Hearing all the buzz around AI? It’s no cure-all, but it can be a helpful tool. Learn what you need to know about the state of AI in healthcare marketing.
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Artificial intelligence (AI) is exciting. It has the potential to save marketing teams time and resources and improve how we serve readers and patients.
But these perks have risks. Using AI incorrectly could result in spreading misinformation, compromising data security, or jeopardizing your company’s reputation. As an ethical healthcare marketer, you must do your due diligence before going all in on AI. We’re here to help.
By the end of 2023, 98% of marketers were using AI at work. This statistic testifies to the limitless opportunity we all see in AI — and the pressure to unlock it. We’re facing the challenge of adapting or falling behind.
This resource hub is a source of truth and collection of insights about AI for the healthcare marketing community. Learn the ins and outs of using AI for marketing — including the risks, limitations, best use cases, and how to protect your readers and yourself.
Get a quick rundown of the do’s and don’ts of AI in healthcare marketing.
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AI is a lifesaver for the right tasks but isn’t fit for every job. Use AI to help with the right things so you can devote more time and energy to those tasks better suited for humans.
Why should marketers use AI? It can help automate or speed up tasks that take significant time to execute but little time to validate. Tools like ChatGPT are perfect for tedious work or repetitive jobs that can be done at scale. Here are some examples.
AI is more than a tool to boost efficiency. You can also use it to improve your healthcare website (in more ways than one). Get some ideas from our friends and fellow thought leaders in the healthcare marketing AI space.
Chris Penn, Co-Founder of Trust Insights, Inc.
“AI can improve access to information on your website that’s hard to find. For example, you may have a page on sciatica, but someone who doesn’t know they have sciatica may search for ‘back pain.’ Traditional on-site search won’t help them because they aren’t using the right terms.
But a language model can translate consumers’ natural language into the correct search terms, digest the page content, and return it back as a conversation. We can use these models to ‘broker’ consumer interactions with our data and improve the customer experience.”
Andy Crestodina, Co-Founder and CMO of Orbit Media
“Conversion is a lot about getting people’s questions answered. But it’s hard for a human brain to look at something and identify what’s missing or find content gaps, like objections you didn’t address or questions you failed to answer.
Give the AI a detailed persona, then copy and paste your content and ask, ‘To what extent does this page meet or not meet this visitor’s information needs?’ When properly trained, AI can give you exactly what’s not on the page — the important things you missed.”
Wise men say, “Only fools rush in.” Racing to make the most of AI could lead to outsourcing the wrong tasks. AI simply isn’t ready for some jobs yet (and it may never be). Learn more about the drawbacks of using AI writers in healthcare marketing.
OpenAI itself tells us, “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Consider checking important information.” Information from AI tools must be fact-checked by a human — never by the model(s) themselves. Keep fact-checking and QA in your content workflow.
AI can’t compete with human expertise when it comes to building a marketing plan or creating reader-facing materials. Use AI to save time and resources on monotonous tasks — so you can put them toward work that requires a human touch.
AI can produce surface-level content that summarizes other sources. But with AI Overviews changing search, SERPs no longer need this kind of content. Limit AI content creation to repurposing. For example, ask ChatGPT to spin a human-written blog into a social post.
Quality prompts elicit quality responses. Your prompt engineering skills directly impact the quality of the output you get from AI. Learn the basics of prompting with 6 AI prompting tips for healthcare marketers.
When prompting an AI tool, tell it exactly what you need, including an appropriate format for its response. (How many words or paragraphs? Do you want bullet points?) The more details you include, the more relevant your output will be.
We all perform better when we understand our expectations. Tell the AI who it is, what it does, what it’s an expert in, and/or what it should know. Use keywords related to the role that will help the AI understand its subject domain.
Copy and paste information that gives the tool what it needs to achieve its goal. For example, if the platform needs expert insights to do the job, paste in a stakeholder interview transcript it can reference. (Just don’t feed it proprietary info.)
Tools like ChatGPT are known to “miss” steps in the work process. (Kind of like a 10-year-old who forgets to write their name before turning in an assignment.) Break down a complex task by delivering clear, step-by-step instructions, one at a time.
