How Birmingham’s Hare Communications helps healthcare providers and healthcare-services companies break through growth plateaus — using brand strategy, SEO and GEO.
Let’s start with a question you may have asked yourself recently:
“We have a great product. We have a strong team. We’re genuinely better than our competition. So why aren’t we growing faster?”
If you work in healthcare — on the provider side or the services side — this is one of the most common and frustrating positions a company can find itself in. You’re not losing because your service is inferior. You’re losing because your market doesn’t fully understand what you do, why it matters, or why you’re the right choice.
That’s not a sales problem. It’s a marketing problem. More specifically, it’s a brand and messaging problem. Here’s the harder truth: You may not even know you have it.
The growth plateau most healthcare companies don’t recognize
There’s a particular kind of growth plateau that’s endemic to healthcare — especially among B2B healthcare services companies. We’ve seen it repeatedly in our healthcare marketing experience.
It looks like this:
- You’re growing, but more slowly than your opportunity warrants.
- New prospect meetings require lengthy explanations before you can even begin to pitch.
- Your best clients understand you perfectly — but those clients found you through referrals, not marketing.
- Your website generates traffic, but not the right kind. And not enough of it converts.
- When a hospital executive asks about you, the person recommending you struggles to explain what you do in one sentence.
Sound familiar? Each of those symptoms points to the same underlying condition: A value proposition that hasn’t been clearly articulated, strategically positioned, or consistently communicated.
This is actually the most common marketing challenge among companies offering genuinely complex, high-value services. And the healthcare sector — with its regulatory complexity, multi-stakeholder decision-making, and jargon-heavy environment — is particularly susceptible.
The companies we’ve helped most weren’t failing. They were simply succeeding below their potential. That’s the gap we close.
Why healthcare marketing is different — and harder
Marketing a healthcare-services company to hospital executives, CFOs, pharmacy directors or clinical administrators is categorically different from most B2B marketing. The buyers are sophisticated, skeptical and time-constrained. Their stakes are high — financially, clinically and regulatorily — and they’re bombarded with vendors claiming to solve their problems.
To break through that environment, your marketing has to do three things simultaneously:
- Educate, not just promote. Hospital decision-makers need to understand your services-category before they can evaluate your solution.
- Differentiate specifically, not generically. “We improve outcomes” and “we reduce costs” describe every competitor in your space.
- Build trust before the sales conversation begins. The decision-maker who arrives already convinced is a completely different prospect from the one who needs convincing from scratch.
This was exactly the problem we faced when we began working with ProxsysRx, the Birmingham-based Pharmacy Services company whose results you may have already read about — either on this blog, or in our case study.
ProxsysRx offers a genuinely extraordinary service: Helping non-profit hospitals use Pharmacy and Pharmacy-related services to improve health system income and patient outcomes — while reducing readmissions. Their primary income streams come from: 1) Managing health systems’ 340B drug pricing programs, and 2) Building, staffing, stocking, launching and managing on-campus specialty pharmacies. The financial impact they generate client hospitals is enormous.
The problem? Almost none of their target market knew they existed — and those who did couldn’t clearly articulate what ProxsysRx actually did.
Our three-stage process for breaking healthcare growth plateaus
We don’t start with tactics. We start with clarity. Here’s how that process works.
Stage One: Get the healthcare-organization’s message right
Before we write a word of content or spend a dollar on media, we do the strategic work that most agencies skip: We get crystal-clear on what you do, who you do it for, and why it matters more than any alternative.
For ProxsysRx, this meant a complete brand rebuild — new logo, new brand standards, new messaging architecture and a new website. Their original homepage headline was “Pharmacy Solutions For Health Systems And Their Communities.”
It was vague and confusing, and it failed to differentiate ProxsysRx in the market.
Our rebrand gave ProxsysRx a foundation for everything that followed. Every piece of content, every email, every ad and every sales tool was built on that clarified strategic platform.
