong place that we can, if we can get them to express care or primary care or the right level of specialty for where they’re at in their journey will be a lot more successful. And we’ve seen almost 30 percent deflection rates with success behind them. And that’s been how we’ve known we’re doing the right thing.

What Sophistication Actually Delivers: A 72% Profit Increase

Aaron Burnett: All right, so we’ve described a lot of requirements for sophisticated marketing for med tech and healthcare, but what’s the real result? What can you deliver if you bring to bear all of this sophistication? If you truly have a HIPAA-compliant data solution in place, if you have measurement systems that enable you to understand and optimize for the business outcome that you need to drive, if you have reporting infrastructure that makes your performance clear to your senior executives and most notably to your CFO, what can you do?

How much better can your performance be? Well, I mean, here’s one example. For one of our clients, we did all of those things. We implemented the right sort of measurement solution. We also ran media mix modeling for the first time for this client. And to give you some sense of the power of this approach, after our first run of a highly tuned and effective media mix model, we were able to increase one of our client’s profit by 72%.

And it was nothing but application of media mix modeling and then implementation of the changes, the optimization steps recommended and suggested by that model. So next, we’re going to hear from Paul Weinstein, who’s president of Wheelhouse, and in this conversation, Paul and I are talking about what our experience has been in moving from what we perceived initially to be an environment of scarcity: much less performance data than we had when we were able to use third-party tracking.

Much more rigorous rules around the way that we could use data, the things that we could do and couldn’t do, much more couldn’t do, to find and target audiences, and the delight and surprise that we and our teams have experienced as we have found that that constraint really drove us to creativity, more rigorous identification of the actual data that we needed to measure, that we needed to optimize toward, and the performance that we’ve been able to drive by doing so, because we have our own data warehouse, because of some very intelligent things we’ve been able to do. As we learned, we’ve found that the performance that we’re driving with the recipe that we have around MarTech is exceptional. It is significantly better than what we drove when we were operating using third-party tracking and targeting.

Data Scarcity as a Forcing Function for Creativity

Paul Weinstein: There was something you said in there where there’s all of a sudden scarcity of data; we, in some ways, feel like we’re data poor.

Mm-hmm. What that has, at least for us, forced us to do is be creative and maybe think a little bit outside the box, or at least deeper into the organizations that we’re supporting, in terms of, we have to go looking for the data that we need. And in a lot of cases, as you go look for the data, you’re finding better data, right?

Right. You’re finding data that tells you the actual value of that lead that we drove with that campaign, with that creative, and we’ve also taken great pains and spent a lot of energy making sure that we are instrumenting our analytics in a way that’s enabling us to tie outcomes to everything from the platforms to the creative, to the keyword, and all of that.

But, in our own data warehouse, we’re bringing in first-party data. We’re bringing in CRM data from Salesforce. We are collecting all the data from the marketing platforms, the ad platforms, and we’re bringing that all together.

We’re putting it in our own compliant data warehouse. Mm-hmm. We’re normalizing it. We’re putting it all together, and then we’re layering on our analytics and BI and visualization on top of that, and then applying our skills as advertisers to be able to understand: okay, this is working, this is not; more of this, less of that.

Right. It’s creating phenomenal outcomes for our clients.

Building Wheelhouse’s First-Party Data Warehouse

Aaron Burnett: All right, so it turns out that constraint, in our case, led to more rigor. It led to creativity. It led to our working closely with our clients to get access to, to leverage, to turn value from data that isn’t typically provided to digital marketing agencies. We integrate with client CRMs. We incorporate their first-party data into our reporting environment.

We pull in Salesforce data because that Salesforce data tells us about new customer starts, tells us about customer lifetime value, gives us the critical signal that we need to optimize toward, that allows us to steer the ship and ensure that what we’re doing from a marketing perspective really is delivering economic value for our clients.

So when you bring all of that together, again, I’ll give you an example of the power that that drives at scale. For one of our larger med tech clients, that unlocked significant growth from a digital advertising perspective, and growth that we were able to deliver even more efficiently than we did at lower levels of spend.

All right, so we have described the underpinnings of what’s required for really effective marketing in healthcare and med tech. You need a HIPAA-compliant or at least a privacy-compliant data solution and measurement framework in place. You need a reporting framework and data infrastructure in place.

You, ideally and all too likely, probably need a privacy-compliant data warehouse that enables you to bring together all of the performance data from the platforms, integrate that data with a client’s or your own first-party data, and maybe data from Salesforce or another CRM to the extent that is different from your first-party data, so that you truly have a comprehensive and unified view of the patient’s or prospect’s journey from top to bottom.

We’ve described media mix modeling and the power that media mix modeling delivers in terms of sophisticated insights and recommendations that can unlock profit. We’ve described real-time propensity modeling that enables you to identify and then to provide a real-time signal back to the platform so that you’re optimizing for this moment of value creation that is well beyond anything that conventional analytics or platform tracking would enable you to target and optimize toward.

