Digital health performance marketing isn't broken — it's misapplied. Generic SaaS playbooks ignore regulatory constraints, long sales cycles, and multi-stakeholder buying committees. We build paid engines designed for how digital health actually sells.

The Problem

Your paid campaigns generate clicks, not qualified pipeline

Most digital health paid programs are optimized for top-of-funnel vanity metrics — impressions, clicks, form fills. But form fills from curious clinicians or students aren't pipeline. Your sales team is wasting time qualifying leads that were never going to buy. The disconnect between marketing attribution and actual revenue makes it impossible to know what's working.

Compliance kills your ad creative options

HIPAA, FDA, and payer compliance requirements restrict what you can say in ads, what targeting you can use, and what data you can collect. Most performance marketing agencies don't understand these constraints and either create compliant-but-bland creative that gets ignored, or push boundaries that create real legal exposure. Neither approach builds a sustainable acquisition channel.

Long sales cycles break standard attribution models

When your average deal takes 6-12 months to close and involves multiple stakeholders, last-click attribution is meaningless. But most digital health companies haven't invested in multi-touch attribution because it's complex and expensive. So you're making budget decisions on bad data — cutting channels that actually influence deals and over-investing in channels that capture demand but don't create it.

Small budgets spread across too many platforms

With limited marketing budgets, digital health companies try to be everywhere — Google, LinkedIn, programmatic, conferences, content syndication — and end up below the threshold of effectiveness on every platform. You need enough spend concentration to generate statistical significance and optimize. Spreading $10K/month across five platforms means you're learning nothing fast.

How We Help

We begin with a full audit of your current paid programs — spend, creative, targeting, conversion paths, and attribution. In digital health, this audit includes a compliance review of all active ads and landing pages. We've seen companies running non-compliant campaigns for months without realizing the risk. The audit gives us a clear picture of what to keep, what to kill, and where the opportunity gaps are.

Next, we build a channel strategy matched to your commercial model. Enterprise digital health selling to health systems needs a different paid approach than D2C telehealth or B2B2C wellness platforms. For enterprise, we typically focus on LinkedIn and targeted content syndication with account-based overlays. For D2C, we build the Meta and Google acquisition funnels with proper cohort tracking. The strategy is specific to your ICP, your sales cycle, and your regulatory boundaries.

We handle execution end-to-end — campaign builds, creative production, landing page optimization, and ongoing management. Our team writes ad copy that's both compliant and compelling, which is harder than it sounds. We A/B test within regulatory guardrails and optimize for downstream metrics (SQLs, pipeline, revenue) not just CPL.

Attribution is where we add the most value for digital health companies. We build multi-touch attribution models that connect paid touchpoints to pipeline and closed revenue across long sales cycles. This means you can actually see which campaigns influenced a deal that closed six months after first touch. We use this data to reallocate budget monthly, not quarterly.

The Winston Francois difference is that we understand digital health buying cycles. We know that a health system CISO and a clinical champion evaluate your product on completely different criteria, and we build paid programs that speak to each stakeholder at the right time in the buying process.

What we deliver

Paid channel audit with compliance review — identifying waste, risk, and opportunity
Channel strategy and budget allocation plan — matched to your ICP and sales cycle
Campaign build and creative production — compliant, compelling, conversion-focused
Multi-touch attribution infrastructure — connecting paid activity to pipeline and revenue
Monthly performance reviews with reallocation recommendations

In digital health, the biggest performance marketing mistake isn't targeting or creative — it's attribution. When your sales cycle is 9 months, optimizing for cost-per-lead instead of cost-per-qualified-opportunity means you're systematically over-investing in channels that capture demand and under-investing in channels that create it.

Our Methodology

Our 90-day sprint for digital health performance marketing follows a build-measure-scale sequence. The first 30 days are audit and infrastructure — we review every active campaign, assess compliance, install proper tracking and attribution, and identify the 1-2 channels with the highest ROI potential for your specific model.

