Uses of AI In Healthcare Marketing for Patient Engagement and ROI

The benefits of AI in healthcare marketing are becoming increasingly obvious. Clinics, hospitals, care providers, and even B2B companies are discovering new uses for cutting-edge AI tools. They’re not just turning to cutting-edge generative AI platforms like ChatGPT to discover new ideas for marketing campaigns or to develop content at scale.

Innovative marketing teams in the healthcare industry are using AI to dive deeper into user data and personalize marketing strategies for specific audience segments. They’re harnessing AI tools and conversational AI technology to automate and improve customer outreach and engagement strategies and improve relationships with customers.

Some brands are even using AI-powered platforms, like Clerk Chat, to unlock the potential of omnichannel marketing efforts through SMS, dive deeper into campaign insights, and intelligently optimize spending strategies.

Ready to discover how using AI in healthcare marketing could benefit your company? Here’s your complete guide to the emerging tools and opportunities you can explore, and the challenges you’ll need to overcome to ensure success.

AI Tools and Technologies Influencing Healthcare Marketing

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is everywhere these days. It’s enhancing the way we manage and use data, improving productivity and efficiency in the workplace, and even nurturing creativity. In the marketing world, countless companies have already discovered the benefits of AI tech and tools.

In fact, around 88% of marketers now rely on AI solutions to uncover insights quickly, enhance decision-making processes, create and optimize content, or analyze campaigns.

In the healthcare marketing space, AI tools offer a unique opportunity. They can help businesses to create more engaging content at scale, nurture and support patients more effectively with a conversational marketing strategy, and upgrade their approach to personalization.

Types of AI Marketing Technologies in Healthcare

Currently, the number of AI tools and technologies for AI in healthcare marketing is growing rapidly, particularly with the advent of new generative AI systems, large language models, and machine learning algorithms. Just some of the most common tools used in the industry include:

• Generative AI: Tools, such as ChatGPT, Jasper, and Midjourney help healthcare marketers create content faster, establish ideas for marketing campaigns, and even convert existing content into new formats.
• Data analysis tools: AI-powered tools for data analysis, like Salesforce Einstein, Tableau, and Power BI help businesses to understand their customer segments, identify behavioral patterns, and craft more intelligent campaigns.
• AI reporting tools: Optimize marketing campaigns, with insights into which strategies work, what types of content appeal to specific audiences, and even when to follow up with leads.
• AI bots and assistants: Bots, like the Clerk Chat AI SMS assistant allow companies to take a conversational approach to connecting with and nurturing the audience. They can send targeted messages to customers automatically, answer their questions, and even close sales.
• AI automation tools: Automation platforms can leverage AI to automate various healthcare marketing tasks, such as sending promotional messages to customers across channels, running A/B tests, or even optimizing content with specific keywords and phrases.

Some AI tools in healthcare marketing can even help businesses maintain compliance with industry standards when working on promotional strategies. For instance, AI tools can instantly detect sensitive information in marketing content or monitor “opt out” requests so you don’t fall victim to non-compliance with marketing laws and regulations.

AI in Healthcare Marketing Applications

As mentioned above, the potential use cases and applications for AI in healthcare marketing are evolving all the time. Right now, there are a few key areas where AI technologies are already delivering incredible results in marketing strategies and campaigns.

Here are some of the top applications worth exploring.

Conducting User Research with AI

Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of AI in healthcare marketing is that it helps healthcare companies to learn more about their target audiences and their specific needs. Many healthcare organizations target a wide range of stakeholders with specific priorities and concerns.

Trying to reach countless audience members with the same “generic” campaigns rarely delivers great results. However, with AI, companies can dive into the data they collect about their customers, to create more tailored social, online, email, and text marketing campaigns.

Businesses can use data gathered from surveys, website analytics, and platform reports, to create in-depth customer profiles that guide every future marketing strategy. These profiles can offer immediate insights into patient trends, concerns, expectations, and behaviors, helping companies to decide which messages to send to audiences and when, and even which services to promote.

Content Ideation with AI and Data Analytics

Effective marketing relies heavily on content, whether it’s the blog posts and articles you share on your website, the posts you promote on social media, or the emails you create to nurture and inform customers. However, coming up with engaging content ideas isn’t easy.

