List of the Best Healthcare Marketing Agencies
Stodzy Internet Marketing
Stodzy is one of the full service digital marketing agencies and has been helping healthcare facilities generate steady patient volume since 2012.
While we are full service, we’re particularly focused on generating organic SEO results as this is one of the most sustainable forms of marketing and will continue to compound over the years.
For example, we helped Sober Nation grow from around 25,000 monthly visitors to roughly 75,000 monthly visitors.
We’ve also helped startups like Medically Assisted grow from essentially zero traffic to roughly 10,000 monthly visitors.
Rather than looking for quick and easy fixes, we focus on the long game and always use white hat link building, thoughtful keyword research, and expertly created content to achieve these results.
In addition, we don’t rely on cookie cutter formulas for our SEO strategy. Instead, we do an audit of your website and identify low hanging fruit to tackle first. From there, we create a strategy that focuses on driving traffic to the services that are most valuable to your business.
In addition, we aren’t one of the massive healthcare marketing agencies with hundreds of clients. So rather than paying high salaries to managers and relying on interns and junior hires to execute the strategy, each of our team members is a dedicated marketing specialist with many years of experience in healthcare marketing.
You can also speak with them directly as we work side by side with your in-house marketing team.
Finally, our founder, Tim Stoddart, is also the owner of one of the most respected marketing blogs in the industry, Copyblogger. Therefore, it’s no surprise that the Stodzy organic results are consistently stellar.
If you’d like to discuss your healthcare marketing strategy, reach out to us today. marketers that specialize in healthcare.
Cardinal Digital
Cardinal Digital is a full service healthcare marketing agency based out of Atlanta, GA. They serve a wide variety of healthcare facilities, from addiction treatment to hospitals. In addition, they offer several case studies proving their work.
They have received several awards for their work and were on the INC 5000 list and Best Places to Work in Atlanta for the past three years.
Cardinal’s team members are also quite active in the SEO community as their staff has written for the Search Engine Journal and other publications.
However, they are one of the larger healthcare marketing agencies with nearly 60 employees, so you won’t have the same level of personalization and customization as a more exclusive agency. In addition, your contract value will be inflated to cover the cost of hires necessary to run a 60 person company (HR, accounting, managers, etc.).
Healthcare isn’t the only focus of their business. They also offer digital marketing for law firms, restaurants, higher education, and other industries. Therefore, its unclear if you’ll be working with marketers that specialize in healthcare.
Intrepy
Next on the list is Intrepy. They are also a full service marketing agency and claim to focus on providing patient centric marketing.
Specifically, the founders claim that they started the business as they felt that few marketing agencies understood providers and the patient journey. Given that they both have a background in previous healthcare roles, this makes sense.
The majority of their customers are small businesses. They provide several case studies on reputation management, Facebook ads, website launches, and SEO. They also have a podcast on medical marketing and cover topics like branding vs. marketing, physician productivity, and more.
Intrepy has also won several awards including Best in Search and Top Digital Marketing Agency from Clutch.
They have a team of roughly seven and are steadily growing.
Thrive Internet Marketing
Based out of Texas, Thrive is a popular internet marketing agency that has serviced a number of different healthcare clients.
They were featured in Forbes magazine, Moz, SEMRush, and a number of other industry publications in addition to multiple awards from prestigious brands.
While they are a full service agency, they tend to specialize in primarily SEO and organic traffic.
They have a team of roughly 150 employees in various locations and it therefore has a rather corporate feel. They also do not specialize in healthcare as they serve a number of different industries.
Neil Patel
Neil Patel is essentially a household name for marketers as he has spent years building his brand through SEO and content marketing.
Nonetheless, NP Digital is his full service marketing agency that helps healthcare businesses grow.
While the brand doesn’t specialize in healthcare, they do have a number of case studies. For example, this case study shows how they increased new organic visitors by 118% by creating easy to read content vetted by doctors.
Nonetheless, they are also a very large agency of over 80 employees. Working with them requires a significant upfront investment.
Grow and Convert
Grow and Convert is a very unique marketing agency on this list. Rather than being full service like most of the other agencies on this list, they focus exclusively on content marketing.
However, they also run ads, build links, and do keyword research for each piece of content. So it still feels like a full service experience.
Their differentiator is that they hold themselves accountable to conversions from content. Therefore, their level of attention to customer pain-points is unmatched. Every single piece of content written by them is derived from an interview they conduct with either a team member or an expert.
They also have plenty of case studies on their blog. While they don’t specialize in healthcare, they do have a case study of growing a concussion center’s pageviews from 500 to 70,000 page views in 14 months.
The company is run by the two founders and a team of freelance writers that they train.
WebFX
WebFX is another very popular and widely known marketing agency that offers marketing services for healthcare. From dermatology to fertility clinics, offer a plan for everyone.
