Your marketing dashboard is lying to you, and it’s costing you millions in missed revenue.
I’ve looked at dozens of marketing dashboards from medical device and digital therapeutics companies in the $2M to $50M range, and I see the same pattern repeatedly: they’re full of data but empty of insight. They track everything except the things that matter most—both the quantifiable connection to revenue and the qualitative strength of your brand.
Let me show you what I mean and, more importantly, how to fix it.
The typical medical device marketing dashboard is a collection of activity metrics. Website visitors. Email open rates. Social media engagement. Content downloads. Trade show booth traffic. Webinar attendees. It’s measuring motion, not progress.
Here’s the fundamental problem: none of these metrics tell you whether your marketing is making you money or building the brand equity that will make you money tomorrow. You can have increasing website traffic and declining revenue. You can have strong engagement rates and zero pipeline impact. You can have excellent trade show attendance and no brand recognition when it matters most.
The dashboard creates the illusion of performance while obscuring actual results. More critically, it misses what cannot be easily measured but determines whether you win or lose in medical devices: trust.
The Metrics Trap and the Brand Paradox
Most CEOs fall into one of two traps. Either they become obsessed with measuring everything and dismiss anything that can’t be quantified, or they invest heavily in “brand building” without any accountability for results. Both approaches are wrong, and both are expensive.
According to recent medical device research, doctor recommendations lead the way in influencing purchase decisions at 47%, with friends and family at 34% and product reviews at 21%, while nearly half of respondents don’t mind who manufactures their device as long as it performs well. This data reveals something critical: brand matters, but differently than most companies think.
The research shows that according to Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman, 95% of buying decisions are based on emotion. Yet most medical device companies approach marketing as if decisions are made purely on technical specifications. You’re selling to humans who make emotional decisions and then justify them with logic, but your marketing dashboard measures only the logical justification.
Measuring the impact of branding can be challenging because it doesn’t produce quantifiable metrics, and while metrics such as customer engagement, number of leads and revenue are certainly influenced by branding, their success or failure cannot be directly attributed to it. This is the paradox: the things that matter most are hardest to measure, but that doesn’t make them less real.
I worked with a digital therapeutics company last year that had perfect marketing metrics. Strong website traffic, high engagement rates, impressive content download numbers. But they weren’t winning competitive deals. When we dug deeper, we discovered that nobody remembered their brand when it came time to make a buying decision. They had activity but no presence. They had metrics but no trust.
Before a consumer decides to let a doctor implant a medical device in their body, they need to trust that it will be safe, and companies earn trust by delivering on their brand promise and continuously building relationships. This trust doesn’t show up on your activity dashboard, but it determines whether you’re in the consideration set when a hospital makes a purchasing decision.
What Your Dashboard Should Actually Track
Let me give you a framework for building a marketing dashboard that balances the art and science of medical device marketing. It’s built around understanding both quantifiable business impact and qualitative brand strength.
First: Pipeline Contribution and Velocity
You need to know what marketing is contributing to actual sales opportunities. Not leads. Not inquiries. Pipeline. Opportunities that sales has accepted and is working toward close.
Your dashboard should track pipeline generated by marketing source, by campaign, by channel, and by time period. But equally important, you need to track deal velocity—how fast opportunities move through your sales process and whether marketing engagement accelerates that velocity.
I’ve worked with medical device companies where this analysis revealed that deals with high marketing content engagement closed 30% faster than those with low engagement. That’s marketing’s contribution showing up not in pipeline creation alone, but in sales acceleration. Both matter. Both should be tracked.
Second: Customer Acquisition Efficiency
Track your customer acquisition cost by cohort and by source. This tells you marketing efficiency and whether you’re getting smarter about converting investment into customers. If your CAC is increasing while revenue per customer stays flat, you’re becoming less efficient. That’s a warning signal.
But here’s where brand matters: loyal customers are more likely to continue purchasing your products even in the face of competition or market challenges, and they’re also more likely to recommend your brand to others, becoming powerful brand advocates and contributing to organic business growth.
Companies with strong brands have lower customer acquisition costs over time because their reputation does work that advertising dollars would otherwise have to do. Your dashboard needs to track both the immediate CAC and the trend over time. If your brand is strengthening, CAC should decline as organic referrals and reputation reduce the cost of reaching and converting new customers.
