Every health tech marketing leader I’ve talked to in the last two years has said some version of the same thing: “We know where we want to be. We just can’t seem to get there.”
They have a goal. They have a budget. They have a team. What they don’t have is a map.
“Grow ARR 30% this year.” “Increase brand awareness in the mid-market.” “Become the go-to platform for patient engagement.” These are not strategies. They are wishes with a deadline attached. And in health tech, where sales cycles stretch 6-18 months, buyer trust is hard-won, and market education is a prerequisite for conversion, wishes are especially expensive.
The problem isn’t ambition. It’s resolution. Goals describe a destination without describing the terrain.
The Gap Between Where You Are and Where You’re Going
Consider a patient engagement SaaS vendor trying to establish market presence. Their current state: a functional website, a few case studies, a sales team doing outbound, and a marketing budget that covers basics.
Their goal: be recognized as a category leader in patient engagement.
The gap between those two points is real. But “become a category leader” gives you no information about what the next 90 days should look like, whether your current activities are moving you toward it, or when you’ll know you’ve arrived.
What that team actually needs is a ladder, a map of the qualitatively different levels between where they are now and where they want to be.
Level 1: You have a product and a website. Buyers can find you.
Level 2: Your content explains the problem before it explains your solution. Buyers start to trust you.
Level 3: Analysts, journalists, and peers reference you when talking about the space. You have a voice.
Level 4: Buyers come to you. Inbound exceeds outbound. Your brand carries weight.
Level 5: You define the category. When someone says “patient engagement software,” your name is the reference point.
These are not milestones on a Gantt chart. They are different modes of operating. Each one requires different capabilities, different positioning, different resource allocation. Most health tech vendors are at Level 1 or 2 and spending like they’re at Level 3. Mapping the ladder makes that visible immediately.
Why AI Changes the Math
Something has shifted in the last 18 months that makes the ladder more relevant than ever.
AI tools are compressing the effort required to advance between levels. Content that used to take a team of three, six weeks, and $30K to produce, a research report, a competitive analysis, a thought leadership program, can now be scaffolded in days and refined from there.
This is not an argument that AI replaces strategy. It’s the opposite. When execution costs drop, the bottleneck moves upstream. The constraint is no longer “can we produce enough?” It’s “do we know what level we’re aiming for, and do we have a clear picture of what it requires?”
If you don’t have a ladder, AI just helps you produce more content at your current level, faster. You get very efficient at being stuck.
If you do have a ladder, AI becomes the mechanism that actually lets you advance. A health tech company that knows it needs to move from Level 2 to Level 3, from “explaining our product” to “owning the conversation in our category,” can now build the content infrastructure for that in weeks, not quarters.
The ladder tells you what to build. AI helps you build it faster than was possible before.
How to Start
Pick one function, marketing, product positioning, market education, whatever is most urgent.
Draw the ladder: five levels, each one a qualitatively different mode of operating. Level 1 is survival. Level 5 is category definition. Fill in the three in between based on your market.
Assess honestly: where are you actually operating right now? Not where your strategy deck says you are. Where does the evidence put you?
Name the ceiling: what does Level 5 actually look like in your specific market? Not “category leader,” but what are the observable markers? Analyst coverage? Inbound deal flow? Conference keynote invitations? Name it specifically enough that you’d recognize it.
Then identify the gap between your current level and the next rung. That gap, not the distance to the ceiling, is your actual strategic priority.
Health tech marketing teams spend enormous energy on the wrong things not because they lack capability, but because they lack a map. Goals tell you where to end up. Ladders show you how to get there, one rung at a time.
About Ryan Hunt
W. Ryan Hunt is Director of Marketing at Keona Health. He has 15 years of experience in software engineering, digital strategy, and marketing across government, media, and health technology.
