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Solr is one of the leading search platforms for websites, enterprises, and more but Solr is more than just a basic search engine.
Healthcare marketing isn’t short on ideas. It’s short on clarity.
Most teams are operating in an environment that’s far less forgiving. Budgets are tighter. Expectations are higher. Channels keep multiplying and none of them are getting simpler. Leadership wants to see progress, not plans. At the same time, patient expectations continue to be shaped by experiences far outside healthcare, which only raises the bar.
None of what follows requires a new platform, a major redesign or a long planning cycle. These are practical shifts teams can make with what they already have.
Here are seven things that healthcare marketers can do right now to meaningfully strengthen your healthcare marketing efforts and put you in a better position for what comes next.
1. Re-anchor Your Strategy Around How Patients Actually Find Care
Most healthcare journeys still start the same way. Someone has a concern. They search. They look for clarity. They decide who they trust.
Yet many marketing strategies are built around channels, campaigns or internal priorities rather than that moment of intent. When you lose sight of how patients are actually trying to find care, everything downstream becomes harder.
Go back to the basics. Look at what people are searching for on your site. Look at what they are searching for before they ever arrive. You will almost always uncover a gap between what your organization is promoting and what people are trying to solve.
Search behavior isn’t just something to report on. It’s a signal you should be using to make decisions.
2. Treat Findability as a Patient Experience Issue, Not a Marketing Tactic
When patients can’t find what they need, they don’t blame your CMS, your website navigation or your internal silos. They blame your brand.
Findability is often framed as an SEO or content problem, but it is fundamentally a patient experience issue. Friction erodes trust quickly, especially when people are anxious or time constrained.
Pick one high-intent journey and walk it end to end as if you were a patient. Try to answer a basic question like whether to choose urgent care or the emergency room or how to prepare for a procedure. Count the clicks. Read the language. Notice where clarity breaks down.
Improving findability doesn’t require getting everything right; it requires being honest about friction and removing it deliberately.
3. Stop Measuring Activity and Start Measuring What Actually Moves Things Forward
Healthcare marketing dashboards are full. That doesn’t mean they’re useful.
Too often, teams report what’s easy to track instead of what actually informs decisions. Impressions, clicks, page views and opens. All fine. But none of them explain whether you’re making it easier for patients to move forward or for the organization to grow.
Momentum shows up in different ways. It answers questions like whether people are getting to answers faster, whether fewer patients are calling for information that should be self-service and whether high-intent journeys are becoming clearer over time.
Identify the small set of metrics leadership actually cares about and connect your marketing signals directly to those outcomes. Then do something hard but necessary: remove at least one metric you report today that no one uses.
4. Make AI Boring and Useful
AI has quickly become one of the loudest topics in healthcare marketing. More noise hasn’t translated into more value.
The goal is not to impress patients with technology. The goal is to reduce friction, increase clarity and build trust. That means AI should feel quiet, accurate and dependable.
Instead of asking where AI might fit, ask where patients consistently get stuck. Repetitive questions. Confusing next steps. Long paths to simple answers.
Choose one of those moments and solve it well. Use AI to surface clear, consistent answers grounded in your content and policies. Measure time saved. Measure reduced confusion. Measure fewer drop-offs driven by uncertainty.
If AI is doing its job, patients shouldn’t really think about it at all.
5. Build Content For Decisions, Not Page Views
Patients aren’t browsing healthcare websites casually. They’re trying to make decisions, often under stress.
Content that works in healthcare tends to do a few things well. It anticipates real questions, answers them in plain language and helps people decide what to do next.
Take one of your highest-traffic pages and look at it through that lens. Focus on the top questions people actually need answered. Remove internal language and unnecessary detail. Cut anything that exists primarily to satisfy internal stakeholders.
If you wouldn’t say it out loud to a family member, it probably doesn’t belong on the page.
6. Break the Handoff Between Marketing, Digital and Operations
Attribution rarely breaks because of tools. It breaks because of ownership.
When marketing, digital, access and operations aren’t aligned on what success looks like, reporting becomes a negotiation. Everyone is technically correct and nothing actually gets better.
Bring at least one operational partner into a marketing planning conversation. Align on a single journey. Agree on what success means for both teams. Document it and revisit it regularly.
You don’t need perfect alignment across the organization. You need functional alignment where it matters most.
7. Prioritize Progress Over Perfection
The teams that make the most progress aren’t waiting for the perfect roadmap, platform or organizational moment. They are making improvements, learning from them and iterating along the way.
Waiting for perfect conditions usually just slows learning.
Pick one improvement you can launch quickly. Something visible. Something measurable. Something that removes friction for patients or internal teams. Launch it, learn from it and improve it.
What Healthcare Marketers Need to Focus on Now
Healthcare marketers are no longer judged by how creative their work looks or how many campaigns they run. They’re judged by how clearly they help people find care, make decisions and move forward with confidence.
Teams that focus on clarity, findability and alignment move faster, earn more trust and don’t need to chase every new idea to show progress.
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