BLOG: The AI automation process: ‘Push-button’ marketing
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Key takeaways:
- Human-directed AI-enabled marketing can improve a practice’s reach across multiple channels.
- Identify automation opportunities and draft an automation workflow to streamline content creation.
In the last post, I introduced the concept of AI content engines and how they can significantly leverage your marketing efforts via multiple technologies and across multiple channels.
The real “magic,” however, is in the technology’s ability to automate much of this process, relieving your employees of rote, redundant tasks and reducing the burden on your practice’s resources, potentially improving the return on your marketing investment.
As I have done previously, I won’t be going into an exhaustive review of specific apps and tools because the technology is constantly improving. Instead, I will describe some areas in which ophthalmology practices should focus for maximal effectiveness.
Identifying automation opportunities
- Content distribution and promotion: This may seem like an obvious one, but now more than ever, content really will be king. With the recent introduction of AI-enabled search, such as Google’s Search Generative Experience, traditional keyword search engine optimization has been upended, and the old rules for website ranking may be obsolete. In response, those practices that employ marketing agencies may need to reassess how and where their marketing resources are allocated. Automating the repurposing, distribution and promotion of your content across various channels, such as social media, email and websites, can save time and ensure consistent messaging.
- Lead nurturing and patient engagement: Automation can help ophthalmology practices deliver personalized content and messages to prospective and established patients based on their behavior, preferences and stage in the customer journey. This helps ensure a message (what) to market (who) to medium (how) match in order to optimize conversions.
- Analytics and reporting: Automating the collection, analysis and reporting of content performance data can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of AI-generated content and help inform future content strategies.
What to look for in automation tools and platforms
Once you’ve identified some automation tools with potential, here are some factors to consider in your final evaluations:
- Features and capabilities: This goes without saying, but any prospective tools should offer the necessary features and capabilities to support your specific automation needs without requiring more man-hours or adding more complexity. Your staff should not need to spend hours learning code. After all, isn’t that the whole point?
- Integration with existing systems: Automation tools should seamlessly integrate with your practice's existing content management systems, customer relationship management platforms and analytics tools to ensure a smooth flow of useful data and content.
- Scalability and flexibility: As your practice grows and its content needs evolve, the automation tools should be able to scale and adapt to meet your changing requirements.
Drafting your automation workflow
Using content marketing (content production, repurposing and distribution) as our example, you will want to map out or draft what your ideal workflow would look like. This does not have to be perfect yet because you might not even know what is possible.
Start with how you currently do things, your “as is” content production process. Who writes the copy? Who creates the images or the videos? Who are the subject matter experts? Who posts content to social media channels?
Then brainstorm on a wish list for your “to be” process. How could this be easier? Are there tasks that are redundant? What steps could be streamlined or eliminated altogether to make the job easier for your staff?
Again, this is more of a back-of-the-napkin exercise at this stage. You’ll be able to get more specific once you know what tools are out there as well as their capabilities.
Next, you’ll want to do the same for your lead nurturing and prospective patient engagement. How will you acquire these leads? Email marketing? Social marketing? Web-based lead generation?
How could you best segment or filter them out for the appropriate information? The first obvious one is age, but other demographic and psychographic factors might be equally important: personality, lifestyle, social status, activities, interests, opinions, attitudes, values and beliefs.
Implementing automation workflow
After you have mapped out your workflows and created a short list of the automation tools you will likely be using, the next step is to implement the workflows and provision their associated automations:
- Content planning, production and distribution. This means simulating the path the content will take from its creation (Human or AI? Text-based or video-based?) to repurposing (video-to-text, video-to-audio, text-to-social, etc) to distribution (What channels? How often? Automated or manual scheduling?).
- Lead nurturing and customer engagement. Define the specific customer content and triggers that will guide the automation process, such as delivering personalized content based on their behavior or launching a series of nurturing emails based on their stage in the customer journey.
- Analytics and reporting. What sorts of metrics will you monitor? What kind of dashboard will be most useful? Who will have access to that information?
Human-directed AI-enabled marketing
Hopefully, as you’ve seen from the previous posts, the introduction of AI tools and automations can significantly leverage your practice’s marketing efforts. Automation of repurposing, distribution and personalization of marketing content can help your practice improve its reach across multiple channels while realizing gains in efficiency and return on marketing spend.
Still, it is important to remember that AI can never replace the “humanness” of your practice: its underlying philosophy, the doctors’ unique backstories and patients’ personal experiences. While AI tools and automation are great at processing and analyzing data, delegating your practice’s branding and messaging to ChatGPT won’t help you stand out from your competitors: They have all jumped on the AI bandwagon, too.
Collapse