Even if you know what kind of topics and concepts your customers are interested in, it can be difficult to produce consistently valuable content at scale. Using AI in healthcare marketing can be extremely useful here. Based on your data, market research, and information taken from the web, tools like ChatGPT can generate a huge range of content ideas for you to work with.

They can surface valuable topics from conversations with customers and stakeholders you transcribe, or industry reports. These tools can even help you to plan out comprehensive email or conversational SMS campaigns that draw attention to a new product, event, or service.

Using AI for ideation can help healthcare companies save time on content production, while ensuring they can create a more diverse range of content assets too.

AI in Healthcare Marketing Content Creation

There are risks to relying too heavily on AI for content creation. Even the most advanced AI models can generate pretty “generic” text, and feeding too much sensitive data into an AI system to help it create compelling content can lead to security issues, particularly for healthcare companies.

However, AI in healthcare marketing can definitely make content creation easier, and more streamlined. For instance, with tools like Jasper.ai, ChatGPT, WriteSonic and Copy.ai, healthcare companies can quickly create outlines or “drafts” for articles, blog posts, social media captions, and so on. There are even specialist solutions available for certain marketing strategies.

For instance, if you’re using SMS workflows in your healthcare marketing strategy, you could use a platform like Clerk Chat to leverage AI tools that can create SMS templates for healthcare, fill them with valuable content based on user profiles, and tailor them to your brand’s voice.

There are even AI tools that can help convert content into new formats for omnichannel marketing campaigns. For instance, you can use tools like Midjourney to create images or videos from blog posts, or you can use other AI systems to convert articles into podcast or video scripts.

Using AI for Marketing Optimization

Aside from simply creating content and marketing campaigns with AI tools, healthcare companies can use intelligent tools to optimize and improve the impact of their content. There are numerous ways to do this. For instance, say you wanted to create a more in-depth article with direct quotes from a healthcare thought leader. You could use an AI tool to summarize a conversation or interview with that professional, and extract quotes for your content.

If you wanted to boost your chances of ranking on the search engine results pages with specific keywords in articles and blog posts, you could leverage AI-powered SEO tools. Solutions like SEMRush’s ContentShake can suggest keywords for campaigns based on your goals, and even embed these phrases naturally into your content.

Perhaps most significantly, companies can use AI in healthcare marketing to instantly personalize and customize content for different audiences. AI can personalize text messages and emails based on previous interactions with customers or pre-built profiles. It can use data from your business to add specific details to marketing messages, like the times and dates of upcoming events.

AI can even translate content into different languages or adjust the tone of messages and content to suit specific groups. For instance, you could use a tool like ChatGPT to convert an article previously tailored to healthcare practitioners into a blog ideal for everyday consumers, removing jargon and complex language in an instant.

Enhancing Marketing Strategies with AI

On top of all the use cases mentioned above, embracing AI in healthcare marketing can also give you an excellent way to improve and enhance your marketing strategies. Analytical tools built into marketing platforms, like Clerk Chat, can give you deeper insights into the results of your campaigns, helping you to make more strategic decisions in future.

The AI assistant on Clerk Chat, for instance, can dive into the results of a specific campaign for pediatrics texting, for instance, and tell you which strategies achieved the highest open rates and conversions. It could show you when the best time to send initial marketing messages and follow-up messages are, based on customer interactions, and SMS compliance laws.

Some AI tools can even analyze historical data to give you predictive insights you can use in future marketing efforts too. For instance, they can tell you what customers are likely to be searching for online, or which questions they’re likely to ask your sales team, based on previous data.

This can help healthcare marketers make informed decisions about how to spend their marketing budget, and stay one step ahead of the competition.

Using AI for Personalized Patient Engagement

While there are numerous use cases for AI in healthcare marketing, the biggest impact for most companies will come from using AI tools to personalize and improve patient engagement. To really connect with patients, drive loyalty, and increase sales in today’s world, companies need more than just eye-catching content and social media campaigns.

They need a way to constantly reach out and connect with customers, responding to their questions and keeping them informed. AI-powered solutions are excellent for automating and scaling customer engagement. AI chatbots are a great example of this.

Unlike a standard chatbot, a conversational AI bot like the Clerk Chat assistant can interact with customers in real-time, across a range of channels like SMS, WhatsApp, and more.

