Healthtech marketing: what works for UK health startups

Healthtech marketing feels different from marketing almost anything else. People are nervous, the stakes feel personal, and every form you add asks for something private. I have worked on growth with five health-tech companies in the UK, including Augmentive and Qured, and this is what I have seen work.

What is healthtech marketing, and what makes it different?

Healthtech marketing is marketing for companies that sell health products or services through technology: online clinics, at-home tests, therapy platforms and health marketplaces. The basics are the same as any startup, with two big differences. People need more trust before they act, and the details they share are health data, which UK law protects more strictly than most personal data.

Many of the health companies I have worked with exist to help people get seen quickly and conveniently, without a long wait. So a fast, easy booking is part of what they sell, and that raises the bar for the website and the booking flow.

In my work, those two differences shape everything. They change what I measure first, how I build the email journeys and which tools are allowed to see what. The rest of this post is the order I usually work in.

Fix the booking flow before you buy more traffic

For most health startups, the booking or registration flow is the business. If people arrive, choose a service and give up halfway, more ads only means paying to watch more people leave.

So I start by measuring the flow one step at a time. I write a tracking plan that names every step, the developers build it, and I check it against real visits before anyone trusts a chart. Once you can see which step loses people, the list of things to fix becomes short.

At Qured, an at-home testing company, that is exactly how we worked in 2020. We rebuilt the analytics first, then ran a test on the booking flow every week. The conversion rate from session to booking went up by 247%. I tell the full story, in order, in how Qured made its booking flow convert better.

The same approach worked for ONKO Health in 2020, which now trades as Alvie Health. Rebuilding and measuring the registration funnel came before any change to it. Conversion to registration went up by 60%, and cost per acquisition came down by 59%.

Once the flow converts, email keeps people coming back. At Corona Test Centre in 2021 and 2022, I built the email journeys from scratch during a short and very busy period, and sales went up by 39%. The company is no longer trading, but the lesson stuck with me: in health, a well-timed reminder is often the most useful email you can send.

Market to both sides of the marketplace

Many health startups are marketplaces. Patients or clients are on one side, and doctors, therapists or carers are on the other. A marketplace grows only as fast as its weaker side, and the weaker side changes over time.

At Augmentive, a two-sided marketplace for psychological wellbeing, I built email journeys for the practitioners as well as for the clients, and measured both sides against the same funnel. When there were not enough specialists in an area, more client ads would not have helped. Over my work with them from 2021 to 2026, monthly revenue grew 34 times.

In practice, this means:

• Two funnels, measured separately. One for people looking for help, and one for the professionals who provide it.
• Two sets of email journeys. Welcome, activation and win-back emails for each side, each written for what that side worries about.
• One number that joins them. Usually completed sessions or bookings, because that is where both sides meet.

Earn trust on every page

People do not book a health service the way they buy a T-shirt. They want to know who is behind it, whether it is safe, and what happens next. I treat trust as something to measure and test, in the same way as the booking flow.

For Augmentive, we built more than fifty landing pages, one for each UK location people were searching in. Each page explained the service in plain words, showed who the specialists were and made the next step obvious. Those pages were also where we ran our tests.

The things I usually test first on a health site are:

• Who is behind it. Real names, real credentials and a real face.
• What happens after the booking. People worry less when they can see the next three steps.
• Price and timing. Clear prices and the next available slot, as early in the flow as possible.

Keep health data out of the wrong tools

Under UK GDPR, data concerning health is a special category of personal data, with stricter rules on when you can use it. Your marketing tools do not need it, so I make sure they never get it.

When I set up tracking for a health company, I write the plan with that in mind from day one:

• Analytics sees steps, never conditions. “Booking started” and “booking completed” are fine. What the person is being treated for is not. Google’s own rules also say no personally identifiable information may be sent to Analytics.
• Email tools get what they need to send the email. A first name and an email address are usually enough. The medical details stay in the clinical system.
• Consent comes before tracking. Nothing loads until the visitor has answered the cookie banner, and “reject” is as easy as “accept”.

Use AI safely in a health company

Most health startups I talk to have small teams and a long list of jobs that repeat every week. That is where AI helps. I build AI agents and automations for jobs like research, weekly reports and first drafts of emails, and they can take hours off a small team’s week.

In a health company, I build them with four rules:

• Patient data stays out. The AI tool never sees medical details, unless we agree otherwise in writing.
• Read-only access first. An agent can look things up before it is ever allowed to change anything.
• A person approves anything that sends or pays. The agent writes the draft, and someone on the team presses the button.
• A spending cap and failure alerts. You know what it costs, and you hear about it straight away if a run fails.

I run my own business the same way. You can see the agents and automations I use every week, with real screens, on my Built with AI page.

When this approach is right, and when it is not

This order of work suits health startups that already have a product people can book or buy, and some traffic arriving. It works especially well for marketplaces and online services where the booking flow is the business.

It is probably not the right starting point when:

• You are still checking whether people want the product. At that stage, talking to users teaches you more than any funnel.
• You need clinical or regulatory advice. I make sure marketing tools are set up carefully, but I am not a lawyer or a clinician, and I will tell you when you need one.

Where I would start with you

If you run a UK health startup and the booking flow feels like it leaks, I would start by measuring it and finding the step that loses people. The Audit does exactly that in two weeks, and gives you a ranked list of fixes, each with a fixed price.

You can read more about my health-tech work, including the five companies I have worked with, on my health-tech page. Or book a thirty-minute call below, and I will tell you honestly what I would fix first.