None of this is easy. None of it’s a panacea. It takes real work and real rigor to develop these systems, to bring the data together that’s required to ensure that they are accurate, to tune them and run them so that you get insights that give you directionality, that enable you to deliver that increase in new customer starts, that increase in profitability, the compelling ROI that makes your CFO not just confident in your performance, but compelled to even give you more resources so that you can deliver more for the organization.

And we’ll close with a clip from Michael Wiegand, who is Director of Marketing Sciences at Wheelhouse and has developed our approach to media mix modeling, describing exactly what it takes to build and refine media mix modeling so that you can deliver the performance we’ve described here.

Media Mix Modeling in Practice: Confidence Intervals and Bayesian Rigor

Michael Wiegand: Just to kind of frame this, we have not made a recommendation based on data yet that has been less than a ninety percent confidence interval. So that’s how accurate the model has to be in our mind before we’re going to start making decisions on tens of millions of dollars in ad spend based on that, right?

We’re not going to blindly shove things into a model that we can’t hang our hat on. So I think that’s one key piece in all of this, is that Bayesian statistical analysis gives us a very high degree of confidence, and it helps us lean into the model gradually and understand whether or not our results are following various saturation curves.

Aaron Burnett: Let’s talk about one of the first applications or implementations of MMM for a client. Tell me about the client. Tell me about what we had to do to build their model, and then we can talk about results.

Michael Wiegand: Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing is the inputs. When we work on MMM with clients, we have to have two-plus years of weekly historical data in all of the channels that they want to be modeled.

You do have to have a substantial amount of historical data for this to work appropriately. And you have to have things like impressions, clicks, cost, all that stuff that you would expect. But then you also have to be able to segment down to particular campaign types within each channel. So when we give clients a recommendation on it’s not just, give this much more money to Google, give this much more money to Meta.

It’s ‘shift this much budget into PMax within Google,’ ‘shift this much more money into dynamic product ads with this particular channel.’ So it’s very granular down to campaign types, and so we needed all of that back data from our clients at a base level. The other thing that we needed was to look at non-digital channels, right?

And try to understand and wrap our brain around the external factors that are impacting this client’s business, so things like market demand, competitor activity and movements, changes in messaging, seasonality, geographic data as well, being able to break down our results historically by things like state, metro area.

And really, the last thing that went into it was direct and organic traffic, again, that baseline of what would I have gotten in the marketplace if I spent nothing on media at all, right? So, once we had all of that picture together, our client was fantastic in working with us and getting all of those sort of offline data sources injected into the model.

Once we had all of that together, we started doing our first few runs with this. And just to give you a perspective, our first model run on this was a ninety-four percent confidence interval on our model, and our margin of error was under ten percent. And again, that’s something that we just set as a rule for ourselves in any model that we run.

But particularly with this client at the beginning, we wanted to make sure our margins of error were well under ten percent before we would lean into any of the recommendations.

The Takeaway: You Already Have What You Need

Aaron Burnett: Okay, so we’ve described a lot in this video, a lot in the way of infrastructure that needs to be in place, a lot in the way of alignment of strategy with measurement, with reporting infrastructure, and organizational strategy and outcomes that you need to hit.

I’m sure this can seem overwhelming. Many of you might be thinking that half of what we described is going to require you to go out and buy new software or hire consultants or subscribe to a magic platform that promises to deliver everything that we have described for the low, low price of fifty thousand dollars a month or something like that.

I’m here to tell you that this is achievable. Nothing that we described here requires you to purchase more software, to hire another vendor, to hire a team of consultants. Most of what we’ve described is in fact composable and probably composable from infrastructure that you already have in place.

Arguably, the hardest work here is identifying the key data, the moments of true value creation that you need to drive toward, and ensuring that you do have instrumentation in place that enables you to get signal from that moment of value creation, and then working back from that.

It’s an organizational muscle that you need to develop. It’s a strategic muscle that you need to develop. The least of it is anything that you might need to spend in terms of infrastructure. This can be done with what you’ve got. You can do this. If you have questions, we are happy to guide you.

Feel free to reach out. We will describe what we’ve done with the clients mentioned here, what we’ve done with others we’ve not mentioned here. There are ways to approach this that are very much crawl, walk, run, and we can help you with the crawl stage, the walk stage, the run stage. We can help you with the thinking about crawling stage, and we can help you with the sprinting once you already have all of this in place and you’re ready to hyper-scale.

Reach out to us at Wheelhouse DMG. We are happy to help.

Thanks again for listening. I’m Aaron Burnett, and we’ll see you next time on The Digital Clinic.

Sponsored by Wheelhouse DMG