This bot can understand what customers are looking for, or what they need from your healthcare company, and send tailored messages to them directly. For instance, they can suggest specific services or products based on a patient’s unique needs.

These bots can also automatically follow-up with customers, offering personalized healthcare advice, and building their credibility of your company, or sending text reminders for appointments.

This doesn’t just make it easier to maintain customer engagement over time, it also means you can improve the customer experience, and increase your chances of conversions with personalized, automated texting strategies.

Challenges with AI in Healthcare Marketing

Using AI in healthcare marketing can be extremely valuable. It can help businesses to save time, improve efficiency, and increase the ROI of promotional campaigns, while keeping costs low.

However, there are still challenges to consider. AI solutions are only as good as the data they’re given, and in healthcare, it’s critical to ensure that you’re protecting the sensitive data your patients share with your business.

Additionally, AI technologies can still make mistakes. They may be subject to hallucinations or instances of “bias” based on the training data they have. Here’s what you need to know about the two main challenges of AI for healthcare marketing strategies.

Data Compliance and Security in AI Healthcare Marketing

First, healthcare companies are subject to strict rules and regulations that will have a direct impact on any marketing strategy they use. For instance, if you’re using SMS for healthcare communication, with an AI bot that can respond to and nurture audiences, you’ll need to adhere to HIPAA compliant text messaging rules.

This means you’ll need to refrain from feeding personal health information to AI solutions that don’t have a Business Associate Agreement in place, and make sure any data you do share with your bot isn’t accessible by third parties. Plus, you’ll need to be cautious about how much personal information you reference in content created with AI, or bot-generated marketing messages.

For instance, your appointment reminder text templates shouldn’t include any sensitive information at the beginning that could easily be seen by third parties.

You’ll also need to be cautious about protecting your AI databases from intruders, which means implementing comprehensive encryption and access control strategies into your technology kit.

Many healthcare companies will also need to make sure they’re archiving text messages and other communication data securely, for auditing purposes. Ensuring your technology integrates with a robust HIPAA-compliant archiving solution is crucial.

Beyond that, there are more general compliance and security regulations healthcare companies need to consider too. For instance, you’ll still need to make sure you’re using “SMS opt-in” strategies to gain explicit consent to communicate with your patients for marketing purposes.

Ethical Implications of AI in Healthcare Marketing

Beyond carefully considering how to protect SMS and other AI-powered marketing strategies from data compliance and security issues, it’s also important to be aware of the ethical implications of using AI in healthcare marketing.

First, there are plagiarism issues to consider, particularly if you’re using AI to create content, as some tools can regurgitate and reuse content without the permission of the original creator. Secondly, there’s the risk of AI hallucinations to think about.

AI solutions can sometimes present “false” information as factual and correct, coming to incorrect conclusions based on what it finds online or in your databases. That’s why it’s so important to double-check the content your AI systems create, and fact-check information.

The last thing you want is for your AI tools to help you generate a high-quality article, full of suggestions, tips, and information that actually turns out to be untrue. This doesn’t just put your brand’s reputation at risk, it could expose patients to damaging and dangerous information.

We’ve all heard of AI tools like Google’s AI overview giving customers problematic advice like telling them to “glue cheese” to a pizza to stop it from sliding off in the past. Don’t take chances with the safety of your customers, validate everything you create.

Embracing AI in Healthcare Marketing

Despite the potential risks, it’s impossible to overlook the potential of AI in healthcare marketing. Whether you’re looking for a way to scale your marketing efforts, improve engagement with patients, or simply create more personalized, relevant content, AI is a fantastic tool.

Solutions like Clerk Chat’s AI toolkit even make it easy to embed AI into your marketing strategy with minimal risks. Not only can Clerk Chat’s assistant send personalized messages to customers for you, and follow-up with patients, but it can help you create automated campaigns from scratch for unique audience groups, and surface insights from campaign data.

Plus, because Clerk Chat integrates with archiving tools, makes it easy to monitor opt-in and opt-out rates, and includes a range of extensive security features, it can help healthcare companies to mitigate AI marketing threats. Discover how Clerk Chat can transform your promotional strategy today, as the ultimate tool for AI healthcare marketing.