Healthcare doesn’t slow down. Keeping up with what’s actually relevant, not just what’s trending on general business media, takes time most of us don’t have.
Brivio Health Insights is launching The Healthcare Marketing Minute: a short, focused roundup every Monday of what’s shifting in healthcare and healthtech marketing. A trend, an insight, a tactic, and an opinion most people won’t say out loud and don’t have the time to research. Designed to start your week sharp, in the time it takes to drink your first cup of coffee.
Trend: Digital ad spend in healthcare just crossed $26.5 billion.
According to the 2026 MM+M/Inmar Healthcare Marketers Trend Report, the overall healthcare marketing and communications market reached $26.52 billion in 2026, up nearly $2 billion from last year. But the more telling story is the channel breakdown.
Digital video and display are projected to grow 70% year over year, connected TV is up 60%, and AI-integrated media and search are up 50%. Influencer marketing, specifically credible micro-influencers, is up 44%. Linear TV and print are losing ground fast. Budget is accelerating toward digital channels that can be measured, targeted, and optimized. The teams that can’t demonstrate ROI at the channel level are going to struggle to defend their budgets in 2026.
Insight: LinkedIn engagement with healthcare content is growing faster than the content itself.
There are now over 154 million members actively engaging with healthcare content on LinkedIn, and engagement is outpacing content volume. That’s a clear signal of unmet demand.
LinkedIn members are also 28% more likely to research healthcare products compared to users on other social platforms. For B2B healthcare brands still underinvesting in LinkedIn content, the window to build organic authority is open, but it won’t stay that way for long.
Tool/Tactic: Stop wasting outreach on bad data; instead use Apollo + NeverBounce for B2B Healthcare contacts.
Apollo gives teams access to 275M+ contacts with filters for title, company size, industry, and buying signals, all in one platform that also handles sequencing. For B2B healthcare teams without an enterprise budget, it consolidates prospecting and outreach without the ZoomInfo price tag.
The catch: healthcare contacts change roles frequently, and Apollo’s data accuracy can lag. That’s where NeverBounce comes in; run every export through it before launching a campaign to verify addresses, cut bounce rates, and protect sender reputation.
We broke down how this combo compares to Clay, ZoomInfo, Cognism, and Lusha in Five Lead Gen Tools B2B Healthcare Sales Teams Are Actually Using, worth a read if you’re evaluating your current stack.
Opinion: Most B2B healthcare teams are spending more on the wrong half of the funnel.
Budgets are flat and ROI-policed. The response at most companies is more top-of-funnel, more content, more reach, more ads. But in a market where deals run longer than a year and require more than 22 touchpoints, awareness without a full-funnel strategy doesn’t close pipeline.
As we wrote in The Future of AI in Marketing, efficiency only compounds the problem if the strategy underneath it is weak.
Healthcare doesn’t wait, and neither should your marketing strategy. Subscribe to The Healthcare Marketing Minute and start every Monday with the trends, insights, and tactics that actually matter.
