AI: The New Frontier of Healthcare Marketing
There’s a certain type of existential crisis that every creative person faces at least once. It comes when we ask ourselves: Is anybody going to see this?
Artificial intelligence may not be a new concept, but it's constantly changing our world in new ways. Indeed, AI has become so ever-present in our lives that we'd all be at a loss if it were suddenly gone. Google, Amazon, self-driving cars, smart assistants, medical implants. Even refrigerators and other household appliances are becoming 'smart.'

Has your marketing?

Artificial intelligence marketing is here. And it's here to stay.

Run-of-the-mill AI can't think like a human (yet), but there are some things it is superbly well-suited to do. When it comes to healthcare marketing, some of those things are total game-changers if you want to create a successful ad campaign in the 21st Century.

Is your ad campaign on life support?

Advertising has always been about getting more people to look at your product over someone else's. Even a lackluster product can be wildly successful if it's put in front of enough of the right people. And that's the trick, isn't it? The right product in front of the right people. Timing, price, and place are factors as well.

But timing, price, and place don't carry much currency on their own without first putting the right product in front of the right people.

The earliest known advertisement is from ancient Egypt, 5000 years ago. If you wanted the most beautiful fabrics made to your personal taste, Hapu would have been your guy. Advertising as we would recognize it today, though, has only been around about 150 years. With the spread of capitalist economies around the world and advancements in the printing press, advertising followed.

Quaint black-and-white newspaper advertisements touting 'miracle cure-all tonics' packed with cocaine or arsenic instantly come to mind. Right alongside soap, cigarettes, and electric corsets on the same page.

Cocaine and arsenic aside, it's hard to imagine such an approach succeeding for your business today, especially if that page is chock full of other ads placed by your direct competition.

That's the limitation of advertising. Market leaders faced increasing pressure from competitors who were offering comparable products at more affordable prices. In order to keep their edge, they needed to get (and keep) more eyes on their brand.

Sound familiar?

The active ingredient? Relevance.

Running ads can feel like you're throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks. Marketing is designed to solve that exact problem: finding out who your target audience is, going where their eyes are, and putting your ad campaign right in front of their faces in a way they cannot resist.

Easier said than done.

People are bombarded by ads almost every waking minute of every day. Most of them flicker right across our retinas without a second thought.

But is it true that sheer quantity alone causes peoples' eyes to glaze over? Think about the city you live in. Millions of other people might live there too, but you’re only good friends with a handful of them. Out of hundreds of restaurants and bars, you have a few regular favorites. Of the thousands of movies released into the world, you know what kind you like to watch.

Neurology even has a concept for it: the Cocktail Party Effect. In a crowded party with hundreds of people present, we’re still able to focus on the one or two voices that interest us. Your brain is surprisingly good at picking out the things you care about from massive amounts of information.

A baseball superfan might be exposed to 5,000 ads in the course of a day. But if one has their team’s logo on it, they’ll look at it for longer and be more likely to remember it later.

Ads get ignored because they're not relevant to the viewer's life.

Targeted ad campaigns are the cure for your marketing ills.

If you've so much as dipped your toe into the tech world, then you'll recognize the word 'algorithm.' This word is just another way of saying, 'We told the artificial intelligence to look for these kinds of things, in this particular way, and show us what they have in common.'

Your average AI is only as smart as the information it's given. But it is brilliant at analyzing that information once it knows what it's looking for.

As just one example, a marketer can use opt-in tracking cookies to track user's online activity, find out where a potential customer looks, what they click, how long they stay, and almost anything else that might indicate what they care about. This generates a flood of information, way too much for a human to sift through — but this is the kind of job AI was simply made for.

The result?

A personalized ad campaign tailor-made for your target audience, providing native advertising right where they are most likely to see and engage with you.

Opt-in cookies are just the beginning of how AI marketing will change your business forever. Optimized pay-per-click campaigns, personalized website experiences, customer service chatbots, and so much more.

Artificial intelligence is your prescription for a successful future.

Isn't it time for your healthcare marketing to stop living in the past?

At Watson Clark, we’re bringing the future to your business today by building targeted ad campaigns for the pharma space. We target ads to healthcare practitioners by using omnichannel marketing, showing you returns that are far better than average in this hard-to-reach market.

If you aren't working toward a future of personalized AI in your marketing, you can bet your competitors are.
Give your healthcare marketing a new lease on life by talking to a Watson Clark expert today.