Days 30-60 are focused builds. We launch campaigns on the priority channels with proper A/B testing frameworks and conversion tracking. Everything is optimized for downstream metrics from day one — we don't celebrate cheap clicks that don't convert to pipeline. We also build the reporting dashboards your team needs to make weekly optimization decisions.

Days 60-90 are optimization and scaling. With 30+ days of campaign data, we can start making statistically significant decisions about creative, targeting, and budget allocation. We identify what's working, kill what isn't, and begin scaling the winners. This approach is different from agencies that lock you into 6-month media buys before they have any data.

How We Work

The first 30 days are intensive. We need access to all ad platforms, analytics, CRM, and any existing attribution tools. We'll audit everything, install proper tracking, and deliver a channel strategy with specific budget recommendations by day 30.

From day 30-60, our performance marketing team builds and launches campaigns. Expect a fractional paid media lead managing day-to-day optimization, with creative and copy support. We work inside your existing tools and attend your marketing team syncs. Campaign reviews happen weekly with data-driven optimization decisions.

Days 60-90 are about proving unit economics. We'll have enough data to show true cost-per-qualified-opportunity by channel and segment. Monthly executive reviews present performance against targets with clear recommendations for scaling or reallocation. Most engagements run 3-6 months initially, with the first sprint focused on building the infrastructure and proving the model, and subsequent months on scaling what works.

We need a single marketing point of contact, access to your sales pipeline data for attribution, and timely creative and compliance approvals. The faster your team can review and approve, the faster we can iterate.

Cost-per-qualified-opportunity reduction
Channel concentration and spend efficiency
Attribution infrastructure and visibility
Compliant creative frameworks that convert

If your digital health company needs performance marketing leadership, we should talk.

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Frequently asked questions

How much does a performance marketing engagement cost for digital health companies?

Management fees typically range from $10K-$30K per month, separate from media spend. This covers strategy, campaign management, creative production, and attribution infrastructure. Compare that to hiring an in-house performance marketing manager ($120K-$180K fully loaded) who still needs agency support for creative and analytics. The exact fee depends on how many channels and campaigns we're managing.

How long before we see results from performance marketing?

You'll see campaign performance data within the first 2-3 weeks of launch. Lead flow improvements typically appear within 30-45 days. Pipeline impact — qualified opportunities influenced by paid programs — takes longer, usually 60-90 days for initial signals and 4-6 months for statistically significant results. We build early indicators into the reporting so you can see progress before closed deals materialize.

How does the performance marketing team work with our existing staff?

We embed as an extension of your marketing team. Our fractional paid media lead attends your team standups, works in your project management tools, and coordinates directly with your content, sales enablement, and compliance teams. We handle campaign strategy, build, and day-to-day optimization — your team provides brand guidelines, compliance review, and sales feedback on lead quality.

What makes Winston Francois different from a traditional performance marketing agency?

We understand digital health compliance constraints, multi-stakeholder buying cycles, and long attribution windows. Most performance agencies optimize for CPL and call it a day. We optimize for cost-per-qualified-opportunity and revenue influenced because those are the metrics that matter for digital health companies with 6-12 month sales cycles. We also build the attribution infrastructure most agencies skip.

How do you handle HIPAA and FDA compliance in paid campaigns?

Every campaign goes through a compliance review before launch. We've built creative frameworks specifically for digital health that stay within regulatory boundaries while still being compelling. This includes compliant targeting approaches, approved claims language, and proper data handling for any lead capture. We work with your legal team to establish guardrails, then operate within them.

What minimum ad budget do you recommend for digital health companies?

We typically recommend a minimum of $15K-$20K per month in media spend, concentrated on 1-2 channels rather than spread thin across many. For enterprise digital health, LinkedIn alone might need $10K-$15K monthly to reach the right decision-makers at scale. For D2C digital health, Meta and Google budgets vary by CAC targets. We'd rather you spend enough on one channel to learn fast than too little on five channels to learn anything.