Stage Two: Build healthcare content that earns authority
Once we get the message right, we launch a content campaign — and this is where most healthcare marketing either wins or loses.
Generic content — the kind that’s written by generalists with little to no prior healthcare-services marketing experience — actually does more damage than no content at all. Hospital executives and healthcare administrators can spot surface-level thinking immediately. When they see it, they move on. Possibly to a competitor who’s invested in content that demonstrates genuine expertise.
The content we produced for ProxsysRx was created differently. Over four years, we published fifty targeted 340B posts — each one built around the specific questions and search queries used by the hospital executives and program managers who were ProxsysRx’s primary prospects. We also produced an 18,423-word Pillar Post — a comprehensive, authoritative guide to the 340B program that became one of the most-linked resources in the space.
The results:
- Within two months: We ranked for 50 critical keywords. Five in the Top 10.
- By Q4 2025: We ranked for 926 keywords, with 61 at Number One, 94 on Page One, and 129 in the Top Five.
- Backlinks: Our best-performing post generated more than 1,100 backlinks — a significant benchmark for Domain Authority.
- Leads: In 2025 alone, our content delivered thousands of leads to ProxsysRx’s development team.
Stage Three: Optimize for AI — not just Google
This is the stage of healthcare marketing that most agencies aren’t talking about yet. We are, because we’ve been doing it — and the results are compelling.
GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — means creating content that AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude and Google Gemini cite as authoritative source material when answering queries from your target market. And it’s the future of Search.
Your prospects are increasingly getting their information from AI assistants, not just search engines. And those assistants pull from a relatively small pool of content they consider authoritative and trustworthy. Getting into that pool is the new frontier of healthcare B2B marketing.
In November 2025, we asked ChatGPT: “What are the latest 340B updates impacting eligible hospitals’ specialty pharmacies?” — a query that maps directly to ProxsysRx’s most valuable prospects. ChatGPT cited seven of our posts as source materials. Seven.
When your prospects ask AI assistants about your product or service category, does it cite your content? If you’re not sure, the answer is probably no. That’s a problem we can solve.
What this means if you’re a healthcare provider — not a services company
Everything above applies directly to healthcare providers, not just healthcare-services companies. Whether you’re a home health agency competing against national chains, a community hospital competing against larger regional systems, a specialty practice trying to grow its referral base, or a health plan trying to differentiate in a crowded market — the core challenge is identical.
Your market doesn’t understand your value as well as you do. Your competitors are marketing aggressively. And your buyers — whether they’re patients, employers or hospital administrators — are making decisions based on whatever information they find fastest.
The question is: whose information are they finding?
Why Birmingham, Alabama — and why now?
Hare Communications is based in Birmingham. We work with healthcare-services companies and providers across Alabama and the Southeast.
We understand the healthcare market. The hospital systems, the regulatory environment, the community health priorities, the procurement processes — this is the world we work inside. We know the language. We know what decision-makers want. And we know how to build content that resonates with the specific audiences that healthcare organizations are trying to reach.
We’re a comparatively small agency by design. We don’t take on more clients than we can serve at a senior level. When you work with Hare Communications, you work with Francis Hare — with forty-plus years of marketing experience. No junior teams, no account layers, no overhead tax.
If any of this sounds familiar – –
Maybe your healthcare company or practice is growing — but not as fast as it should be, given the quality of what you offer. We’d love to have a conversation.
We helped one hospital services company grow 50x in just over four years. We helped the owners of a healthcare-software company optimize its value among prospective buyers through a comprehensive rebranding. We’ve worked with healthcare providers ranging from private orthopedic practices to community hospital systems.
The common thread in all of our work: We got the message right first. Then we made sure the right people heard it.
To schedule a preliminary conversation at your convenience, contact Francis Hare at hare@harebrains.com or 205-873-1105.
Related Reading:
How We Helped A Hospital Services Company Grow From $20M to $1B
Healthcare Companies & Providers Don’t Need More Marketing. They Need the Right Message.
