Free guide · Patient marketing
The Fourth Lever.
Growth in healthcare has four levers, and most companies only ever pull two. Patient marketing is the fourth: assumed illegal, mostly just misunderstood. How it grows the accounts your sales team has already won, and the sequencing that keeps it inside the rules, in seven minutes.
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Aim, problem, vision, mission.
Aim
To show you the growth mechanism most healthcare companies ignore entirely: patient marketing as the way to grow the accounts your sales team has already won, with our reading of the rules that make it possible.
Problem
Winning an account is slow and expensive: committee decisions, buying cycles that stretch across years, a rep fighting for every meeting. Then the account is won, the team moves to the next opportunity, and the usage never arrives. Almost nobody treats that as a marketing problem, because almost everybody assumes patient marketing is off limits.
Vision
Your salespeople acquire accounts. Patient marketing grows them remotely: demand that pulls through the healthcare system rather than relying on rep push alone, reaching the clinicians and patients no rep will ever meet.
Mission
Make patient demand something healthcare companies build, not something they wait for.
The growth lever most companies never pull.
Growth in healthcare comes from four places: new hospitals, new users inside existing hospitals, existing users doing more with your portfolio, or more patients moving towards the clinicians who already use your products. The fourth means signposting the availability of a specific treatment to the right audience, whether that is an age group, a condition, or a cohort whose outcomes could improve with earlier intervention, and making them aware that the treatment they need is available at a clinic near them. That fourth lever is patient marketing, and most companies ignore it entirely.
Here is why it matters commercially. The account your team just won took committee decisions and a buying cycle that stretched across years, and the moment it closed, the team moved to the next opportunity. Usage is now somebody else's problem, which in practice means nobody's. The third lever, existing users doing more, is a marketing job as much as a sales one, and the fourth lever is how marketing does it: campaigns that grow the account remotely while your reps fight the next committee. The old answer to flat usage was more reps in more corridors, and the economics of that stopped working years ago.
What stops companies is a confusion. They picture American direct-to-consumer drug advertising, and they are right to flinch: that model is not permitted in almost every market outside the United States and New Zealand, and trying it in Europe gets you shut down quickly, rightly so. But that is not what patient marketing in a regulated market is. As It's Not a Sales Problem puts it, this is patient activation as a legitimate lever to unstick institutional demand generation, built on a sequencing that keeps every layer on the right side of the line.
The patients, meanwhile, are already moving. Most patients now research a condition and its treatment options online before they see a clinician about it. NHS waiting lists remain over 7 million patients in England (NHS England Referral to Treatment statistics), and private hospital admissions reached record levels in 2024 (Private Healthcare Information Network). The question is not whether patients are researching. It is who they find.
The unlock: educate, filter, direct
The legal unlock is not a loophole. It is sequencing: three layers, separated by what each is actually doing, so that every layer stays inside the advertising rules instead of testing them.
01
Educate
Health information about the condition and the treatment landscape, not your product. Education generally sits on more permissive ground than promotion, because it is information. The line is not self-policing: where a manufacturer funds the education and only one product fits the description, regulators look harder. This is still where the patient searching at 10pm finds something that acknowledges their experience.
02
Filter
Not every researcher is a candidate. Filtering, honest eligibility signposting and triage questions, protects both the patient and the system: the wrong patients are not pushed towards a treatment, and clinics are not flooded with unsuitable enquiries.
03
Direct
Signposting a filtered, suitable patient to clinicians who already offer the treatment solves the access problem: connecting a patient who has a need with a clinician who can assess it. In our experience it is the layer regulators are most comfortable with, because it is doing that job rather than pushing a product. It still sits inside the advertising rules, and it is still written to them.
The companies that get this right do not treat patient marketing as a workaround for regulation. They treat it as a discipline shaped by regulation.
Our reading, not legal advice
What the rules actually permit
Our reading of the UK position, as marketers rather than lawyers: advertising for medical devices sits under the CAP Code, enforced by the ASA, alongside MHRA device rules. Unlike prescription-only medicines, medical devices are not subject to a blanket ban on advertising to the public, and that difference, the prohibition people half-remember not applying, is what makes patient-facing device campaigns possible at all. Claims still have to match the device's stated intended purpose and be substantiated, and the codes restrict how treatments can be endorsed, including the use of celebrities and health professionals.
