by Fire&Spark ⏐ January 31 2026
Key takeaways
- At scale, B2B2C becomes B2C. Once coverage hits a threshold, you’re a consumer brand—whether you planned it or not.
- DTC is “air cover,” not a replacement. It builds branded demand + trust that lifts HR email, direct mail, brokers, and other eligibility channels.
- The board-case is risk reduction. DTC diversifies your mix so growth doesn’t fall apart when a hero channel softens.
- AI search is changing demand capture now. Intent-rich prompts are replacing broad keywords—making “trophy keyword SEO” a 2026 trap.
- Reputation is summarized instantly. Queries like “Is [Brand] legit?” and “[Brand] vs [Competitor]” are always-on brand tracking you must manage.
- Fast wins come from repurposing what you already have. Turn decks, clinical assets, FAQs, and support scripts into public, high-intent content.
- Let B2B2C data drive DTC. Scale what already converts in mail/HR email into landing pages and AI-optimized content formats.
- Start small, ship weekly. Watch for 90-day signals, then compound impact over 12–18 months.
CMOs in digital health are entering 2026 with a familiar constraint: the growth number is still yours, but the channel landscape keeps changing faster than your org chart.
In the premiere episode of The Digital Health Growth Show, co-hosts Chris and Noah sat down with Karin Underwood (Virta Health) to unpack a question that comes up in closed rooms at scaling B2B2C businesses:
Where does DTC belong when employer and payer distribution still drives the majority of enrollments?
Employer and payer distribution still matters. HR email and direct mail are still crucial enrollment drivers. But this conversation surfaced a reality many leadership teams haven’t fully internalized yet: as coverage expands, the old “employer-first” (or employer-only) model breaks.
If you’re covering a meaningful share of the population, you’re effectively operating as a consumer brand, whether or not your growth spend is allocated to B2B sales. At that point, direct-to-consumer marketing for B2B2C digital health is no longer an option. It’s a vital growth lever that changes the ROI math across your acquisition portfolio.
“At scale, B2B2C becomes B2C.”
That’s the headline insight. Everything else, AI search, long-tail strategy, “air cover,” measurement, flows from it.
DTC marketing for B2B2C digital health becomes mandatory once coverage crosses a threshold
One of the most important surprises from this conversation was the “coverage threshold” concept.
Karin explained that Virta’s footprint now reaches a massive portion of the population across multiple conditions. When coverage gets that broad, you stop behaving like a niche employer benefit and start behaving like a consumer brand with a reputation to manage at scale.
For a CMO, the implication is blunt: your go-to-market model isn’t static. Your marketing mix can’t be static either.
Here’s the paradigm from which the rest of your 2026 deck should flow:
If your covered lives cross a certain threshold, you don’t “add DTC.” You wake up one day and realize you are a DTC brand. Your strategy just hasn’t caught up yet.
DTC marketing for B2B2C digital health is “air cover” that lifts conversion in your hero channels
Most B2B2C CMOs have a couple of hero channels that carry their growth: employer email, direct mail, broker-driven campaigns, and other eligibility-dependent tactics.
Those channels can remain your highest last-touch converters and still be vulnerable: fatigue, deliverability, rising costs, lower engagement, leadership changes at enterprise clients, or simple saturation.
That’s why the most useful way Karin framed DTC wasn’t as a replacement channel. It was as lift.
“At Virta, channels like HR email and direct mail still win on pure conversion. But DTC acts as ‘air cover’ that lifts all those B2B2C channels—through more branded search, higher trust, and better response rates.”
Chris echoed the execution standard CMOs should adopt:
“It doesn’t have to be big, but it has to be consistent over time.”
If you’re only evaluating direct-to-consumer marketing for B2B2C digital health by last-touch attribution, you’ll underinvest. “Air cover” doesn’t show up as cleanly in a channel report, but it’s often the reason your eligibility pushes convert at the rate you’re proud of.
DTC marketing for B2B2C digital health is risk diversification, not a side project
The most board-friendly argument for DTC isn’t “this will be our #1 revenue driver.”
It’s “this reduces dependency on fragile channels.”
If your growth model falls apart when one channel underperforms, that’s not a performance problem; it’s a portfolio problem.
That framing is especially useful in Q4 planning, because CMOs can justify DTC spend as portfolio hedging rather than speculative brand spend. You’re buying resilience.
DTC adds optionality. It’s risk reduction through channel diversification. That’s the investment thesis: optionality and compounding lift.
DTC marketing for B2B2C digital health must adapt to AI search and AEO
AI search isn’t a future trend. Instead, AI search is actively rewriting how people ask health questions, which changes how your brand is discovered and evaluated.
The behavioral shift happening right now: consumers are moving from generic Google queries to conversational prompts in AI tools.
“AI search is rewriting the playbook faster than most teams are reacting.”
If your SEO strategy is still built around trophy keywords, you’re optimizing for the past. AI interfaces reward specificity, context, and intent.
The pattern Karin highlighted is exactly what CMOs should internalize for 2026:
People are no longer just searching “diabetes treatment.” They’re asking: “Weight loss for new moms on GLP-1s,” “How to get off GLP-1s,” “A1C 6.5 reduction,” and “Is brand legit?”
This is where younger brands can outrank incumbents. This is where AI search is most likely to hand you an edge.
DTC marketing for B2B2C digital health needs a new kind of brand tracking: “Is Brand legit?”
