320 Alisal Road Suite 100
Solvang, CA 93463
P: 805-430-9879
Marketing for Independent Medical, Dental, & Aesthetic Practices
Digital marketing for Central Coast med spas, opthamologists, oral surgeons, and more. Based in Solvang.
Central Coast Healthcare Marketing
Do a test: go search for your practice’s name in Google. You’re likely at or near the top of the page—and congrats are in order! Everybody searching for you is able to find you.
Now think about how they’d find you if they didn’t know your name, and search for that. “medspa in slo”. “dental implants lompoc”. “santa ynez plastic surgery”. Can they find you now?
If not, that’s what we call a growth ceiling. And it’s a gap that can be closed through digital marketing + advertising.
Breaking through the growth ceiling
Referrals and branded search traffic are incredible sources of potential new patients; but, they are also severely limiting. Current patients only have so many friends, and branded search will only help people who know you find you, not anyone else.
That’s the bad news (“your brand awareness has a limit’). Fortunately, the gap between category seekers and a brand-aware audiences is one that can be shrunk with the right healthcare advertising campaign.
Where New Patients come from
We talk a lot about the marketing funnel, which is essentially a visual representation of the customer journey. The top of the funnels feeds into the bottom, which itself is what converts into new patients.
The top of the funnel relies on tactics that drive demand generation. Screechy Cat Media is proud to be one of the only digital marketing + advertising agencies in the Central Coast to offer tactics such as Connected TV (advertising on streaming services) and programmatic display, both fantastic high-impact awareness channels for driving awareness and first-time visitors to your practice’s website.
Per Nielsen, streaming accounted for more than 48% of all tv viewing as of May 2026, with YouTube clocking in at 13%. These are real opportunities to position your practice in front of new patients using the same targeting methodology used on other effective digital advertising tactics.
Where healthcare marketing often fails
Healthcare marketing + advertising has what we refer to as leaks: places during the process on the journey from brand unaware to current patient where we lose performance data.
Most of these leaks come down to ineffective digital tracking, made even more difficult in the healthcare space thanks to tighter privacy regulations like HIPAA that the industry needs to abide by.
These leaks usually fall into one of two categories:
- Call Tracking—little to no ability to see where phone calls to the practice originate from, how many are received, and what the conversion rate is.
- Pixel Tracking—pixels are limited to public-facing pages, otherwise the practice risks litigation and fines.
Improperly placing pixels on your practice’s website can cost big bucks. Aspen Dental is recently settled for $18.7M on a Meta and Google pixel tracking case, while Derrick Dermatology settled a similar case for $1M.
Screechy Cat Media’s Tracking Methodology
Advertising pixel tracking is still allowed for healthcare practices; however, a proper cookie consent banner with opt in/out capabilities is required, and there cannot be any tracking placed on pages where users are signed-in.
We pair call tracking technology with advertising pixels and server-side conversion measurement to measure the first half of the ad campaign, which is the lead. From there, we rely on the practice’s anonymized first-party data to track new and returning patient statistics.
Sample Healthcare Marketing tactical plan
| Channel | Rationale | Marketing Goal(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Connected TV | High-impact awareness tactic to unearth new audience segments | Brand Awareness |
| Programmatic Display | High-impact awareness tactic to unearth new audience segments | Brand Awareness |
| Paid Search | Bid on category keywords to capture traffic from brand unaware, in market audiences | Brand Awareness, Traffic, Leads |
| Paid Social | Find new intent audiences, lookalikes. Cost-efficient tactic. | Brand Awareness, Traffic, Leads |
Why Choose Screechy Cat Media
Central Coast healthcare marketing is a competitive industry in the Santa Ynez Valley, Solvang, Buellton, Five Cities, SLO, and Santa Barbara.
Screechy Cat Media develops customized tactical plans that include marketing, advertising, analytics tracking, and real-time reporting dashboards. We have augmented existing marketing departments, stepped in as subject matter experts, and acted as the sole marketing arm for healthcare clients—our relationships are tailored to your goals, needs, and resources.
We have served as digital strategists with independent healthcare practices in both Chicago to the West Coast in 20 years of marketing + advertising. We understand what a successful marketing plan looks like, because we’ve led strategy on them for years.
Healthcare Advertising Case Study
See how a med spa client increased new patient acquisition by more than 300% while also lowering acquisition costs in this Healthcare Case Study
How we achieve success
- We measure what matters: lead conversion rate, cost per new patient acquired, and case acceptance rate.
- We follow the most current industry guidelines around pixel tracking and data privacy.
- Each client is different; there’s no “cookie-cutter” approach that will “just work” for every situation. Each marketing strategy is built around the strengths and opportunities of your brand—not someone else’s.
©2026 Three J’s and a K, Limited dba Screechy Cat Media
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320 Alisal Road Suite 100
Solvang, CA 93463
P: 805-430-9879