Third: Brand Health Indicators
This is where most medical device companies fail. They either ignore brand completely or they measure it in ways that don’t matter.
A brand is more than a logo and name; it is the value perceived by your customers, beyond each individual product you manufacture. You need to understand whether that perception is strengthening or weakening, and whether it’s helping or hurting your ability to compete.
Track unprompted brand awareness among your target accounts. When a hospital CFO is asked to name medical device companies in your category, do they mention you without being prompted? If not, you’re not in their consideration set, regardless of how good your product is.
Survey your customers and prospects about brand perception. Not whether they like your logo. Whether they trust your company. Whether they believe you’ll be around in five years. Whether they see you as innovative or safe. Whether your brand makes them more or less likely to recommend you. Nearly two-thirds of consumers seek a connection with a medical brand, and connections breed trust, which in turn creates customer loyalty.
Track your position in competitive evaluations. When you’re in a competitive bid, what position are you typically in? Are you the preferred vendor who wins on trust and relationship, or are you the challenger who has to win on price? Your position in that dynamic tells you about brand strength.
Fourth: Market Influence and Thought Leadership
This one’s harder to quantify but essential to track. Are you shaping market conversations, or are you reacting to them? When industry publications write about trends in your category, do they quote your executives? When hospitals discuss best practices, do they reference your content?
In the medical device industry, building a trusted brand can be challenging as medtech companies must navigate stringent regulations while positioning themselves as leaders in innovation, safety, and efficacy. Part of building that trust is demonstrating expertise that goes beyond your products.
Track speaking engagements at major industry events. Track media mentions and the sentiment of those mentions. Track whether your content is being shared and referenced by industry influencers. These are leading indicators of brand strength that will eventually translate to market share.
The Integration Point: Where Numbers and Narrative Meet
Here’s what most CEOs miss: the numbers and the narrative aren’t separate. They’re interconnected. Strong brand reduces customer acquisition costs. Thought leadership accelerates deal velocity. Trust increases win rates.
Your dashboard needs to show both sides of this equation. On one side, the hard metrics: pipeline, conversion rates, CAC, revenue per customer. On the other side, the brand indicators: awareness, perception, trust, competitive position.
The art is in understanding how they connect. When brand awareness increases, does CAC decline? When thought leadership improves, does deal velocity increase? When trust strengthens, do win rates improve? These connections are where marketing creates asymmetric value—where investing in hard-to-measure brand work produces measurable business results.
I’ve seen this play out repeatedly. A medical device company invests in building authentic relationships with frontline clinicians, creating grassroots advocacy that generates patient and provider demand. It’s hard to measure the ROI of each individual relationship. But six months later, hospitals are calling them because clinicians are requesting their device. The brand work created quantifiable pipeline that never would have appeared on a traditional activity dashboard.
What This Means for Your Company
If your marketing dashboard only shows activity metrics, you’re managing theater, not results. If it only shows short-term conversion metrics, you’re optimizing for today at the expense of tomorrow. If it ignores the brand entirely, you’re building a house without a foundation.
The medical device industry is projected to grow significantly through 2029. That growth will go to companies that build both efficient operations and trusted brands. You need marketing leadership that understands this balance, that can defend brand investments with business logic while also proving marketing’s contribution to revenue.
The dashboard I’m describing requires different infrastructure than most companies have built. It requires CRM integration, marketing automation, regular brand perception studies, and most importantly, marketing leadership that thinks about both the art and science of building market position.
But here’s the hard truth: if you can’t build this dashboard, you don’t understand your marketing’s business impact. You’re flying blind. You’re making decisions based on either pure intuition or pure metrics, when the answer lies in understanding how they connect.
The companies that win in medical devices and digital therapeutics are the ones whose marketing leaders can walk into a board meeting and explain both how marketing drove pipeline this quarter and how brand investments are reducing CAC and increasing win rates over time. They’re not showing social media likes or dismissing measurement as impossible. They’re showing the full picture of how marketing creates value.
If your marketing dashboard isn’t showing you both sides of this equation—the measurable and the meaningful—it’s lying to you by omission. It’s telling you about activity while hiding the absence of both short-term results and long-term positioning. Fix it.
To your success,
Sunny