Two cautions belong next to that. Product class matters: what holds for a device does not hold for a prescription medicine. And geography matters: patient marketing rules vary dramatically across EMEA. What is permissible in the UK may be restricted in France; what is allowed in Germany may be forbidden in Italy. Companies operating internationally need country-specific regulatory intelligence before launching any patient-facing programme. That is the first stage of the work, in writing, with the lawyers in the room, before anyone writes a headline.
The strategies
The three levels of patient marketing.
The strategy stack, with what each level looks like in practice. The foundation is non-negotiable: clinical evidence, regulatory approval and the compliance framework come before any campaign. Build on evidence; skipping ahead is guessing.
01
Direct campaigns and find-a-clinic
Direct-to-patient campaigns with a find-a-clinic destination: multi-channel work across search, paid, social and PR that signposts a treatment's availability, landing on a find-a-clinic function with the legal checklists, clinic onboarding and landing pages behind it. Whether the campaigns run branded or non-branded depends on the territory and its rules, which is why the work starts with the legal position in writing.
02
Co-branded materials
Take the adverts that work, attach the metrics, and create co-branded versions clinics can use to market themselves: patient brochures, recovery guides, FAQ handouts, email and landing page templates. Your campaign learnings become a service you provide to the clinics that offer your treatment.
03
Co-marketing partnerships
The mature end: you and the clinic fund campaigns together, typically 49/51, with shared activation, real-time reporting and monthly optimisation. Treat the split as evidence that both sides are paying fair value for what they get, not as a threshold that makes the arrangement safe. The line that matters is that funding is never conditioned on the clinic's use of your product, and that belongs in writing at stage one. This is where the relationship changes. You are no longer just a supplier; you are a partner in the clinic's commercial success.
Each level compounds the one before it: the campaigns prove what works, the co-branded materials package the proof, and the partnerships fund the scale.
What patients actually want to know
Patient messaging is not HCP messaging with the jargon removed. It is a different discipline, and the sharpest description of it we have came from a pain specialist reviewing a draft campaign:
“I do not know who you are talking to here, but it is not patients. They do not want to know about the product. All they want to know is what is going to happen to them.”
Through our University of Bath partnership, writing up lectures on how patients experience and communicate pain, the same finding keeps returning: patients do not just want more information. They want information that acknowledges their experience. They want to feel heard before they can hear.
In practice, a patient weighing a treatment cycles through the same concerns: will it make the pain stop, could it make things worse, what will it involve, how much pain afterwards, what does it mean for family and work. And when the pain eases for a week, the cycle resets to maybe I am just getting older, maybe I will put it off. Messaging that meets those questions in the patient's own language is what moves someone from researching to asking their clinician. The difference between manage your condition and get back to the things you love is the difference between a page that informs and a page that converts.
The six stages, in order
Patient marketing programmes fail the same way launches do: by skipping stages. Stages three to six are the three levels above, expressed as a build sequence. The sequence we run:
01
Legal and regulatory setup
What can be said, in this market, for this product class, agreed in writing before creative work starts.
02
Patient messaging
Built on how patients experience and communicate the condition, tested against the concern cycle, approvable on first pass.
03
The find-a-clinic website
The educate and filter layers made real, ending in signposting to clinicians who offer the treatment.
04
Learning what works
Channel by channel, market by market, with the backend as the single source of truth.
05
Co-branded materials
Level two above, delivered clinic by clinic once the campaigns have proved what works.
06
Co-marketing partnerships
Level three above: the mature end of the programme, on the terms set at stage one.
People skip stages anyway. Then they call us asking why it is not working. We ask if they did stage two. There is usually a pause.
What it looks like when it runs
The live proof is public: a patient acquisition system for Arthrosamid, running across the UK, Germany and Sweden. 285 patient enquiries at a £29 blended cost per acquisition, with attribution from first click to clinic enquiry. The full diagnostic, creative and per-market numbers are on the case study.
Read the case study“They do not want to know about the product. All they want to know is what is going to happen to them.”
Take it with you
The PDF, for legal and compliance.
Everything on this page, designed for print. Built to forward to the colleagues who need to say yes to stage one.
Where to take this
Three ways forward, in ascending order of commitment.
Score your readiness
The Patient Marketing Readiness assessment scores the same territory across legal and compliance, patient messaging, acquisition infrastructure and measurement: a 0 to 100 score and your weakest areas named, in under ten minutes.
Start with stage one
Scoping that conversation costs nothing, and it removes the fear that stops most programmes before they start. The PDF version of this guide is built to forward to your legal and compliance colleagues.
Talk it through
A free hour with Michael against your own patient pathway. No pitch: if we can help, we will say how, and if we cannot, we will say so.
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