The health industry is one of the most challenging for any agency, whether it is a specialized or general one. But what makes it so difficult?
How have the big brands debunked the secrets and mastered the art of gaining the belief of their customers? We have searched relentlessly on the internet. The majority of the content is full of materials that look identical. In many contexts, the core is the same: strategies for healthcare marketing, things you need to know about healthcare marketing, and so on.
Unfortunately, nothing we have found satisfied our forage. Hence, we have tried to gain a deep understanding of healthcare marketing from a different perspective. We wanted to use real-time data by bringing them under the microscope where even the tiniest details are clear and speaking loudly. Let’s first talk about the basics a little bit.
In the sections that follow, we will be importing data that will optimize your outlook about healthcare marketing in 2025. Stay tuned.
What is HealthCare Marketing?
Healthcare marketing is not a special branch of marketing. Rather, healthcare marketing refers to the methods that have been widely used to let people know about the existence of a medical facility or service. These are the sets of objectives that help hospitals, clinics, and medical centers to get people looking for different degrees of medical assistance right to their door.
The Goals of Healthcare Marketing
Having said that the set of objectives helps the correct audience know about a medical facility or service, it becomes clear that the goal of healthcare marketing is clear and concise. There are three core goals behind all the marketing initiatives in the healthcare industry:
- Let the correct audience know about your existence
- Show how you can solve their problems
- Explain why you are the one they should choose
Though it sounds skeptical, a real-life example would make things clearer about how these goals determine the marketing success of a healthcare brand. Let us assume the characters of our story:
- Aid Medical Center – A clinic near Orange County
- Mr. Patrick – The CMO of Aid Medical Center
- Mr. Andrew – A diabetic patient looking for a clinic that will help him understand and control the effects of the disease
If Mr. Andrew doesn’t know Aid Medical Center has specialized programs for diabetic patients, there’s nothing else that matters to him in choosing AID—because he is unaware of the existence of this clinic.
Mr. Patrick just joined AID in the middle of last month as the Contractual Chief Marketing Officer. He took 10–15 days to study the specialties of the clinic and did his own research on customer segmentation.
He also knows about the fierce competition in this industry. He decides to launch a campaign with the help of a pharmaceutical company. The campaign will be named:
“Test Your Sugar, Maybe It Is Too Sweet for Your Kidneys”
This will help the local residents know more about the disease diabetes and how to manage it.
But how will he connect to his audience? Here comes the cellphone, the Facebook group, and the Facebook page of AID Medical. He invited all his local colleagues to like that page and share the event as much as possible. Within a week, 350 people gathered—they got the chance to know about the disease they were fighting with. In addition, they also got familiar with a nearby hospital that could respond to their problem at the earliest possible time.
Mr. Patrick also announced a special offer for local residents: anyone who subscribes to a year-long medical assistance support group will be eligible for free ambulance support anytime during that year.
As all the purposes were served, Aid Medical Center gained its momentum quickly and doubled its regular customers. The number of employees tripled, and the CEO of AID is now planning to open a second facility that will help cancer patients fight their nasty opponent.
When the core goals are served well, just like in this story, your medical facility and services become well known to their audience. They know why they should choose your service and what makes it unique. All your marketing efforts become aligned and more effective.
From Hypothesis To Real-Life Examples: The Marketing Strategies of Top Health Care Brands
Digital marketing is one of the single most effective marketing channels in 2025. Mayo Clinic–Rochester, Cleveland Clinic, and The Johns Hopkins Hospital are the 3 top healthcare brands in the USA. We have taken a closer look at their digital marketing strategies.
In this process, we have divided all their marketing efforts into two segments: one is organic and the other one is paid. Let’s start with Mayo Clinic–Rochester.
Organic Marketing Strategy of Mayo Clinic–Rochester
Organic Healthcare Marketing Strategy refers to promoting healthcare services, products, or practices through unpaid, natural channels instead of relying on paid advertising. It focuses on building trust, visibility, and long-term engagement by delivering real value to potential patients or customers. The approach leans heavily on SEO, content creation, and social proof to attract and retain an audience.
The organic marketing strategy of Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota includes:
Content Marketing
Mayo Clinic has their website. They have strategically found keywords that are relevant to their business, have huge search volume, and comparatively lower difficulty. The age of the domain is 28 Years 2 Months 8 Days, and it was registered on August 8th, 1997. In this long time frame of more than two decades, the brand’s website has managed to rank for 23.6M keywords. For many of them, they are ranking in the top positions, which eventually helps them get 123 million visitors to their website each month.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
When we say SEO, as a complete beginner it may sound too critical or complex, but the reality is not the same. SEO is a bunch of techniques that help search engines understand the usefulness of your medical services. There are three ways that helped Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota to drive more traffic to their website:
- Having tons of backlinks – Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota’s website has 30 million backlinks pointing to it from different sources. Useful blog posts, research papers, newspapers, articles, medical journals, and freelance journalists have linked to this website with content relevant to the medical sector. Eventually, this helped them rank higher.
- Technical SEO – The website of Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota has 8.72 million webpages indexed by Google. Google loves to index pages that are interconnected to relevant topics. The website’s structure and proper utilization of local SEO techniques have helped Google understand the importance of each page—more than many established newspapers.
- Local SEO – If you visit the website of Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, you will find the title “Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota,” which is a part of their local SEO. (Local SEO: using the demographic keyword for getting a better search position.) In addition, the meta description of the homepage also utilizes this technique. The meta description looks like this on 17th April 2025:
“Learn more about Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.”
Social Media (Unpaid)
Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota has five different social media channels to reach out to their target audience. They are using X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Their Facebook page has 1.2M likes and 1.3M followers. The number of shares and engagement in each post on the Mayo Clinic Facebook page varies between 200–1000, which is a very effective way to reach customers who rely on social media for their decision-making.
Email Marketing Tactics of Mayo Clinic
Mayo has also leveraged email marketing as their cold marketing strategy. The website of Mayo offers a free newsletter sign-up for visitors. So, anyone showing interest in their business by subscribing to the newsletter can be communicated with over time.
The number of emails is subject to their private information, but as a professional marketer, I can guess it is somewhere between 100k to 300k each month. This number is estimated based on a rule of thumb that out of every 100 visitors, merely 1 will subscribe to your newsletters.
To Be Continued
While we’ve uncovered the organic strategies that top healthcare brands like Mayo Clinic have mastered over decades, there’s another side to the story—the paid marketing game. From highly targeted Google Ads to patient-focused social media campaigns, paid strategies have been equally vital in shaping these institutions into household names. In the next blog, we’ll take a deep dive into how the top 3 hospitals in the USA leverage their advertising budgets to dominate the digital space, attract international patients, and position themselves as leaders in medical innovation. Stay tuned as we dissect the tactics, platforms, and campaigns behind their paid healthcare marketing success.