However, they are also one of the largest healthcare marketing agencies on this list with over 400 employees. Therefore, while they do have systems in place to get your initial marketing engine off the ground, customization and specialized help will be challenging.
In addition, you can assume that only a small percentage of your budget will actually be spent on high quality talent executing a strategy.
Nonetheless, their leading brand is no doubt an attractive option for businesses that just want a simple plan in place.
Activate Health
This healthcare marketing agency specializes primarily in advertising. Though, they also offer content marketing, SEO, and other organic strategies.
They tend to specialize in pharmaceuticals and health insurers. Activate Health works with brands like Dignity Health, Avella, and many others. So while they may not be a fit for smaller companies and clinic-based healthcare businesses, they do have specialized expertise and can help larger, corporate organizations grow.
Despite the large companies they work with, they are a boutique agency of only about six people and can provide a customized strategy to kickstart growth.
Marcel Digital
Marcel Digital may be an excellent option if you don’t have the budget for a fancy agency with 50 employees, but still want high quality results. They focus primarily on SEO. Their retainers range from $2,000 to $5,000 per month.
They have plenty of satisfied customers, and the founder, Ben Swartz, will even come out to your business to discuss an SEO strategy (if you’re in the Chicago area).
In addition, the small team size (most of it run by the founder himself), makes it possible to create a custom strategy designed for your specific goals.
Health Media Experts
Health media experts are just that. They specialize exclusively in medical marketing and offer everything from PPC and SEO to graphic and website design. They also offer an influencer marketing program that they heavily promote. Health Media Experts are one of few healthcare focused digital marketing agencies to wholeheartedly dive into influencer marketing.
Based out of Sarasota, FL, the company was founded by an Inc. 500 physician and entrepreneur that grew her previous company to nearly $20 million in ARR. Therefore, they have both the knowledge of marketing as well as the background in healthcare to help you meet your goals.
They typically work with startup companies and smaller healthcare businesses that need an initial boost and can provide a long term strategy for steady growth.
McDonald Content Solutions
McDonald is another agency that focuses primarily on content marketing. They know that by creating content that answers key questions your patients are searching for, they can provide a consistent stream of patient volume that will ultimately compound over time.
With Google’s EAT guidelines, medical writing must be accurate and ideally approved by a doctor to improve its chances of ranking.
Unfortunately, this is where most marketing agencies fall short for medical companies as their writers often aren’t experts in the area. Therefore, this is McDonald’s main claim to fame.
Sagefrog
Sagefrog serves a variety of different industries. Healthcare is one of them. They have a variety of case studies proving their healthcare marketing prowess, such as increasing leads by 700% for one client.
It appears that most of their clients are startups and smaller healthcare businesses. However, they can provide a fully integrated marketing strategy for you.
With four offices and nearly 40 employees, they have a host of impressive clients like Aramark, GSI Health, and more.
Bryant Brown
Bryant Brown’s stance is ensuring you have a data-driven strategy to create a strong brand presence across your industry.
They have helped organizations like the National Kidney Foundation and Avail Medical grow their online presence and become industry leaders. However, unlike most of the other healthcare marketing agencies on this, they tend to specialize more in branding and PR than just the standard PPC and SEO.
Their target audience tends to be pharmaceuticals, medical devices, hospitals and health systems, and other large healthcare businesses.
Response Mine Digital
Response Mine is not exclusively focused on healthcare digital marketing. However, they have some impressive healthcare clients including the Mayo Clinic.
They are a full service digital agency with everything from PPC and SEO to email marketing and local search, and they have plenty of case studies to prove it.
For example, they helped MedExpress Urgent Care increase their impressions by 47% and clicks by 33%. Similarly, the Back Pain Centers of America saw an additional 1,000 readers monthly with Response Mine.
Growth Med
Based in Playa del Ray, California, Growth Med offers a number of healthcare services, including SEO, PPC, reputation management, lead management, and even medical website hosting.
They also have a plenty of case studies, such as increasing one plastic surgeon’s leads by 300% with a multi-site integration.
In addition to their traditional agency, they also have their own technology and telehealth platform, Patient.Chat. The founder, Steven Fruchter, was previously the founder of companies like Get.com and most recently a CTO. His unique background brings an interesting aspect to SEO.
Saga Pixel
Saga Pixel is an SEO, PPC, and web design agency that specializes solely in healthcare. Based in Philadelphia, they are a boutique agency of 14 employees and specialize in marketing for plastic surgeons.
They are ideal for smaller companies with limited budgets that want to see long term results through SEO.
Ogilvy Health
Ogilvy is one of the most successful advertising agencies in the world. It’s no surprise that they have a sector of the business designated to health.
While they aren’t a go-to agency for smaller startups, they are an excellent choice for brands that want to make a statement and establish themselves as market leaders.
