Background
There are approximately 4.5 million healthcare professional profiles on healthgrades.com. Roughly 260,000 Standard Profiles have been claimed by a healthcare professional, and less than 3% of the profiles on Healthgrades have been sponsored by a health system or life sciences advertising partner.
More about these two profile options:
- Sponsored Profiles: Partner physician profiles are part of a robust advertising program, offering premium placement, branded physician profiles, and clear calls to action. Their health system appears first in healthgrades.com search results and doctor profile pages. Sponsored Profiles are sold to groups and systems with large advertising budgets through direct sales.
- Standard Profiles: Healthcare professionals can create a Healthgrades account and claim their free, standard profile on the site. Standard Profiles have a generic design that includes competitor listings and third-party ads.
B2B Marketing, Product, and Strategic Development collaborated on the go-to-market for a new Elevated Profiles offering.
Objective
With Elevated Profiles, Healthgrades is taking the opportunity to target and engage with the middle market, which we have not traditionally served, including provider practices, smaller health systems, and individual physicians—connecting them to our high-intent, high-value consumer audiences to help them boost their online presence and acquire more new patients.
Elevated Profiles subscribers receive a distinctive, professional profile design that’s free of competitor listings and third-party ads—and a direct link to their online scheduling system. Subscription plans are $49.95 per month or $479.40 annually.
By offering this new profile tier to providers through a subscription-based sales model, we can tap into a market of over 4 million provider profiles and establish a new revenue stream.
My Role
Product Positioning
Message Development
Go-to-Market Strategy
Website Landing Pages
Eloqua Email Campaign
Content Creation
Social Media Support
Paid Ads (Meta and Google)
Integrated Marketing Plan
Our physician audience has never had a purchasing relationship with Healthgrades—since claiming a profile and logging into the user dashboard is free—so this was a new communications challenge for our team.
Healthgrades’ other advertising and media products are sold with a direct sales approach. With Elevated Profiles, we created a marketing funnel featuring various digital touchpoints and a self-service checkout.
Website
Content
I supported the creation of value-add content for an HCP audience, with Elevated Profiles CTAs embedded throughout:
How a Strong Online Presence Helps Doctors Get More Patients
A strong digital presence can be the difference between being discovered and overlooked by healthcare consumers. Learn how you can get more patients by standing out online.
Turn Clicks into Appointments: 5 Ways to Strengthen Your Doctor Profile
Your online doctor profile is often a patient’s first impression of your care. An optimized profile builds trust, boosts visibility, and turns clicks into appointments. By keeping information current, highlighting experience, encouraging reviews, and adding direct scheduling through Healthgrades, you can strengthen your digital presence and make it easier for patients to choose you with confidence.
Email Marketing
During the initial test-and-learn phase, we compared a direct sales approach with a thought leadership approach. We found that direct sales messaging did not resonate with this group, and thought leadership buried the purchasing call-to-action too deeply in the content.
- Therefore, we landed on a blended messaging approach that teed up a physician marketing concern or trend with a nearby Elevated Profiles CTA.
- We segmented our audiences based on internal hypotheses that certain specialties would be more prone to purchase a subscription, based on the nature of operating their “business of one” or promoting their professional brand.
- Priority segments included Dentistry, Behavioral Health, Alternative (e.g., Chiropractic), and General Medicine (e.g., Primary Care Specialties).
While our email campaigns drove subscription signups, I decided to pull back on this strategy in favor of paid media efforts and future trade publication placements. I’m cognizant of the high quality of our physician audience, comprising nearly 200K registered subscribers, and did not want to compromise this list or risk messaging fatigue.
Healthgrades Insighter Physician Newsletter
In-line placements and ad units in the Healthgrades Insighter Newsletter created surround sound and awaremess with our physician audience.
Paid Social
In Q4, we ran a paid Meta campaign to calculate our conversion rate and inform 2026 budgeting and tactics. We built awareness and authority among physicians by distributing educational content through Meta to both existing (a direct list-match of our email subscriber list) and lookalike (those who engage with our physician-focused content) audiences.
The campaign delivered solid impressions and click volumes while prioritizing cost efficiency over maximum reach. Results showed consistent delivery, with opportunities to further improve CTR and traffic quality through creative and targeting optimizations in the future campaign.
Results
Over the course of the MVP phase (July through December 2025), we converted 138 Elevated Profiles subscribers.
- Annual Subscribers: 53
- Monthly Subscribers: 85
The majority of our active subscribers were in the Behavioral Health category. Other specialities with a higher propensity to buy were: General Medicine, Dentistry, and Neuro/Spine.
Email marketing campaigns and physician newsletter placements generated product awareness. Although email marketing drove signups, the conversion rate was lower than I’d hoped. I decided to pull away from the tactic to avoid compromising our valuable registered physician subscriber audience.
Meta Ads were a new physician marketing tactic for us, and bolstered qualified lead capture. Meta allowed us to reach our entire physician list in a less intrusive way and generated an impressive number of qualified leads. Paid social and ads allow us to maintain broad visibility at a low CPM, helping us reach existing and similar physician audiences across multiple digital touchpoints beyond the MVP phase.
Teams can take these results and key learnings into future iterations of the Elevated Profiles rollout, including our efforts to reach group practice managers and physician audiences with more than one subscriber.
Audrey Keller 