Growth marketing for early-stage health tech SaaS: What actually works

Search for health tech marketing advice and you'll find a lot about buying committees, account-based marketing, and winning hospital contracts. None of it helps if you're four people selling software to physiotherapy practices, independent gyms, or a few hundred dietitians.

Growth marketing for early-stage health tech SaaS is a different job. You need to pick one narrow group of buyers, fix the path between the click and your demo, then spend money on ads, and in that order. Most founders do it backwards.

Here's who you're actually selling to, what to fix before you spend anything, which channel to test first, and how long it realistically takes.

Why doesn't the standard health tech marketing advice apply to you?

Because almost all of it is written for companies selling to hospitals and payers.

In that world, a single deal is worth several hundred thousand a year. There's a procurement process, a security review, and a buying committee of nine people who all need different things. Account-based marketing makes complete sense there. When one account is worth that much, building a personalised campaign around it pays for itself.

You're not in that world. You're selling to a practice owner, a studio manager, a clinic of four. And the deal might be €200 a month. There is no buying committee. There's one person who sees clients all day and looks at your website at nine in the evening with a glass of wine or water ;)

The advice isn't wrong. It's just written for a company ten years ahead of you, and running enterprise plays at your deal size burns money you don't have.

Who are you actually selling to?

Not "healthcare." That's a sector, not a market.

The person signing up is a small business owner who happens to work in health. They didn't get into physiotherapy, or personal training, or nutrition because they love evaluating software. They're not reading your feature comparison table. They're wondering whether switching systems will cost them two weeks of chaos, whether their receptionist will hate them for it, and whether five years of client records will survive the migration.

Two things follow from that.

First, your messaging needs to sound like it was written by someone who has actually sat in a practice, not someone who read a market report. Talk about the Monday morning schedule, the no-shows, the invoicing that eats every Friday afternoon. Not "streamlined workflow orchestration."

Second, get narrower than feels comfortable. "Health tech" is not a target. "Physiotherapy practices with three to ten therapists in the Netherlands" is a target. You can write copy for that. You can find those people. You can't do either for "healthcare providers."

What should you fix before you spend anything on ads?

The path between the click and the demo request.

You can't out-train a bad diet, and you can't out-spend a broken signup flow. If your homepage doesn't say what the product does in plain language within about five seconds, if your demo form asks for eleven fields including practice size and current software, if nothing happens for three days after someone submits it, more traffic just means more people bouncing off the same wall, faster.

Go and look at yours honestly. Can a stranger tell what you sell? How many fields does the form have, and do you genuinely need all of them before a first conversation? What happens in the hour after someone hits submit?

Verne Health is B2B SaaS in health tech at roughly this stage. Within the first three months of putting a real plan and some testing discipline in place, we were getting five to seven marketing-qualified leads a month landing directly with sales. Not traffic. Not newsletter signups. Leads sales could actually work.

That didn't come from a bigger budget. It came from being specific about who we targeted and removing the friction between the ad and the demo.

Which channel is worth testing first?

Honest answer: it depends on whether demand already exists.

If your buyers are already searching for what you sell — "fysio software," "praktijkmanagement software," "gym software," that kind of thing — start with Google Ads. The volume will be small, but the intent is high, and you're capturing people already looking. Small and high-intent beats big and vague at your stage.

If nobody's searching yet because the category is new, Google has nothing to capture. LinkedIn Ads makes more sense, because you can target by job title and company type with real precision. Clicks cost more, but you're paying to reach exactly the right person rather than hoping they show up.

What isn't worth your time yet: broad social campaigns, content at scale, and anything described as thought leadership. Those need budget and patience you don't have.

Pick one. Give it three months and enough budget to produce real data, below roughly €1.000 a month you won't get enough clicks to learn anything, and you'll conclude a channel doesn't work when you simply never tested it properly.

How long before any of this works?

Longer than you'd like, and that's worth knowing up front rather than discovering it in month two.

Healthcare buyers are cautious for good reasons (B2B in general takes longer). Changing the system a practice runs on is genuinely disruptive, it touches client records, billing, and every appointment in the calendar. Nobody does that on a whim, and nobody does it in December. Expect months between first click and signed contract, not weeks.

So don't measure revenue in month one. Measure whether the right people are clicking, whether they're reaching your demo page, and whether demo requests are turning into actual calls. Those tell you if the machine is working long before the revenue shows up. If you judge a campaign on revenue after four weeks, you'll switch off something that was about to work.

When this won't work

A few situations where none of the above helps, and I'd rather say so than sell you something.

If the product isn't ready. If customers sign up and churn after two months, marketing makes it worse, you're just filling a leaky bucket faster and spending money to do it. Fix retention first.

If you can't describe your best customer. If you can't tell me which type of business gets the most value from your product and why, no campaign fixes that. That's a customer-conversation problem, and the answer is ten calls with existing users, not a media budget.

If you need results in six weeks. Sometimes that's the honest constraint, runway is runway. But then you probably need sales, not marketing. Pick up the phone.

If you already have an in-house marketer. Then you likely don't need me. You need them to have a plan and the room to execute it.