While they lack the customized element of boutique agencies, they do attract top talent, and their reviews are quite exceptional.
How to Select a Healthcare Marketing Agency
Now that you have a list of some high quality healthcare marketing agencies, how do you choose which one is best for your needs? Here are a few tips you can use to narrow down the selection and choose the business that best fits your needs.
Background in The Medical Field
First, the agency you select should have a background in the medical field. This is important as they must understand laws regarding medical marketing.
For example, if your marketing partner wants to write about a patient story, they must understand HIPAA compliance to avoid saddling your company with serious fines.
A good sign that they have a deep understanding of the medical field is either:
- They specialize in only healthcare or
- The founder has a background in the medical field (as is the case with several of the agencies on this list).
In addition, messaging for a patient is much different from writing to a typical consumer. The messaging should be more sensitive. Your marketing partner should make an effort to understand exactly what your patient goes through during customer research.
For example, they should conduct thorough customer research that consists of listening to initial patient calls, interviewing healthcare professionals, and even talking directly to your patients.
On the initial call, ask for examples of other medical practices they have worked with and ask them how they approach medical clients.
Realistic Expectations
While the marketing agency should be able to show you impressive results, they shouldn’t promise number one rankings overnight or an instant flood of new patients from a Facebook ad.
Instead, they should set expectations upfront that building a strong brand doesn’t happen overnight and neither will marketing results.
That said, they might identify some low hanging fruit to tackle, and that may provide excellent results in a short period of time. However, the growth will often slow after the first month.
Therefore, ask what their typical results are within the first month, first six months, and first year.
Focus on Results (Rather Than Vanity Metrics)
Another common pitfall with marketing agencies is that they focus on vanity metrics rather than results. Therefore, they might show off stats like traffic or engagement, but if they can’t equate it to new patients or an increase in treatments/consultations, they approach marketing as a siloed aspect of the business rather than an engine for business growth.
For example, if they say “we helped grow this business’s traffic by x%” but they didn’t track conversions, there is no way of knowing if that traffic was qualified traffic. Unfortunately, driving unqualified traffic isn’t going to help the business grown and is really a waste of money.
While it’s rare that you’ll find an agency that offers performance pricing models, they should at least be tracking conversion metrics and using that as a guiding light for their overall marketing strategy.
Therefore, ask them if they watch conversions and what they use as their main KPIs.
Skilled and Experienced Team
The lifeblood of any marketing agency is really the talent they hire. Most agencies offer the same services (SEO, PPC, email marketing). Many even use the same tactics (such as guest posting for link building, keyword research, etc.).
However, if everyone is using the exact same tactics, it’s quite likely that they won’t work for long. Therefore, a successful strategy requires a creative and innovative expert that can either execute each tactic with nuance to make it more effective than everyone else already doing it. Or, they can create an entirely new tactic.
Therefore, it’s typically best to avoid working with large, corporate agencies of 50 plus employees as they are either:
- Too cookie cutter in their approach (they have to be as an agency of that size depends on processes to function) or
- They hire mostly junior staff to actually execute the strategies as they are paying higher salaries to management.
While having processes is a good thing as it ensures you will continue to receive the same quality work month after month, there should be some leeway for creativity within the team.
For example, suppose you need more backlinks. In that case, a quality team may experiment with something like original research rather than just pitching guest posts exactly how any link building blog post would recommend.
Proof of Work
To analyze the skill of a team, ask them to show you past work. If there isn’t any nuance in the execution of each strategy (not necessarily the approach), it might be a red flag that they are too cookie cutter.
However, avoid the pitfall of only selecting a team that has decades of experience. Sometimes, people that have been doing marketing for years lack innovation. They may maintain dated tactics that worked years ago and now show a minimal ROI. Instead, judge their experience and skill on the case studies they have executed in the recent past.
Excellent Communication
Finally, they should be open to discussing the vision with your team early on. While audits are an excellent starting point, they don’t necessarily uncover the most important issues hindering a business’s overall goals.
For example, while an SEO audit may show that an old blog post is 404ing, fixing that blog post may not be as important as something like updating the content on a service page (something that might not be prevalent until talking to the team).
Therefore, they should be willing to discuss issues with your team and really act as a partner rather than a service provider. You may also want to check that they won’t charge for additional phone calls and conversations as some agencies will bill for this.
That said, while the first month often requires additional communication, it shouldn’t be taken advantage of.
Take Action Now
If you aren’t seeing the marketing results that you need, hiring an agency is an excellent way to gain instant access to a team of skilled marketing professionals.
That said, if you need a skilled, reliable team that can get the results you want in a timely manner, the team at Stodzy would be happy to help. We can provide a free consultation that will uncover low hanging fruit and map out a long term strategy that will help you grow to your full potential.
Request your free proposal today.