So what do healthtech marketers view as their biggest challenges in 2025? How will they adapt to changes in buyer behavior and what are their priorities? To help with these questions, we analyzed recent conversations with health tech marketing leaders to bubble the big issues that will be their most significant challenges this year.
Over the last few months, we have had one-on-one conversations with a dozen Healthtech marketing leaders and 1o+ group discussions on key marketing issues with members of the Healthtech Marketing Network. We then used NotebookLM to help us analyze twenty hours of conversations. What came out of this is what this collective group of marketing leaders view as their top issues.
The Healthtech Marketing Show Episode
To help us understand these issues better, we discussed these top issues with two members of the Healthtech Marketing Network: Stacy Sand, Vice President of Marketing and Communications at Getwell, and Michael Passanante, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications at CapitalRx.
Stacy and Michael provided their perspectives on the five top issues, how they have taken action, and what they will do differently in 2025.
Check out the episode.
So, What Are The Top Marketing Issues in 2025?
1.  Measuring Marketing Impact and ROI
Now, more than ever, marketers are under pressure from the C-Suite to demonstrate the impact the marketing investment is making. Most marketers feel that their CEO believes that marketing is contributing, but few are confident that their CEO believes the ROI is convincing.
But there is more to it than that.
The fundamental challenge of measuring marketing ROI has evolved significantly. While ROI measurement has been a persistent challenge for decades, the issue now stems from shifting buyer behaviors, making traditional demand generation and advertising campaigns less effective rather than measurement difficulties alone.
Traditional attribution models and metrics are becoming less relevant as buyer journeys become more complex and self-directed. This isn’t just a measurement challenge – it reflects a real decline in the effectiveness of conventional marketing approaches.
Many are making progress in this regard.
“We’re doing full-funnel tracking all the way down to booking… we are tracking the lead source throughout. The other thing we’re tracking more closely now is velocity… where are the stuck points in the pipeline.” – Stacy Sands, GetWell
In 2025, marketers must develop new frameworks for measuring value that align with modern buying behaviors and digital-first engagement patterns. This requires rethinking what constitutes marketing success in 2025 and beyond.
“What we’ve tried to do is move away from the hamster wheel of MQL funnel… we want to understand how our brand is being perceived in the marketplace… if those are growing, that means our content program is working.” – Michael Passanante, CapitalRx
2.  Aligning Sales and Marketing
The organizational structure of sales and marketing is undergoing significant transformation. A notable trend in 2024 was consolidating CMO roles under Chief Revenue Officers, potentially creating new opportunities for improved alignment.
Historically, when CMOs or VPs of Marketing report to the head of sales rather than directly to the CEO, it does not always end well. This sometimes created a great deal of tension, where the pressure to generate leads at the expense of brand building.
This structural change presents challenges and opportunities for redefining how marketing and sales work together. While alignment has been a historical challenge, these organizational shifts may finally break down traditional silos.
“The benefit of being in a role where we are reporting into sales leadership is that we share some priorities around use of technology… helping them understand that surround sound helps them, this idea of surrounding the customer with our messaging through different voices, different channels.” – Stacy Sands
Success in 2025 will depend on leveraging these organizational changes to create truly integrated revenue teams with shared goals, metrics, and customer understanding.
A new “One Team, One Goal” model is emerging, where sales and marketing report to a Chief Growth Officer or a Chief Commercial Officer oversees marketing, sales, and customer success. This relatively new model can work well.
“Partnership between sales and marketing… it’s probably the best situation I’ve personally been in as far as the sales team understanding and appreciating the value that marketing brings and marketing understanding what sales has to deal with on a daily basis.” – Michael Passanante
3.  Adapting to Evolving Buyer Behavior and Longer Sales Cycles
The fundamental shift in buyer behavior continues to reshape marketing strategies. Buyers are increasingly self-directed and engage with vendors much later in their decision-making process, requiring new approaches to early-stage engagement. In 2025, marketers will need to redouble their efforts to adapt to this. Some are investing to understand buyer needs better.
“The larger the buying committee, often the longer your deal is going to take… we’ve worked with some market research firms out there to get briefings on the role of the CIO, the role of informatics leaders. How do they all work together? What’s the reporting structure?” – Stacy Sands
Longer sales cycles, particularly in healthcare, require marketing to adapt its engagement and measurement approaches. This includes developing content and programs that support extended buyer journeys and multiple stakeholder involvement.
Marketing teams must evolve strategies to meet buyers where they are, focusing on digital-first engagement and value-added content that supports self-directed research and evaluation.
“One of the things we’re really focused on heading into next year is creating the stories that help our champions sell internally… they have to be able to tell our unique story because oftentimes status quo is the biggest enemy.” – Michael Passanante
4.  Navigating Budget Constraints and Optimizing Resources
There was significant turmoil in marketing budgets and staffing in 2024. There were many layoffs in healthtech. How will things change in 2025?
Gartner research indicates overall marketing budget increases for 2025, but it is unclear that this will happen across the healthtech sector. The challenge lies in optimal allocation and effectiveness of spending, with a notable shift from personnel to program investments.
Marketing leaders must strategically leverage increased program budgets while potentially operating with leaner teams.
“We’re going to use some of those program dollars to experiment and see if we can’t move things in areas that we haven’t previously tried… you cannot ignore brand particularly in the time that we’re in.” – Michael Passanante
The focus is shifting from doing more with less to investing more strategically, particularly in technologies and programs that can drive scalable results.
“Where I probably have used platforms to scale where I don’t have people… we’re bringing on technology that helps really mimic the responsiveness of another product marketing manager in enabling the sales team.” – Stacy Sands
5.  Leveraging Technology and AI
AI represents a transformative opportunity for marketing operations and effectiveness. The pace of AI advancement is outstripping most marketing leaders’ ability to capitalize on its potential fully. And when we polled these marketing leaders on their adoption of AI in 2024, it seemed that most were taking a cautious approach.
In 2025, marketing teams that develop capabilities in AI-powered tools and platforms may gain a competitive advantage and capture significant productivity gains.
“AI, everybody’s AI… like electricity, I think it’s going to find its way to us… to go out in search of AI by itself is probably not productive in as much as you want to know what you’re trying to get to.” – Michael Passanante
Success in 2025 will largely depend on how effectively marketing teams can integrate AI into their operations, from content creation to campaign optimization and customer analytics.
The verdict is out on who they will partner with to help them on this journey.
“We’ve evaluated the vendors we have versus the best of breed vendor… sometimes you’re better off with the best of breed vendor. We’re adopting this year an AI chatbot that serves as an SDR on our website.” – Stacy Sands
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Do you agree with these priorities? Let us know in the comments.
If you liked this post and want to learn more…
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