Everyone needs effective advertising and marketing to attract and retain paying customers.
That includes every healthcare organization.
Today, more healthcare advertising and marketing happens online.
Patients, like consumers, increasingly control how they find and engage with providers. They rely on internet searches to find health information. They leave reviews and comments on social media to rate care. And they click on ads to learn more about providers.
This all means one thing:
Healthcare marketers need to do more-and better-digital advertising and marketing than ever. They need to make every advertising and marketing campaign count.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can help.
AI is the umbrella term for a suite of technologies that learn to improve on their own. And there are tons of technologies for AI in advertising available today that do advertising and marketing tasks better and faster than humans.
Read on to learn how.
Before we get into AI for healthcare advertising and marketing...
Let's establish what we mean when we say "healthcare advertising and marketing."
We see healthcare advertising as any paid advertising that reaches patients with marketing messages. The goal of this advertising is to convince a potential patient to establish a relationship with providers. Today, more advertising takes place online via pay-per-click (PPC) healthcare ads and social media advertising, which we focus on here.
We define healthcare marketing as any non-paid effort that attracts a prospective patient to your website or brand. These efforts include publishing SEO-focused content marketing to rank for key medical terms. They also include running patient-focused social media marketing to attract attention on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media channels.
Unfortunately, both paid advertising and organic marketing are hard to do. It's often difficult to accurately plan, measure, and execute data-driven campaigns with proven ROI.
This is where artificial intelligence comes in.
Healthcare advertising and marketing online is so important because patients are increasingly using digital channels to find providers.
Without effective advertising and marketing, providers risk losing ground to more adept competitors.
Yet, keeping up with competitors is costly. It requires more digital ad budget, more content, and more social media engagement. And, even when you do it right, it requires much more headcount.
Forward-thinking providers have turned to AI to help.
AI has the power to augment and automate advertising and marketing activities. AI tools can also become more intelligent over time, delivering better performance the longer an advertiser or marketer uses them.
Intrigued?
Keep reading to see exactly how AI can benefit you.
Healthcare advertising and marketing efforts often focus on three key areas, all of which AI can improve:
Let's take a look at how AI impacts your healthcare advertising strategy and healthcare marketing strategy in each area.
Today, some AI tools can run ad campaigns for you by automatically assessing your ad accounts, finding lookalike audiences, and allocating budgets for maximum ROI. (One company even used AI to get a 3,000% return on ad spend.)
Other AI tools can help your human teams manage PPC campaigns. While these tools won't do everything for you, they will recommend best practices and actions to reduce budgets and improve performance, saving you time and money.
Last, but certainly not least, some AI tools can even predict ad performance before you launch a single campaign.
AI is also used to create and optimize content marketing like blog posts and web pages. There are already AI tools that can write natural language on any topic you choose. (We even experimented with writing an entire blog post using only AI!)
AI platforms also exist to optimize your existing content and help you produce content that ranks in search. These platforms use advanced machine learning to analyze all articles in search results for a given keyword, then tell you exactly what to do to rank for it.
Marketers and advertisers use AI to create exceptional experiences across their websites, email marketing, and social media presences.
The list of possible use cases for AI in these areas could fill an entire book and include AI tools that can:
How Do You Advertise and Market Your Healthcare Services with AI?
So, how do you start using AI for healthcare advertising and marketing?
You need to find your use cases.
Here's a quick and easy framework to do that:
First, list out the advertising and marketing activities your team regularly does.
Second, evaluate two primary factors for each activity:
Third, pick some use cases to explore. Select some appealing use cases, then start researching. Often, you can find vendors through sites like ours or just by Googling "AI for [insert use case]."
Below, we have listed several use cases and vendors listed to jumpstart your use of AI.