This might be the most actionable nugget from the entire conversation: AI search has turned brand perception into a single, summarized answer.
The branded-search conversation is bigger than SEO. It’s the new focus group. It’s the new brand tracker.
The “audit” prompts Karin recommended are operational.
“Grab 50–100 real questions your ICP would ask (non-branded and branded like ‘Is Brand legit?’, ‘Brand reviews,’ ‘Brand vs Competitor’) and see what Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and others show.”
And this is the humility test CMOs can use internally:
When negative info is served about your brand, don’t scoff at it. Remedy it.
“One thing that’s being slept on when it comes to AI search is the branded search side of things… It doesn’t actually matter whether or not those things are true – what matters is there’s enough sentiment online indicating they are, and that can become an issue preventing you from showing up in both traditional search and AI search.”
In 2026, your brand is being summarized in a single paragraph every day inside AI tools, and most teams have no idea what it says.
Treat an “AI search brand audit” as a KPI, not a curiosity.
DTC marketing for B2B2C digital health should be built from “hidden” assets you already own
CMOs often assume DTC means “net-new content production.”
Here’s a better approach: convert internal assets into public demand engines.
- Clinical reports.
- Sales decks.
- Enrollment FAQs.
- The scripts your member support team repeats every day.
These are already proven conversion drivers, you’re just keeping them behind the firewall.
“Turn existing ‘hidden’ assets into DTC fuel… convert the best pieces into public content: web pages, articles, YouTube scripts, tools.”
This is one of the fastest ways to shorten time-to-value in 2026 planning because it avoids the slowest part of content strategy: ideation without validation.
You already have validation. Your org is sitting on it.
DTC marketing for B2B2C digital health can start small, but the cadence must be real
Chris delivered this practical guidance for resource-constrained teams:
“There’s a big difference between doing nothing and something… just small steps.”
Karin’s version of “small steps” was not vague. It was a disciplined operating model
- audit what exists
- identify one or two high-value content formats
- repurpose cross-functional assets
- commit to consistent small bets over time rather than a “big bang” campaign
This is also where AI becomes helpful without risking quality: define “what good looks like,” then scale with guardrails.
“You don’t need a huge content team. You need a couple of proven formats… and the discipline to ship small experiments every week.”
That sentence is your 2026 operating principle.
DTC marketing for B2B2C digital health should be informed by B2B2C performance data
One of the easiest mistakes we can make is treating DTC and employer marketing as separate universes.
Virta’s approach is the opposite: use your B2B2C data to architect your DTC roadmap.
If you know which messages, visuals, offers, and formats move conversion in direct mail and HR email, that insight should shape:
- landing pages
- blog structure
- topic prioritization
- AI-optimized content formats
The learnings gave a perfect example of how granular those insights can be:
Virta tests performance to the point where QR code placement on a mailer can materially change conversion.
That’s not a “mail” insight. That’s a behavioral insight. CMOs should move those insights across channels aggressively.
DTC marketing for B2B2C digital health requires the right expectations: 90-day signals, 12–18 month payoff
CMOs are constantly managing the tension between short-term board expectations (fast proof) and the real-world investments required for sustainable success(long-term investment and compounding returns).
Here is a clean expectation-setting framework you can use when advocating for DTC spend:
Smart teams don’t wait three years to see if DTC works, but they also don’t kill it after 30 days. Look for directional wins in 90 days, then compounding impact over 12–18 months.
This is operational pacing CMOs need: Look for traction in a 90-day plan so you can decide how to invest further.
Three 90-day plays CMOs can take into marketing strategy development right now
If you’re finalizing 2026 plans, this episode helps you answer three questions: where DTC fits in a B2B2C model, what AI search changes about your brand strategy, and how much to invest now to de-risk your channel mix over the next 12–18 months
Here are three concrete 90-day plays:
- Run a cross-channel audit (search + AI + branded queries)
Reset leadership assumptions about visibility and reputation. Make “AI search brand visibility and sentiment” a tracked KPI. - Launch a small, focused long-tail content program
Pick one or two topics tied to your clinical edge. Build 10–12 intent-rich pages that reflect how real members search now, not how marketers searched in 2018. Leverage internal expertise from your B2B sales team, enrollment team, and providers themselves to get your content flywheel started. - Codify and scale 1–2 winning content formats with AI support
Choose a proven asset (a guide, report, FAQ set, high-performing lifecycle message). Turn it into a repeatable template, then use AI to test controlled variations across channels.
What digital health CMOs need to know
At scale, your business model changes whether you admit it or not. If you’ve crossed the coverage threshold, DTC is no longer optional. DTC is “air cover” that lifts all of your channels.
AI search has turned reputation into an always-on, summarized answer, so branded queries like “is [brand] legit?” and “[brand] vs [competitor]” comparisons are now key opportunities to win over persuadable searchers.
The winning teams will run brutally honest audits, build long-tail visibility around clinical edges, and commit to consistent compounding execution with clear data-tracking to measure success and iterate on the approach
Noah captured the essence of this conversation in these words:
“What I heard is that a lot of your journey (at Virta)… has been about adapting… keeping an eye on what those changes are and changing your strategy and approach accordingly… and constantly integrating what’s working in the business into your marketing strategy.”
Are you ready to adapt, to change your strategy, to iterate? Talk to a digital health SEO expert for guidance on your DTC go-to-market.
