On the Cusp of a Revolution: How AI is Changing Life Sciences Digital Marketing
From drug discovery to patient care, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping every aspect of the life sciences and biotech sectors. But what does it mean for marketers in these industries? Here we explore the opportunities, challenges and risks that AI poses to life sciences and biotech digital marketing.
What’s unique about applying AI to life sciences marketing?
Life sciences marketers face unique challenges when considering how best to make use of AI. Unlike other sectors, they must communicate complex scientific messaging, adhere to strict regulatory guidelines and manage highly sensitive information – all in a rapidly advancing industry on the cutting edge of innovation.
Additionally, their target audiences of researchers, healthcare professionals and patient communities are more informed and specialised than other sectors.
These factors mean that using AI in life sciences marketing is more nuanced and challenging than other sectors.
The benefits of using AI in life sciences marketing
Although AI has only recently been adopted, its impact is already being seen across marketing in the life sciences and biotech sectors. A recent survey suggested over half of all marketing teams are already using generative AI.
New Research: 60% of Marketers Say Generative AI will Transform Their Role, But Worry About Accuracy
From Sales Force
Here’s an overview of the benefits AI could bring to your team.
Increased automation
From updating social media and writing email subject lines to answering simple customer enquiries, one of the key advantages of AI is its ability to automate routine tasks.
When these day-to-day jobs are covered by AI, your team is freed up to focus on more creative or strategic work. And AI can go beyond automating processes, helping you to improve your ways of working.
For example, AI can be used to automate media buying but it can take that one step further to predict the most effective ad and media placements.
More-granular personalisation
Personalisation has been a key trend in marketing for some time, but AI facilitates personalisation at scale and in real-time.
For example, rather than sending a whole customer segment the same email at the same time, AI allows you to send your customers only the most relevant emails at the most relevant times, based on their interests or behaviours.
You can also target ads more precisely, personalise your life sciences or biotech website for individual customers, or mix and match content modules within emails on a customer-by-customer basis.
Deeper analysis
AI lets you analyse large data sets quickly and more effectively, drawing out patterns and predictions that individuals might miss. This enables you to get a better understanding of customer behaviour, market trends and competitor activity.
With a stronger foundation, you can create more engaging campaigns with a bigger reach to ultimately boost sales and profits. Once campaigns are complete, you can use AI to analyse the performance of every element, which helps inform even more effective activity in future.
Faster content creation
AI can help with the creation of everything from code to photos, videos, design and copy. But it can also be used to identify key topics or trends in your market, analyse keywords and find content gaps in your life sciences or biotech website.
Additionally, it can help automate your content inventory, analysing your existing content for quality as well as quantity, and can repurpose existing content for social media.
AI and life sciences digital marketing – the risks and challenges
Losing the human touch
With AI being hyped as a game-changing technology, there is a temptation to transfer all processes and outputs to this new tool as soon as possible without a human hand to guide it. However, businesses then run the risk of losing their voice or distinct life sciences brand identity. Content could become impersonal or inauthentic and marketers risk plagiarising existing articles or offering only the same perspective as the rest of the market.
The need for quality inputs
Whether it’s analysis or content creation, the quality of the data or prompt which is put into the AI system has a huge impact on the quality of the outputs.
Put simply, if the initial data or prompt is flawed, inaccurate or biased, then the results will be the same.
As an example, using AI to generate quality written content relies on an informed understanding of customers, precise keywords, a well-written prompt, a solid content plan and more.
If these steps are missed out, the result is large quantities of poor-quality content that creates noise rather than cuts through. This is unlikely to engage customers or drive sales and could undermine an organisation’s reputation and credibility.
Concerns around data security
The use of AI in marketing raises important questions about privacy and data security. This is particularly true with life sciences or biotech digital marketing where AI systems might be handling sensitive health information. Marketing teams will need to find ways to safely process and store data to avoid breaches, misuse and a loss of customer trust.
How to mitigate the risks of AI
Integrating AI with your existing life sciences or biotech marketing processes comes with challenges and risks. However, many of these can be mitigated when AI is targeted to the right processes and used smartly under the guidance of expert marketing teams.
AI-generated analysis and written content, for example, still need the original thought and emotional intelligence that only a human can offer.
This could mean editing articles created by ChatGPT so they more precisely address specific customers or offer a more individual take on a topic. Or it could mean reviewing the results of AI-generated analysis to sense-check the recommendations and provide a more nuanced commentary.
Getting the best possible results from AI integration relies on multiple disciplines, individuals and systems, and it's constantly changing. Keeping ahead of the curve is a challenge. Doing this in-house could mean major investment in systems and structural changes to refocus teams.
That’s why many life sciences marketers are utilising third parties with expertise in AI to maximise the impact of this new tool.
At Arttia Creative, we understand the challenges you may face in integrating AI with your existing marketing function.
We have expertise and experience with AI systems so we’re uniquely placed to recommend the integrations to help your team maximise marketing reach, effectiveness and ROI.
The Takeaway.
AI is a rapidly changing and complex technology that can transform processes and outputs for life sciences digital marketing teams. When used well, it can save marketers time, reduce routine tasks, offer deeper insights and better content, and open up new possibilities with personalisation.
However, the results of AI integration rely on having an in-depth understanding of the technology, so finding experts is an essential first step.
Need help understanding how you can make the most of AI? Let’s talk.