It’s common for an AI tool to answer a question preemptively. Instruct it to work out the correct solution before providing an answer. It may take a little longer to receive a response, but that’s a good thing. It means it’s working.
It takes time to find prompts that work. Create a “library” of effective prompts and other resources to share with your team and save everyone time. (Or collaborate within ChatGPT Team.)
AI uses math, not magic. It’s going to make mistakes. Don’t give up on it when it does — consider it feedback to refine your part of the process.
What should you do when AI gets it wrong?
Rework your prompt: You may need to split instructions into simpler steps and explicitly tell it to go one at a time. Or you may need to include more context, more specific details, or an example of what you’re looking for.
Remind it to take its time: ChatGPT’s “instinct” is to use the data available to predict the right response immediately — not to examine the steps required to determine the answer. It’s like working with a kid: You may need to tell it to go in order and work out the solution first.
Tell it to check its work: Simply asking ChatGPT, “Did you miss anything?” can prompt it to check over its work and ensure it completed every necessary step.
Review your data: Predictive analysis only works with high-quality data. If you’re feeding a dataset into an AI tool, make sure it’s complete, accurate, relevant, and unbiased.
While AI has the potential to benefit the healthcare field and its consumers, it could just as easily cause harm.
AI writing tools make it easier than ever to spread mass amounts of misinformation. They aren’t void of bias and run the risk of perpetuating medical racism. Human editors must check generative AI content for both bias and accuracy.
OpenAI says it themselves: “ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.”
Publishing generative AI content also comes with potential legal and data privacy risks. If you aren’t careful, you could inadvertently infringe on copyright by publishing plagiarized information. And remember that anything shared with OpenAI becomes public knowledge. Without proper precautions, you could compromise secure company data, including protected health information (PHI).
Want a more comprehensive view of the risks of AI for medical writing? Watch key parts of a panel discussion about AI in healthcare communications, sponsored by Aha Media Group. (We broke the webinar down into the highlights.)
While 98% of marketers currently use AI at work, only 22% of organizations have policies surrounding employee usage of generative AI. This leaves room for great risk.
This precaution helps reduce potential legal and data privacy risks (such as copyright infringement or compromising PHI).
In addition, AI output is only as strong as the data input. Data governance guidelines ensure you’re inputting accurate and organized data to get the best results.
Your AI policy should include guidance around how your organization uses AI and user data.
How is user data being used? Is it input into OpenAI platforms? Who receives access to the data? How is it stored, and for how long?
What are your internal procedures relating to data? How is data collected, organized, and “cleaned” to be AI-ready?
Is your company using AI to write content? Edit? Create headlines or subject lines? Generate images? Generate ideas?
Is a human editor fact-checking and editing content so readers can trust that it’s accurate? (We hope so.)
Share your policy internally for employee compliance and externally for transparency with your audience. Ensure your team understands the importance of following the guidelines and the risk of taking shortcuts like publishing generative AI content without adequate editing.
It’s easy to become consumed by the world of AI and all its promises. “Shiny object syndrome” could result in overinvesting money and time into tools that don’t provide a sufficient return.
Before investing considerably in AI, try a variety of tools and focus on the ones that can help you reduce expenses or streamline your workflow. Don’t let something you don’t need cost you time or money.
Looking to learn more about how to improve your processes with AI? Explore some of our favorite guides, courses, and helpful resources.
Stay current with this constantly updated roundup of popular tools for a range of use cases (with honest reviews).
Learn more
Explore strategies for getting better results from ChatGPT, straight from the source — OpenAI.
The Cookbook is better suited for users looking to build a custom GPT, but this specific article is a helpful collection of prompting libraries, guides, courses, and papers.
Paul Roetzer’s marketing-focused AI course has step-by-step lessons for marketers at every level, from entry to CMO. Recommended by our Founder and CEO, Ahava Leibtag.
Talking to the AIs and Joining the NLP Revolution are highly rated intros to prompt engineering, free with a subscription to LinkedIn Learning.
Andy Crestodina from Orbit Media shares how to make AI marketing personas using ChatGPT and Bing.
Experimenting with AI at work or preparing to start? Get marketing-focused AI tips to ground you and serve as a safe jumping-off point.
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