Artificial intelligence, or AI, is already transforming the face of marketing as we know it. AI technology can help to optimize and speed up many different marketing tasks, improving customer experiences and driving conversions. Artificial intelligence (AI) is vital for pharmaceutical brands to incorporate in marketing strategies to more effectively facilitate interactions with physicians. As pharma marketers transitioned from in-person communications to digital marketing initiatives during the Covid-19 pandemic, enormous amounts of data are being acquired during campaigns. Now, marketers have an opportunity to integrate analytics powered by AI to enhance marketing campaigns that will garner greater traction with physicians. With digital ad spending in the health care and pharma industry projected to grow to $11.25 billion in the United States this year, brands can usher in a digital era that harnesses the power of AI technologies to better understand and engage physicians.
AI can hyper-personalize the customer experience by analysing their profiles.
AI speeds up production of certain types and formats of content.
AI-powered software can decide what content to create and when to distribute it.
AI can process vast quantities of data and make accurate predictions based on patterns that emerge from it.
AI can predict customer behaviour and identify and nurture the most valuable leads.
Optimizing the “When” and “Where” of Digital Promotion
The growth of digital marketing has opened up many new options for marketing, but all these new possibilities also mean that the sheer number of choices can be difficult to manage.
There are many different channels available to content marketers in the enterprise but not all these channels will perform equally well for each lead. While it’s possible to work out the best channels through thorough experimentation, this process takes time and is highly resource-intensive.
AI removes this burden of manually selecting the best channels for each marketing campaign to target specific leads. AI-powered software can automatically find the channels with the highest chance of success in real-time, based on each interaction with the brand.
Timing is also vital when it comes to making the most of your marketing campaigns. Again, AI eliminates the need for guesswork, experimentation, or relying on industry averages such as “the best time to post on LinkedIn is Wednesday between 10am and 2pm”. AI scheduling software can automatically calculate the best times for posting promotions on each marketing channel, for each individual customer.
Understanding and Predicting Customer Behavior
Did you know that AI can predict your personality traits better than your spouse partner, friend, even your family? That’s one of the key insights I learned a few years ago when I attended Pegaworld at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, NV.
More than 4,000 Business and IT leaders came together to understand the role of technology and AI in the future of sales, marketing, customer service. This event included some really smart people if a bit more technical than the audience I typically see at Marketing conferences.
But an audience who is still trying to solve the same problems I think we all are:
Marketers trying to understand how to effectively reach target customers when ad blockers, changing media consumption habits, and ad performance are impeding us.
Customer Service people looking improve customer satisfaction, net promoter scores all while holding down costs.
At a high level, AI can provide personalization across the customer journey and predictive modeling to achieve better outcomes at every customer interaction. Other AI capabilities include:
A Customer Decision hub that can automate recommendations in realtime to improve customer experiences using AI
Natural Language Processing to determine the mood and intentions from customer emails and voice calls
A Self-Service Advisor, which can even scan your customer’s browsing history to present different options.
AI-driven applications, that can alert a retail store rep on how best to help customers in-store, in realtime on their phones or tablets
AI Is Vital For Pharma Marketers
An investment in AI solutions will garner significant returns for marketers, as a deeper comprehension of a physician’s journey can empower brands with messages, moments, and platforms that raise the interaction level of each physician. Thus, while tending to patients, messages can be triggered that will resonate based on real-time communications with the patients. Whether it’s at the moment of diagnosis or payment, messages that inform physicians based on their current mindset will offer a greater opportunity to establish a meaningful connection with patients.
AI-based learnings provide marketers with a road map of data to create a path from the brand to a physician. By building a profile on a physician, marketers can share hyper-targeted messages that are personalized to the physician to reflect their treatment patterns, reflect their prescription methods and identify the digital platforms that result in higher engagement rates. Whether it’s signifying attendance at a webinar, interaction during a previous campaign, content within social media posts or data analysis in search of patterns, it is just the beginning of the various digital marketing efforts that can captivate the attention of their target audience.
Insights drawn from communication behaviors and preferences embolden marketers to enhance messages by delivering them at the right time. Knowing which moments are the most opportune and recognizing which digital platform raises the interaction level is crucial to the success of a campaign. A message powered by AI analytics will elevate the effectiveness of a piece of content by equipping marketers with knowledge about which message will have the most impact and best digital medium is best used. Without these insights, engagement rates can drop. You’ll deliver messages at the wrong time or on a platform where the physician isn’t in the ideal medical mindset to want to learn about an illness, treatment or prescription drug.
It is artificial intelligence for a reason — data derived from AI is superior to the intellectual standards of humans. Marketers utilizing AI technologies have an ongoing resource seeking new, relevant patterns of data that can alter the success of a campaign. With the ability to decipher data amassed, AI can cultivate and deploy tactics based on those interpretations of metrics to implement strategies. With the use of audience segmentation based on the derived analytics, personalized engagement can be measured to better dictate the approach in future campaigns that will maximize the impact of the messages. With marketers gaining those granular insights, the ROI of campaigns can be enhanced.
Conclusion
To advance AI-based marketing efforts, pharmaceutical brands can partner with a data-driven company that will foster insights that educate their marketing team and guide the creation of more impactful initiatives. Further, brands should have conversations with their marketing team to determine the current data that’s being leveraged to dictate campaigns, as well as what metrics are significant in better understanding and connecting with their target audience. This will enable companies to ensure they are aligning with the ideal partner. In addition, while integrating AI-powered data, marketers must embrace their findings and employ a transitional period, in which they can utilize the newly gained data to support campaigns that will raise engagement with physicians.
Better Business Intelligence
The time it takes to develop the right algorithm that works for the business can be a grind. It takes multiple testing and continuous iteration to improve accuracy of results. The human effort to do this can take months. What machine learning has done is automate predictive analytics and allow models to go into production much sooner than traditional business intelligence (BI) models. As new data is ingested, the models “learn” and adjust. This continuous feedback loop allows for greater performance in a much shorter time period with much better accuracy.
Convergence Between Pharmacy - Data Science and AI 
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