Why Your Virtual Care Company Shouldn't Be a Marketing Company

Executive Summary

• The patient acquisition funnel has three distinct stages (marketing, enrollment, and care delivery) and most virtual care companies try to build internal expertise in all three.
• Marketing is a specialized discipline where firms like Growth Vanguard have spent years learning what works in healthcare acquisition.
• When marketing drives volume to a funnel optimized for insurance coverage, fewer patients hit dead ends and the entire experience improves.
• The most successful virtual care companies focus relentlessly on clinical excellence and partner with specialists for everything else.

The early-stage trap

For virtual care companies at scale, strong in-house growth teams absolutely make sense. The best have internal marketing expertise that serves as a genuine differentiator, managing the end-to-end funnel and optimizing ROI on every dollar spent. But getting to that scale is the hard part. Early-stage companies rarely have the volume to justify a full in-house growth function, and the learning curve is expensive. Every dollar spent figuring out what works is a dollar not spent on patient care or runway extension.

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This is where working with specialized agencies changes the math. A firm like Growth Vanguard brings years of pattern recognition across dozens of healthcare companies, which means early-stage teams can skip the trial-and-error phase and start with playbooks that already work. As companies grow, the model typically evolves: some capabilities come in-house, others stay with external partners, and the mix shifts based on where the ROI is strongest. The goal isn't to outsource forever. The goal is to get to scale faster by leveraging expertise you can't yet afford to build internally.

The funnel nobody talks about

Every virtual care patient moves through three stages: they discover your service, they enroll and verify coverage, and they receive care. Marketing, enrollment, care delivery. Each stage requires different expertise, different systems, and different operational muscle. The companies that scale fastest recognize that their competitive advantage is clinical, and they partner with specialists for everything else rather than trying to build institutional knowledge from scratch.

What marketing expertise actually looks like

Tim Ming founded Growth Vanguard after spending years as Head of Growth Marketing at Amwell, where he helped build the marketing engine that took the company through its IPO. He's built a team with deep expertise across the largest players in virtual care. Nick Caughel was the first consumer marketing lead at Teladoc, where he built and managed the digital go-to-market strategy and drove 40%+ growth in member registrations year over year as the company went public. Brett Doyle rebuilt and led the lifecycle marketing program at Talkiatry. Together, this team has seen virtual care giants scale from early-stage companies to publicly traded platforms. That depth of experience is nearly impossible to replicate with internal hires.

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Growth Vanguard focuses on healthcare patient acquisition as well as patient retention and engagement, with roughly 95% of clients running direct-to-consumer. When we asked Ming what channels work best, his answer surprised us with its simplicity: "Paid search all day. It's very boring." But what actually differentiates results, he explained, isn't the channel selection itself—it's the rigor of testing and optimization that comes after. They prefer pre/post testing over A/B testing because healthcare audiences are too niche for rapid statistical significance, a methodological insight that most internal marketing hires learn the hard way after burning through budget on inconclusive experiments.

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Consider their work with a growth stage behavioral health company. When Growth Vanguard started working with them, they were spending $100,000 per month on marketing. Over three years, that increased to $600,000 per month as the company scaled, and they raised an $88 million Series C along the way. That kind of growth requires expertise built over years across multiple companies.

When marketing meets insurance reality

Here's where the funnel gets interesting. Growth Vanguard can drive volume all day, but what happens when patients land on your site depends entirely on what comes next. Ming described a common scenario: a virtual care company has contracts covering maybe 10% of American lives. They turn on paid marketing, drive interested patients to the site, and then watch most of them bounce when they discover their insurance isn't accepted. Ninety percent of marketing spend is essentially driving patients to a dead end.

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"The funnel feels better" when insurance coverage is broad, Ming told us. When a company works with Bridge and suddenly covers 80% of lives instead of 10%, the math changes completely. Marketing dollars convert into actual patients instead of disappointed website visitors. We've seen conversion rates improve 2-5x when a partner adds insurance or expands coverage through Bridge. Same patients, same clinical offering, just dramatically less friction when patients try to verify coverage and understand costs. Marketing and enrollment are connected stages of the same funnel, and pouring money into patient acquisition without solving insurance friction is like filling a bathtub with the drain open.

The full-funnel partnership in practice

Neura Health offers a useful example of how this works when the pieces come together. The virtual neurology company has been working with Growth Vanguard's partners on SEM for over three years, building a sophisticated patient acquisition engine. They also work with Bridge for eligibility and insurance operations. This combination allows them to see where the funnel breaks and fix it systematically. Neura's leadership gets to focus on clinical innovation (their coaching model, their symptom tracking app, their care protocols) because they're not also trying to become experts in Google Ads optimization and payer contracting simultaneously.

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The alternative is what Ming described as "the learning, struggling phase," the months or years companies spend figuring out marketing and operations through trial and error. Working with experienced partners means you "don't have to be in that learning, struggling phase for as long." You get to profitability faster, which means you get to focus on care faster.

The B2B2C dimension

Not every virtual care company goes direct-to-consumer. Some work primarily through employers and payers, acquiring patients through benefits relationships rather than advertising. Ming noted that even companies with strong B2B2C ambitions often need direct-to-consumer capabilities as a complement. The payer partnerships that seem promising often deliver less than 5% of patient volume, even when companies want them to drive 50%. Direct-to-consumer becomes a way to control your own destiny while B2B2C relationships develop.

What this means for your company

If you're building a virtual care company, the question worth asking is: what's actually differentiating about what we do? For most companies, the honest answer is clinical. The care model, the patient experience, the outcomes you can deliver.

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But here's the thing: excellence at each stage of the funnel is imperative, not optional. You can build the best clinical product in the world, but if your marketing can't find patients efficiently or your insurance coverage leaves 90% of them unable to access care, it doesn't matter. The difference between covering 80% of commercially insured lives on day one with Bridge versus spending years assembling piecemeal contracts is the difference between a company that scales and a company that stalls. That's not table stakes. That's a massive competitive advantage.

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The most successful virtual care companies we work with have figured this out. They build lean organizations focused on clinical excellence, partner with specialists for patient acquisition, and work with Bridge for insurance operations. They pour their energy into the part of the patient experience that only they can deliver. Your patients deserve a company that's exceptional at caring for them, and that's hard to achieve when you're also trying to be a marketing company and an insurance operations company. Focus on what you do best, and let specialists handle the rest.

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The companies scaling fastest in virtual care aren't doing it alone. Talk with Bridge about insurance operations. Talk with Growth Vanguard about patient acquisition and engagement. Then get back to building the care experience only you can deliver.

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