Part two of a series on diagnosing growth instead of guessing at it.
In the first article, we laid out the Healthcare Growth Equation: Growth = Demand × Trust × Conversion × Measurement. Four variables, multiplied, meaning if any one drops to zero, so does the result.
A clean equation invites a fair question: Where did it come from?
The honest answer? More than nine years of sitting across the table from hundreds of healthcare businesses and noticing that, beneath wildly different symptoms, they kept describing the same four problems affecting business growth..
Here’s how that pattern revealed itself, and why we’re convinced these are the four pillars that matter.
The pattern hiding inside every “marketing problem”
When a healthcare business calls us, they rarely describe their issue as one of demand, trust, conversion or measurement.
Instead, they describe a symptom, such as:
- “Our growth has stalled.”
- “We’re spending on ads, but nothing’s converting.”
- “We’ve expanded and now we’ve got capacity we can’t fill.”
That last one is almost verbatim from a dermatology group we spoke with recently. They’d grown into a larger space, added practitioners, filled the waiting room with comfy chairs – and the marketing wasn’t keeping pace. On the surface, it was a demand problem: get more people in the door.
Except when we dug in, the real constraint was elsewhere. They were sitting on a database of around 30,000 existing patients and couldn’t confidently segment who wanted cosmetic treatments versus medical dermatology. They weren’t short on an audience, but they couldn’t read the one they had. This was a measurement problem wearing a demand costume.
After enough of these conversations, you stop hearing just the symptom and start tuning into the underlying structural issue. It’s always one of four things.
Pillar one: Demand – being wanted before you’re chosen
The first pattern was the most obvious and the most often misdiagnosed. Healthcare businesses pour money into being seen without first establishing whether the market actually feels the problem they solve.
The clearest version is category creation. When a clinic wants to own a treatment category rather than compete for scraps within it, louder advertising doesn’t help. The work is building demand from the ground up through education and content.
We did this with Cochlear, who wanted to own the adult hearing space. Working with ENTs and audiologists worldwide, we built credible thought leadership content around that specific need, so that when someone went looking, the answer was already there waiting for them.
Real demand work means being the most relevant, most findable answer at the moment a patient privately recognises their problem and conducts either a Google or an AI search. Search engine marketing is the foundation of sustainable patient acquisition: service-intent keywords, location-based search, and a Google Business Profile that turns a “near me” search into a booking. Every other marketing dollar depends on this. Get the keywords wrong and every ad, every page, every campaign quietly misses.
Quick reference: what demand failure looks like
| Signal | What it usually means |
| High spend, low enquiries | Reaching the wrong audience, or the wrong message for the right one |
| Good traffic, no conversions | Demand and conversion variables both need attention |
| Strong brand, weak search visibility | Category terms not targeted – being found by name, not by problem |
| New service not gaining traction | Market doesn’t yet feel the problem you solve |
Pillar two: Trust – the variable you can’t buy your way out of
In healthcare, trust is the precondition for any marketing success. And it’s invisible until it’s missing.
The sharpest illustration I’ve seen recently came from a telehealth group operating across several Asian markets. On paper, they were a conversion machine – campaign conversion rates as high as 7% in some categories, hundreds of thousands in monthly ad spend, a genuinely capable performance team. By the logic of most agencies, they had it figured out.
Then I asked about their website. Their own VP of Marketing described it plainly: built on Squarespace two years earlier and untouched since. If you went looking for the company, you’d find a LinkedIn page, a basic website and a few articles from their Series A. Here was a business converting brilliantly at the bottom of the funnel while standing on almost no trust infrastructure at all.
That works right up until the moment a buyer, a regulator or a platform looks closely.
Trust signals that matter in healthcare websites:
I encourage businesses to see the regulatory layer as a source of trust rather than a constraint. A business that visibly meets Ahpra and TGA advertising guidelines signals its professionalism to patients and partners alike.
You cannot outspend a trust deficit. The businesses that learn this early are the ones still standing when their competitors get found out.
Pillar three: Conversion – where money leaks quietly
Conversion is everything that happens in the gap between interest and action. Time after time, I see healthcare businesses bleed money here that they never notice leaving.
A cosmetic clinic we worked with had full pricing published openly on their website. Reasonable instinct. But the behaviour told a different story: visitors would reach the price, take fright before they understood the value, and leave without making contact.
So, we reframed it. Instead of confronting a cold visitor with a number, we offered something worth downloading that carried the pricing inside it. Same information. The patient arrived at the cost with context rather than without it. Conversion improved because we removed the friction at the exact point people were dropping off.
That’s the discipline. If patients can’t book easily, every dollar spent on demand is wasted.
Go to your website and conduct a conversion audit:
*Hint: an online booking option means they don’t have to wait to call you on Monday.
Conversion quietly dies at every hurdle in the way of booking. You don’t see the bodies until you go looking for the friction that killed your sales.
The same friction logic governs patient acquisition and retention alike, because the nurture sequence that brings someone back next month is just conversion applied to the relationship rather than the sale.
Pillar four: Measurement – knowing vs guessing
Once I saw it, this issue reframed all the others.
Most healthcare businesses are tracking something using dashboards or reports that show numbers moving. The problem is that they’re measuring activity like clicks, impressions, sign-ups. Instead, they should be measuring factors that improve business outcomes and add value to their buyers.
Think back to that dermatology group with 30,000 patients they couldn’t segment. The data existed, but it was unreadable, so every decision became a guess dressed as a strategy.
Good measurement does more than report the past. It tells you which of the other three variables is breaking and what to fix next.
What good measurement looks like:
- Year-on-year reporting, not last-quarter snapshots that hide seasonal patterns
- Connections between CRM and booking data so a lead can be traced to revenue
- Reporting built for what executives actually need to see, not what’s easiest to count.
Done well, measurement is the variable that makes the rest of the equation legible.
Why these four, and not five or twenty?
Because, across nine years and hundreds of healthcare businesses, every growth problem I’ve seen has resulted from one of these four variables or the relationship between them.
The equation holds whether you’re a single clinic or a multi-market platform. Scaling healthcare businesses don’t escape the equation; they just feel a weak variable faster and at greater cost.
Remember, the four pillars involve multiplication, not addition. A business can be strong in three and have the fourth quietly dragging the result toward zero. That was the case with the telehealth company’s trust gap, the cosmetic clinic’s conversion leak, and the dermatology group’s unreadable data. Each involved a single weak variable capping an otherwise capable business.
That’s why the growth equation concentrates on finding the weakest variable and fixing that first.
The bottom line
The equation is built from empirical evidence gathered over nine years of seeing the same patterns repeating across every kind of healthcare business, from startups and hospitals to clinics and telehealth platforms, in both B2B and B2C contexts. The evidence grew until the four pillars were impossible to unsee.
I think of it as a diagnostic, not a slogan, because it was built backwards from real problems, not forwards from a nice idea.
Which brings the whole thing back to you. Right now, one of your four variables is closer to zero than the rest, but you might not know which one it is. So before you spend another dollar, find out where you actually stand.
Complete the Healthcare Growth Scorecard
Four minutes, one clear answer on which variable is holding your growth back.
Next in the series: One equation, every corner of healthcare – exploring why the foundations of growth stay the same across the healthcare industry.
