Building Global Patient Acquisition through Multilingual Precision
Context
Industry: Healthcare / International Patient Acquisition / Performance Media
The Problem:
For UCLA Health, international patient growth required more than awareness. It required trust across borders, languages, and highly sensitive care categories.
The challenge was especially complex because the audiences were not uniform. Prospective patients in Canada, Mexico, the Middle East, Hong Kong, and Taiwan were moving through different media ecosystems, speaking different languages, and evaluating care through very different cultural and behavioral filters. In high-consideration categories such as oncology, orthopedics, and telehealth, generic messaging was never going to be enough.
UCLA Health needed a system that could do three things at once: elevate the brand internationally, localize the message without losing institutional credibility, and convert high-intent audiences into measurable patient interest while remaining compliant in a highly regulated healthcare environment.
Solution
We built a multilingual acquisition framework that treated each market, platform, and audience segment as part of a coordinated global demand engine.
- Localized Messaging at Global Scale: Developed market-specific creative systems tailored to diverse international audiences, including Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, allowing UCLA Health to communicate quality care in culturally relevant ways.
- Channel-by-Channel Role Assignment: Structured each platform around its strongest function, using Search for high-intent conversion, Programmatic for scaled awareness, Paid Social for audience expansion and engagement, and specialized environments such as LinkedIn and Elsevier for professional and high-value targeting.
- Healthcare-Specific Precision: Focused messaging around service lines with strong international demand, particularly oncology, orthopedics, and telehealth, ensuring the brand appeared in moments of active research and treatment consideration.
- Regional Market Adaptation: Built distinct regional activations for Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as culturally specific campaigns across Chinese-language social ecosystems, making the brand feel both globally elite and locally legible.
- Trust Through Design and Relevance: Used custom identity systems, translated assets, and audience-specific storytelling to overcome both language barriers and perceived distance, reframing UCLA Health from a U.S. institution into an accessible international care destination.
- Performance-Driven Optimization: Allocated budget toward channels and tactics with the highest proven conversion efficiency, particularly search-led acquisition, while continuously refining targeting and remarketing logic to improve lead quality over time.