Using AI Tools in Medtech Marketing

AI is getting all of the buzz lately, but are any of the tools actually useful for marketers?

Beyond that, is AI safe to use, and are there any concerns you should be aware of before using it?

It’s something we’ve been talking about internally and with other colleagues in the industry, and certainly many of you have been having the same types of discussions as AI continues to permeate different areas.

If you are curious about how AI can help you, but aren’t sure where to begin, here are some ideas to get you started and understand the limitations of these technologies.

Useful AI Tools

We all know about the more common AI tools like ChatGPT and Jasper. We might use them to help complete more tedious tasks, like summarizing a longer piece of content or outlining an article idea.

That said, there are some lesser-known options you might find useful in your day-to-day marketing tasks.

Grammarly

Grammarly can be helpful if you want to do a quick grammar/spelling check on something you’ve written before it goes out. It can also check for things like style and tone. You’ll probably still want multiple sets of human eyes on any official content, but Grammarly can help you clean up any initial mistakes, and can also be helpful for things like proofing important emails.

Goldcast

Goldcast is a platform for webinars, conferences, and other events, whether virtual or in-person. However, they also have an AI tool called Content Lab that will allow you to upload video and repurpose it into other forms, like social media posts, blogs, or smaller video clips. If you have a video of an event or presentation, that can help save you some time in getting all of those pieces out. 

Anthropic’s Claude

Anthropic’s Claude AI tool can save you time if you need to summarize a long document. It is built to handle complex analysis, where other tools might not be capable of doing the job for long-form content. It also has high security protocols in place, including HIPAA compliant options if needed.

Perplexity

Perplexity can be used to gather research, generating answers to your queries using web-based sources, which it cites as source material. It can be a helpful starting point if you need to do in-depth research on a topic and want to quickly gather some resources to start reviewing.

Concerns About Using AI in Marketing

We definitely have found ways in which AI enhances our marketing processes and adds some efficiency, but it also isn’t surprising that people are hesitant to use the full capabilities of AI. 

For our own purposes, we tend to use it more in the early stages of content development, rather at the end. For example, we might use AI to summarize or create an outline of a podcast episode, and then use that information to write a blog post based on the podcast. We might also use AI to create a short summary of the blog post that we can edit for a social media post. These are relatively low-stakes uses of the technology that allow us plenty of leeway to catch and correct inaccuracies and personalize the content before we publish it.

In medtech marketing, accuracy is not something to take lightly. A mistake can be quite costly, not just in terms of dollars, but also to your reputation. As our COO Justin Bantuelle discussed in a recent podcast episode with RJ Kedziora of Estenda Solutions, you can’t “move fast and break things” in healthcare. And you certainly don’t want to do anything that might misdirect patients or providers and lead to harmful outcomes.

Additionally, a lot of people are becoming disillusioned with AI and its current capabilities. A recent article on The Byte highlights some of the issues and mishaps companies have encountered by using AI. Complaints range from lack of trust in the output to actually giving customers the wrong information. Others are concerned that AI won’t be able to keep up with what the industry needs, and the progress and potential of these tools may stall out. 

Some brands are halting the use of AI in marketing altogether out of concerns for what might go wrong. There isn’t currently a lot of clarity on key sticking points, including how data might be used, how the use of AI might affect ownership of marketing creative, and who is responsible if someone’s rights are violated through the use of AI. This may not be the case forever, but until there are legal precedents, many companies are unwilling to take the risk.

All of this is to say, while AI can provide efficiencies to some of our processes as marketers, it’s certainly not in a position to replace what we do. The human aspect of marketing is still very much needed. We can provide not only checks and balances to AI output, but also nuance and context that AI bots do not have.