The healthcare industry is undergoing rapid digitalization. Need proof? The digital health industry’s revenue is expected to grow from $420.2 billion in 2026 to $1.83 trillion by 2033, according to Grand View Research.
High demand for telehealth, growing use of AI in healthcare, expanding data analytics capabilities, and rising expectations for tech-enabled patient experiences are creating new growth opportunities for healthtech vendors. However, capturing that growth requires a well-designed healthcare software digital marketing strategy.
A healthcare software marketing strategy helps healthcare software vendors:
Here are the 10 steps to build a strong digital marketing for healthcare strategy, from setting the right foundation to guiding execution across your team.
Set data-driven marketing goals with a focus on website traffic, conversions, and customer retention. But avoid generic SaaS key performance indicators (KPIs), which often miss what actually drives healthcare software sales: long, multi-stakeholder buying cycles that look different depending on who you’re selling to. Identify KPIs that reflect that reality, such as:
Put the right analytics tools in place and establish data benchmarks. Then, assign specific metrics to team members to promote accountability. Aside from being as specific about your targets as possible, you should tie each KPI to your short- and long-term objectives so team members can understand the impact of their efforts.
Generic messaging can wreck an otherwise solid healthcare software marketing strategy. You’re not speaking to one stakeholder, but usually several executives and senior staff across clinical (concerned with care quality and workflow fit), IT/security (centered on implementation concerns including interoperability and integration as well as compliance), and finance (focused on reimbursement and overall ROI). When defining personas, each player’s unique needs and expectations must be spoken to. On top of that, your target audience might have different pain points and priorities year to year. It's important to continually revisit your marketing personas and update your messaging, segmentation, and targeting strategies.
Survey your audience to get a general overview of healthcare software and SaaS market demands, and interview customers to gain in-depth qualitative insights. Working with a healthcare software digital marketing agency can help you conduct focus groups and analyze the competitive landscape to further inform your strategy.
Much of the rapid change in the healthcare industry is driven by policy, not just technology. The impact of two recent rulings is worth watching closely:
These rules are ushering in a wave of integration and compliance work across the industry, and vendors positioned as already compliant or audit-ready have a real, timely differentiator to lead with in their marketing.
Regulatory deadlines create urgency independent of your product roadmap. Buyers are racing a compliance clock, not just comparing features. Marketing that leads with this urgency (readiness checklists, compliance webinars, fast-migration case studies) tends to outperform the usual feature-benefit messaging when a compliance deadline’s approaching.
Beyond policy, keep current with how AI is reshaping content, healthcare software advertising, and personalization. (For a tactical approach to meet new search expectations, including structuring content for AI answer engines, see our blog “Healthcare Software Marketing: SEO, AEO & Demand Generation Strategies.”)
To stand out in the healthcare software digital marketing environment, you need to know what you're up against so you can strategically position your content and offers to distinguish your brand in the marketplace.
Besides overall marketing strategy, take a deep dive into your competitors' tactics in content marketing, social media marketing, SEO marketing, and video marketing. You can also conduct a SWOT analysis to identify opportunities in each area. Remember, however, that your competitors likely differ by care setting or by EHR ecosystem (e.g., integrated with Epic, Cerner/Oracle Health or another platform vs. EHR-agnostic), which affects how you position your organization.
Most B2B healthcare buyers do extensive research before contacting a vendor. In healthcare software specifically, buyers typically engage with eight or more touchpoints — such as your owned content, LinkedIn profile, and industry events — before ever reaching out. An effective inbound marketing strategy can help you attract the right prospects early on in the customer lifecycle and cultivate relationships to drive conversions.
An effective inbound strategy has many components, and for skeptical healthcare buyers, it should be built on trust signals like clinical validation studies, KLAS Research rankings, and peer-reviewed outcomes data woven into compliance-focused whitepapers and case studies. The challenge isn’t just producing those assets, but sequencing them so each meets a buyer at the right stage of a long, multi-stakeholder journey. Partnering with an inbound marketing agency can help ensure that all the pieces are working together effectively to maximize your ROI.
Content is a key component of any inbound strategy, and it’s especially effective for supporting B2B technology sales. But in healthcare software marketing, content also carries the trust-building weight that a more transactional sales conversation would elsewhere. In other words, it usually does the work that a first sales meeting does in other industries.
