AI for Healthcare Marketing: Are You Ready for It?

Hospitals spend over 2.9 billion dollars on healthcare marketing in a given year. If you include pharmacies, health insurance, physical therapy, and other forms of healthcare, that number gets bigger. 

It’s safe to say that healthcare marketing is big business. However, the world of marketing is changing fast. Have you considered AI, predictive analytics, or similar tactics that could help?

It’s a simple question: are you ready to incorporate AI into healthcare marketing? We’ve assembled a guide to help you learn more and take control of your healthcare marketing tactics. Let’s get started!

What’s The Goal?

These days, patient acquisition mimics a typical customer lifecycle. Finding the right healthcare provider is more than just a matter of convenience.

Do you take their insurance? Do their values align with yours? Do your services align with their season of life—are they likely to need an organ donation, a knee replacement, or treatment for a rare form of cancer?

These are just a few of the questions that patients are asking when they kickstart the customer lifecycle. Healthcare decisions aren’t made based on proximity anymore. 

Instead, healthcare marketing is now an SEO game too. Here’s how it works. 

Pay-per-click advertising is the name of the game for healthcare marketing. This advertising convinces exact patients in need of your services that care is available, efficient, affordable, empathetic, and speedy. After all, no one wants to spend hours in a waiting room!

The goal is to get potential patients/customers to click on advertising to learn more. Eventually, the customer lifecycle will evolve till they reach out to make contact and set up an appointment.

However, healthcare marketing has its own challenges. It involves publishing SEO-optimized content, PPC advertising, social media marketing, mailers, and phone calls. This involves paid and organic advertising, which are difficult to manage. 

Marketing is a numbers game, just like healthcare is. And it’s a tough sell! You aren’t selling suntan lotion or bracelets—you’re convincing potential patients to put their life into your hands. That’s why leveraging one of the best tools at your disposal—artificial intelligence—is crucial.

Keeping Up 

There are countless options for potential patients these days. Take therapy, for instance. A potential patient could go for online therapy, a mental health app, a private therapist, or a therapy group that might make things cheaper.

The options are endless. At the end of the day, you’re in a breakneck race with competitors to attract attention, clicks, and contacts.

Rather than chasing your own tail, it’s important to use all the tools at your disposal. That’s why AI, predictive analytics, and machine learning need to be included in any healthcare marketing plan. A predictive AI tool can take your historical data and identify future customers, what messaging to target them with, and when and where to target them to increase the likelihood of conversion.

To successfully leverage the customer lifecycle, you need to account for three things: digital advertising, SEO, and prospect engagement.

Digital Marketing

AI is the equivalent of a sci-fi assistant. Artificial intelligence can predict outcomes and uncover insights with accuracy and speed that no one thought possible. The goal of leveraging AI is to get a high return on ad spend, manage PPC campaigns, and use best practices to improve performance. 

Depending on what you want to do, these AI tools can help run your campaigns, assess your preexisting ad accounts, and help you find the right audience. Then, they can help you make budget decisions before you even spend a dime. 

Precise budget allocation can help result in maximum ROI. This will save you time and money, all while putting the right message in front of the right audience.

SEO-Optimzied Content 

Predictive marketing is all about anticipating your audience. This requires strong content marketing that people can discover through SEO optimization. 

Creating blog posts, landing pages, product descriptions, alt text, and meta descriptions are all SEO-related tasks. Since they’re related to SEO, AI can help! 

AI tools previously got a bad rap. After all, how can a machine possibly mimic the human empathy and nuance necessary to write a real blog post? That’s no longer the case! AI has billions of data points available to make decisions on wording, language, and nuance. Natural language processing (NLP) can identify the words and phrases that have the strongest positive and negative impacts on your results.  

Then, you can optimize and improve it with the right keywords. This will help improve your Google rankings.

Engaging with Prospects

AI can help create personalized experiences, automate content, and more. For instance, AI will create a personalized newsletter for each one of your customers if you want.

Before this newsletter is sent, AI can help recommend which visitors might be more interested. It can also generate if/then scenarios for different subject lines that it’s written and forecast the different results. 

Then, with the right data connectors, this newsletter can be auto-populated with content that artificial intelligence forecasted will generate the best outcome at the patient-by-patient level. It’s an easy way to craft content and authentically connect with your audience!

Implementing AI for Healthcare Marketing

How can you practically take steps toward implementing AI in healthcare marketing? Start by auditing your current marketing activities and the data you have available. 

What does your team regularly do to facilitate marketing and advertising experts? Can any of these activities be automated? Of course, it’s important to gauge the time and energy cost of actually automating these activities.

You should also consider the benefit of automating these activities. Predictive marketing is all about making smart choices, and it’s important to see whether automation will actually pay off in each specific case.

UPMC’s marketing team, for example, has increased the number of patients to their pipeline for a specific microservice while decreasing their outreach from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 75 using results generated with Squark’s AI in one day. Results that would have taken their team six months to generate.

Healthcare Marketing

Healthcare marketing is an exciting space to be in. Patient acquisition is a rewarding process, and being able to leverage artificial intelligence tools to make it happen is a huge step in the right direction. 

That’s exactly what Squark is here for. Our AI platform helps you work smarter and faster while revolutionizing results and transforming your business. 

This approach lets you leverage AI to predict the customer lifecycle. This leads to more informed decisions, faster results, and increased revenue.

If you’re interested in what Squark can do for you, check out our free demo today!