One thing I have heard a lot recently is the increased difficulty in getting heard above all the digital noise. This is in part because Covid-19 accelerated the digital journey of many companies. However, now there is so much digital marketing from pharmaceutical companies that the competition to get to the physician and the patient has intensified dramatically. I don’t know about you, but I have so many webinars that I would love to attend but there just isn’t enough time in the day. Pre-Covid, there were nowhere near as many and I could make time to attend the ones of interest as they were few and far between. Not anymore. Every day new and interesting topics pop into my inbox. In fact, not only webinars! Every time you go online, be it checking mail, social media, or searching for something else, there is a competition for your attention. And your customers are the same. There are so many companies fighting for their attention. Not just other pharma, but numerous companies. So, what can you do to regain their attention in a smart way?
Well, there are a number of options. None of which involve creating a greater quantity of content and more noise. It is just about being smarter about it, and of course using the secret weapon that is Artificial Intelligence. It is all about personalization. There are many levels that you can do this.
1. Understand your audiences
AI can be effectively used to understand and segment your audiences – right down to a segment of one. There are commercially available AI-powered tools that allow one to find the competitors’ audiences and what content is engaging them into action. So, if you have a drug competitor or maybe even a complementary other drug that you know your target audience would take, you can use AI to really get to know that audience. In addition, AI can also be used for customer discovery and analysis by brand driven content.
2. One-to-One conversations
Get a lot more insight from your customers and provide an amazing customer experience from using the new generation of AI-Powered chatbots. The old generation chatbots that do not have NLP (Natural Language Processing) or Machine Learning in them and were all very much rule based. So, they will look up keywords in what was asked and pull up the closest match. This is not that satisfactory from a customer experience perspective. I recently interacted with one of these and it drove me to despair as there was no other option – the call centre was closed – and it could not understand the simple thing I wanted because it was not programmed for that specific language. You will not have this problem with a well-made NLP+ML-powered chatbot. They can delve into the issues and can read emotion and do what is required. For physicians, these next generation bots integrate including text, voice, and web-based digital human bots, and for patients, their bots can initiate critical conversations with patients at the right time in their healthcare journey. This means you can offer Patient Support Programs that leverage the power of health experts and can be scaled to respond through bots that deliver both information that is both on message and empathetic. This was never possible with the old generation bots.
Another option with one to one is digital humans. They have personality and can be deployed to handle all discussions simultaneously. Digital humans are being used for call centres, sales calls, HR, tech support, and now even a COVID-19 assistant. This would be a great use for pharma companies also for their patients. They can be interacted with via text or voice and with the Covid-19 assistant service they would assist the person with screening them for Covid-19 and offer general information and next steps. There are so many uses for digital humans that really customise and personalize the experience. And, because they are AI-powered, they have been able to be built with the ability to detect emotions and respond accordingly, alongside intelligence in dealing with a situation.
3. Personalized content
AI allows digital marketers to identify their customer and tailor the message in real time. This means they can moved away from the notion of audiences and segments, which may be useful when thinking through your problem and solution but once you start to use AI, it is an old fashioned concept because we can now personalize to a segment of one – the individual customer. By combining personalized data and the AI, we can begin to create a completely personalized, highly relevant message, which heightens the bar for the customer experience and can only result in higher engagement and conversion.
4. Improvement Digital Ad Performance
There are several ways advertising can generate far higher results using AI. One is writing the content. Using AI, one can identify what content will get more engagement with your target audience. If you are targeting patients and running any kind of online advertising, AI can be used to get far higher return on Ad campaign spend and results. On top of writing, AI can also be used to predict if an individual will click on an ad. It can be used to build the creative and test the different variations to improve performance as well as optimize spend. These are all possible to do in real time and at scale, which dramatically changed the results of your campaigns.
5. Personalized emails
It is now possible to use AI to generate personalized emails (including the content). This means a different content will go out to each individual depending on their needs and preferences. Without the marketer having to generate all that content. How powerful is that!
6. Personalized messages in real time
This is sometimes called Dynamic Creative Optimization and is a great way to improve performance of campaigns as it uses AI to deliver highly personalized content based on the individual’s data, searches and location. This can really help cut through the digital noise.
7. Offline with AI
You didn’t think you would see this on the list did you? With all the digital noise, some companies are going back to offline campaigns. One such company I met decided to do a direct mail campaign to try and do something different. Yes – snail mail. They used response cards that people handwrote their details on and sent back. The campaign was very successful with tens of thousands of responses coming back daily. However, they then realised to process all these handwritten answers to enter into the database and would need a lot more people to do this. But they then wondered about whether AI could help. It could. By using ICR (intelligent character recognition) alongside machine learning this task was automated so the cards that came back could automatically be added into the database with ICR.
Conclusion
These are only a few examples of the ways AI can assist you rise above the digital noise out there.
In the Eularis membership, we have actually found and interviewed companies that have employed AI to do each and every one of the areas outlined above. They discuss what their challenge was and why they turned to an AI solution, what AI vendor they used, how the on-boarding went, how long the project took, any challenges they found along the way, advice to anyone else implementing this kind of solution, how it worked and what the results were, and even in many cases, how much it cost.
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If you are looking for a solution such as any of these, and want to hear from a company who solved it and how they did it, join the Eularis Membership as we find the best in breed solutions, and find people who have had these challenges and solved it and interview them to know:
- which vendors are best in breed for the solution
- how the on-boarding went
- how long it took
- how much it cost
Then check out our membership as these interviews are all available in the membership.
ps. We are not paid to endorse any of these companies. We have integrity, and only feature solutions from companies that we have investigated and firmly believe are the best for the challenge. Our duty is to our members, and to find them the best solution for their needs, not to the companies we feature. We believe that these are companies that do a great job for their specialization.
To learn more about how Eularis can help you find the best solutions to the challenges faced by healthcare teams, please drop us a note or email the author at abates@eularis.com.