Refer to your ideal client personas to see how best to address your audience's pain points with the right content at the right time. A clinical champion and an IT security reviewer, for example, are often looking for entirely different proof points at the same stage of the buyer journey. Find out where your customers get their information (peer networks and trade publications carry more weight in healthcare than in general B2B), and which formats they prefer.
Healthcare software digital marketing also needs to turn strategies, insights, and contextual information into actionable tactics. Value proposition mapping can illustrate the various components within a strategy, and a flow chart can map out processes.
Your editorial calendar should be built around dates important to healthcare buyers rather than publishing content just to publish. That means anchoring content to compliance deadlines (like the ones covered in step 3), major industry events such as HIMSS, and hospital budget cycles, since most health systems finalize technology budgets in Q3/Q4 for the following year. Use a product roadmap to inform how you orchestrate marketing activities around new launches, certifications, or compliance milestones. These carry more weight with healthcare buyers than a generic feature announcement would.
Track the KPIs you established in step 1, and set a regular schedule to review them so you can confirm you're progressing in the right direction. In healthcare software, this often means watching metrics at each stage of a long, multi-stakeholder deal rather than a single top-line conversion number, since a stall can mean very different things depending on where it happens. (A slow trial-to-paid rate might mean the deal is sitting in security review, not that the product missed.)
Some outcomes are harder to measure with hard numbers. Brand trust and clinical credibility, for example, rarely show up cleanly in a dashboard. In that case, use qualitative benchmarks (e.g., buyer surveys on how your brand is perceived among clinical and IT audiences) or indirect signals, like increased branded search volume or mentions in industry press like Healthcare IT News or Fierce Healthcare.
For healthcare software digital marketing, LinkedIn is typically the highest-priority social media channel. It’s where clinical, IT, and finance decision-makers spend the most professional attention, more than Twitter/X or Facebook. Share valuable content, participate in industry discussions, and mobilize your team to like, comment on, and share company posts to extend their reach organically.
Keep in mind that HIPAA limits what you can share even in marketing content. Patient stories and testimonials often can’t be used as freely as they would be in other industries, so lean on de-identified case studies, outcomes data, and customer champions speaking in their own professional capacity instead. And remember that social platforms are built to keep users on-site, so craft a mix of posts designed for the platform itself and posts meant to drive traffic back to your own content.
When people think of digital marketing for healthcare, they don’t often consider news outlets as potential messaging channels. But with 86% of U.S. adults getting most of their news online, you could be missing out on a huge opportunity for brand visibility if you don’t incorporate a robust earned media strategy.
Where should you start? Look to your internal experts for advice. Chances are, they have strong opinions on current events in health tech. Outlets like MedCity News, STAT, and HIStalk regularly feature vendor perspectives and op-eds on industry shifts, and they’re often more receptive to a well-argued hot take from a subject matter expert than to a straightforward company announcement
The steps above cover a lot of ground, but the throughline is that healthcare software buying is slower, more scrutinized, and more stakeholder-heavy than most B2B sales, and your marketing must be built for that reality rather than borrowed from a generic SaaS playbook.
Download our comprehensive guide, “How to Build a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy for Healthcare Software,” for a deeper walkthrough of each step.
Not every team has the in-house bandwidth to run all 10 steps well. When choosing a healthcare software digital marketing partner, look for one with real healthcare industry knowledge that will guide you through the process end to end.
Ready to explore how partnering with SpotOn can help you build and execute a healthcare software marketing strategy that fits how your buyers actually decide? Schedule a time to chat with SpotOn leadership and see how we can help.
Healthcare software marketing has to account for longer, more scrutinized buying cycles, larger buying groups spanning clinical, IT, and finance stakeholders, and compliance requirements like HIPAA that limit what content (such as patient testimonials) can be used in marketing.
Healthcare software buyers typically engage with eight or more touchpoints, including content, LinkedIn, and industry events, before reaching out to a vendor directly, and complete a large share of their research beforehand.
Useful healthcare-specific KPIs include cost per demo, sales cycle length broken out by care setting (hospital system vs. private practice vs. ambulatory surgery center), and trial-to-paid conversion rate benchmarked separately for deals requiring IT or security sign-off.
LinkedIn is typically the highest-priority channel for healthcare software digital marketing, since clinical, IT, and finance decision-makers spend more professional time there than on platforms like Twitter/X or Facebook.
