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: tighter platform health-ad policies, higher CPMs, and buyers who scrutinize compliance before they scrutinize price.
The Problem
Your paid campaigns generate clicks, not qualified pipeline
Most digital health paid programs still optimize for impressions, clicks, and form fills. Form fills from curious clinicians or students aren't pipeline, and your sales team wastes hours qualifying leads that were never going to buy. The gap between marketing attribution and actual revenue makes it impossible to know which dollar is working and which one to cut.
Compliance restricts your ad options before you even write copy
HIPAA, FDA, and payer rules limit what you can say, who you can target, and what data you can collect – and both Google and Meta have tightened healthcare advertiser certification and Special Ad Category rules in recent years. Most performance agencies either write compliant-but-bland creative that gets ignored, or push boundaries that create real legal exposure. Neither builds a channel you can scale.
Long sales cycles break standard attribution models
When your average deal takes 6-12 months and touches a clinical champion, a procurement lead, and a compliance reviewer, last-click attribution tells you almost nothing. Most digital health companies still haven't invested in multi-touch attribution because it's complex to set up. So budget decisions get made on bad data – cutting channels that influence deals and over-funding channels that just capture demand someone else created.
Small budgets spread across too many platforms
With constrained marketing budgets, digital health teams try to cover Google, LinkedIn, programmatic, conferences, and content syndication at once, and land below the spend threshold needed to learn anything on any of them. Health-vertical CPMs on LinkedIn and paid search have both climbed, which makes thin spend even less forgiving. Concentrate on one or two channels long enough to reach statistical significance, or you're paying to generate noise.
How We Help
We start with a full audit of your current paid programs – spend, creative, targeting, conversion paths, and attribution – plus a compliance review of every active ad and landing page. We regularly find companies that have been running non-compliant campaigns for months without realizing the exposure. The audit tells us what to keep, what to kill, and where the real opportunity sits.
Next we build a growth strategy matched to your commercial model. Enterprise digital health selling into health systems needs a different paid approach than D2C telehealth or B2B2C wellness. For enterprise, we typically lean on LinkedIn and targeted content syndication with account-based overlays. For D2C, we build Meta and Google acquisition funnels with proper cohort tracking. The plan is specific to your ICP, your sales cycle, and your regulatory boundaries – not a template pulled from a SaaS playbook.
We handle execution end to end – campaign builds, creative production, landing page optimization, and ongoing management. Our team writes copy that is both compliant and compelling, which is harder now than it was a couple of years ago given how much platform health-ad policy has tightened. We test within regulatory guardrails and optimize for downstream metrics – SQLs, pipeline, revenue – not cost per lead.
Attribution is where we add the most value – it's the core of the measurement infrastructure we build into every engagement, connecting paid touchpoints to pipeline and closed revenue across long sales cycles. That means you can see which campaign influenced a deal that closed six months after first touch. We use that data to reallocate budget monthly, not quarterly, which matters more now that platform-level tracking hands you less by default.
The Winston Francois difference is that we understand digital health buying cycles. 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 point in the process instead of running one generic funnel at everyone.
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 runs 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 the ones that create it.
Our Methodology
Our 90-day sprint 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 one or two channels with the highest ROI potential for your specific model.
Days 30-60 are focused builds. We launch on the priority channels with real A/B testing frameworks and conversion tracking, optimized for downstream metrics from day one – we don't celebrate cheap clicks that never convert to pipeline. We also build the reporting dashboards your team needs for weekly optimization calls.
Days 60-90 are optimization and scaling. With 30-plus days of campaign data, we can make statistically significant decisions about creative, targeting, and budget. We identify what's working, kill what isn't, and scale the winners – a different approach from agencies that lock you into six-month media buys before they have any data.
How We Work
The first 30 days are intensive. We need access to every ad platform, analytics tool, CRM, and any existing attribution setup. We audit everything, install proper tracking, and deliver a channel strategy with specific budget recommendations by day 30.
From day 30 to 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, working inside your existing tools and attending your marketing team syncs. Campaign reviews happen weekly with data-driven decisions, not vibes.
Days 60-90 are about proving unit economics. By then we have enough data to show true cost-per-qualified-opportunity by channel and segment. Monthly executive reviews present performance against targets with clear scaling or reallocation calls. Most engagements run 3-6 months initially, with the first sprint building the infrastructure and later months scaling what works.
We need a single marketing point of contact, access to your sales pipeline data for attribution, and fast creative and compliance approvals. The faster your team reviews and signs off, the faster we 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 run $12K-$32K per month, separate from media spend – the range has crept up as platform certification and compliance review work has grown more involved. This covers strategy, campaign management, creative production, and attribution infrastructure. Compare that to an in-house performance marketing hire ($130K-$190K fully loaded in most markets) 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, and lead flow improvements typically appear within 30-45 days. Pipeline impact – qualified opportunities influenced by paid programs – takes longer: 60-90 days for initial signals, 4-6 months for statistically significant results given typical digital health sales cycles. We build early indicators into reporting so you see progress before deals actually close.
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 standups, works in your project management tools, and coordinates directly with content, sales enablement, and compliance. We own 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?
Most performance agencies optimize for cost-per-lead and stop there. We optimize for cost-per-qualified-opportunity and revenue influenced, because those are the metrics that matter when your sales cycle runs 6-12 months. We also build the attribution infrastructure most agencies skip entirely, and we know the compliance terrain well enough to move fast without creating legal exposure.
How do you handle HIPAA and FDA compliance in paid campaigns?
Every campaign goes through compliance review before launch, using creative frameworks we've built specifically for digital health that hold up under regulatory scrutiny while still converting. That includes compliant targeting, approved claims language, and proper data handling on any lead capture, all within Google's and Meta's current healthcare advertiser requirements. We work with your legal team to set the guardrails, then operate inside them without needing sign-off on every asset.
What minimum ad budget do you recommend for digital health companies?
We recommend a minimum of $18K-$25K per month in media spend, concentrated on one or two channels rather than spread across five – LinkedIn CPMs for health system decision-makers have risen enough that thin enterprise budgets no longer reach scale. For D2C digital health, Meta and Google budgets vary by CAC target. We'd rather you spend enough on one channel to learn fast than too little on five to learn nothing.
