How AI and Personalization are Reshaping Healthcare Marketing

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Croom Lawrence, the founder of Predictive Healthcare, is no stranger to the realm of modern healthcare marketing, particularly when it comes to the way healthcare brands engage with today’s healthcare customers.

Croom's career has always been inspired by his personal connection with those struggling with serious health conditions, taking on the seemingly impossible mission to make personalized medicine a reality while uniting with today’s potential for AI/ML-led customer experience marketing.

What makes Croom a true gem of his profession isn't his ability to just conquer deep marketing verticals like Digital or the Omnichannel mantra of today.  It's his unwavering commitment to delivering personalized, impactful healthcare experiences to the real people who need them, connecting physicians with their patients, and curating the best possible outcomes. In short, Croom really cares about the patients and doctors he serves, and that makes all the difference in the way he truly reaches them.

It's no surprise that Croom Lawrence has been crafting a formula that's poised to change the future of healthcare marketing for the better. With a tirelessly tested combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and personalization, Croom is moving the puzzle pieces together and giving us a full view of how healthcare marketing is paving the way for better branding and marketing across all industries.

In a series of interview questions, Croom laid his philosophy out on the table and spilled inside information on how omnichannel marketing, AI, and personalization are transforming healthcare outreach, and how those tactics really get the job done.

The Transition to Omnichannel

The transition to omnichannel marketing isn't one that's come easy for all fellows of healthcare marketing but needs to be made nonetheless. Successful omnichannel marketing comes down to 4 key enterprise-level functions: brand strategy, customer experience, marketing operations, and performance optimization.

Healthcare brands, as customer-centric organizations, have to maintain two critical roles: effective customer listening and being a growth engine. Omnichannel is an obvious growth enabler, no matter what industry you pin it up against.

Omnichannel may be a bit of a buzzword, but it has a long and storied history over many decades. The strategy certainly offers sufficient reach, competitive with platforms like TV, where it's possible to deliver connected and personalized experiences to best the competition.

Omnichannel’s Roots in AI

In the future, healthcare marketing is all about big ideas that come from big data. Great marketing is about creating customer intimacy through a personalized experience. This construction is made possible by big data and AI delivered to influence behavior.

We're now witnessing the introduction of AI into nearly every industry. It's deeply present in the auto industry (self-driving cars are cool and kind of scary) and AI-powered Amazon.  Now, health can hardly be imagined without AI-led precision medicines among many other enablers from Conversational AI to robotics.

All of those prominent personalization experiences are built on data graphs that offer the health enterprise the power of competitive advantage, to customize and deliver something that is unique and solves customer problems instantaneously in a very personal way.

Marketing leaders need to think about omnichannel and AI as the next generation of branding and marketing, one that's a key engine for growth so long as it solves a true customer problem.

Where Are We in the Wave of Hyper-Personalization?

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Whether we like it or not, we're all living and immersed in the current state of personalization and AI. There are more than 110 million virtual assistant users in the United States alone, delivering the most personalized AI experience available, one that today’s youngsters can operate with ease.

This is the very beginning of a phase where AI will continue to disrupt every stage of the healthcare value chain, but in a good way. Although very few AI solutions are in use in clinical practice currently, plan on that changing. 

Living Better, Longer

We'll see the AI occupation come to life over the next 20 years. Robotics, big data, deep learning, artificial intelligence, precision medicine, and many other bodies of knowledge in healthcare will converge.

As this convergence takes place, we're entering a brand new phase of health care called precision longevity. Precision longevity is about living better, for longer, but not exclusively with the help of pharmaceuticals.

Living better longer is an approach that embraces emotion but also implements devices, data, tracking, robotics, and nanobots. There's so much of a vast opportunity to live better longer, that soon it will be more affordable and will begin to reduce the cost of our healthcare system. It's a very optimistic view.

AI: Filtering Out the Noise

Moving into the stage of precision longevity, there's going to be a lot of noise. There are going to be a lot of AI data training sets, many models for a propensity for customer behavior, and several segmentation solutions to drive customer strategy.

The list goes on, but you get the idea: the devices or programs will be numerous and the cost of technology is eventually going to reach zero. So with all the commodified versions of this developing technology, what's going to separate the effective, innovative tools from the rest? Personalization driven by data. We just have to start with our best hypothesis on what constitutes a great personalized experience.

By utilizing platforms like Salesforce and Hubspot, any company—big or small—has access to personalized data engines and personalized customer experience dashboards. Brands that aren't taking advantage of these platforms and technologies are going to get crushed by those who are. Try as we might, no human team can compete with a computerized personalization engine.

No matter how you slice it, AI is the future of hyper-personalization and what comes next in healthcare marketing.

Healthcare Branding & Health Activism

This may be a bold, even controversial statement, but if you look at things from a certain angle—all brands are healthcare brands. Think about it this way: even brands like Walmart and Amazon sell products that help us live better, longer lives. From Amazon’s new venture into genomics (Amazon Omics), smart sleep devices in an endless array, or state-of-the-art elder care, these medical technologies are contributing to everyone’s health and wellness, right from birth.

"If you can wear it or ingest it, it helps you live better longer. That’s healthcare, and there are unique planning tools brands can access to forge adoption among HCPs, Patients, and Caregivers."

Over the next few years, the factor that will really live between consumer behavior and brand response is a sense of universal activism. More than ever, consumers want their brand choices to be about more than just the product itself.

Purchase decisions and brand loyalty often come down to influencing factors such as climate change or the desire for improved nutrition—factors that might have no impact on the product or its use but are deemed important to consumers in their journey for better health.

Personalization is key to this effect, especially when it's used to target specific values that shape brand choice. Using data to recognize a consumer's take on climate activism or environmentally-friendly practices is going to improve the accuracy of outreach campaigns.

The point here is that brands need to be more aware of their very real connection with these influencing factors, and the obligation to align with the values that are driving brand choice. Ignoring your brand's impact on the environment or other health and lifestyle factors is a major faux pas, one that will leave you out of the biggest consumer trends on the horizon.

"Health activism expands beyond traditional patient activism or marketing to healthcare providers."

This is not all to say that all brands should be considered healthcare brands, but almost all of them can be. In the future, more brands will intentionally make the subtle transition into a multifaceted organization that supports health and wellness—living better, longer.

Living better longer means we need to do a better job of selecting and engaging consumers who are associated with the values of health activism, and that those activists can likewise reach larger addressable markets. As a result, consumers will inherently begin to select health brands that are personalized to suit their values as well as their health and wellness goals.

A Connected Marketing Experience

To make sales, marketing, and operations all work together in concert, you've got to incorporate customer service and e-commerce. Customer point of view has to be front and center, with that viewpoint leading the charge into a tangible business transformation.

When a business or leader embraces customer-centric transformation, they make huge strides that improve customer listening and personalization. This personalization might start with a customer's point of entry, be it service, e-commerce, sales, or marketing. The experience that a consumer receives is specific to their point of entry, marking a unique journey and curating a highly connected experience.

Here, we are combining omnichannel marketing with the capability of dynamic creativity. and we need solutions that can take these content fragments, whether they're headlines, images, body, copy calls to action, shuffle them, and reassemble them so that they're appropriate and relevant for the customer where they are in their journey for maximum resonance.  This is the heart of health behavior change going forward but also the key to forging adoption in very crowded healthcare markets.

The New Wave of Branding

In the end, the need for branding, particularly in healthcare, is absolute. Branding might look a little bit different now than it did a few decades ago. Today, experience and consumer values play a larger role in developing and maintaining brand identity. Brands have to revolve around experience, making memories, and imbuing emotion and meaning in the company in a way that is consistent with the values of customers

"Brands are built differently now."

So what does this new era of branding mean? How can companies and businesses transform into the type of brand that's going to propel consumer relationships forward? Croom has some thoughts on that.

Build on the backbone of customer data.

For brands to succeed, we've got to pivot away from traditional marketing. It's time to get into the business of customer journey and experience management. We need to start delivering personalized, curated customer experiences, providing direct routes to helping them solve personal challenges.

Know and use measurement as a catalyst for change.

In this sense, "measurement" calls for superior customer listening, embedding analytics, and utilizing trackers and surveys at every step. These elements inform the success of real-time interventions that help illustrate customer journeys and migration.

Lean on a strong sense of loyalty

Branding—and e-commerce services especially—needs to appeal to a much stronger sense of loyalty. Overall, brand loyalty is a return on emotion in which our storytelling, advocacy, mission, and identified values inspire customers. Combine that emotional appeal with improving service quality, speed of response, brand perceptions, and being more personal, and you've got a

The Future is Personal

When it comes to building a brand for the future, it all comes down to curating the perfect, personalized experience. This happens when we expand the vision of data—using measurement as a catalyst for change. Stack that data by driving outsized loyalty, grounded in emotion and brand storytelling, and you've got the building blocks for brand success.

In the end, successful branding and customer reach in healthcare come down to supporting and blending the many ecosystems within an organization. For healthcare specifically, the brand ecosystem, sales reps ecosystem, customer ecosystem, and the ecosystem of our key opinion leaders have to be brought together so that they're overlapping and consistent and congruent around the truth of the brand and the values that we all believe in. It's a delicate balance, one wrapped snugly in digital, social, and content marketing.

The future of healthcare marketing is a highly personal experience—if Croom Lawrence has anything to do with it, anyway. Artificial intelligence is helping us create meaningful connections in healthcare, personalizing and transforming the way healthcare brands and their customers establish and maintain relationships. Over here in the world of growth marketing, we're taking notes.

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