The 5 Pillars of AI-Powered Paid Media in Healthcare Marketing

Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a Healthcare Marketing podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m excited to be here today to chat with you about human-led AI and paid media. So lots of folks are still talking about AI conceptually.

They’re talking about how organizations need to be smart, about how we’re integrating AI into your marketing processes, that compliance needs to be top of mind, and everybody’s doing it. But not many folks are actually pulling back the covers and sharing with you how they’re doing it, what steps they’re actually using to implement AI into their processes, and the results that they’re seeing.

So we thought today that we would focus specifically on our paid media division at Hetty and Hop and share our five pillars of AI integration. So at Hedy & Hopp, our stance on AI is it’s truly a core part of the agency’s DNA. So a couple of ways this shows up is we have a full-time employee who owns AI implementation throughout our agency.

It is her full time job that is all that she is focused on, is making sure that our processes are optimized, we’re being smart about the way that it’s being integrated. We’re following compliance regulations and that we’re being innovative. Our golden rule at Hedy & Hopp, however, is that AI accelerates and informs, but humans own the strategy and validate the outputs.

So the entire way that we think about AI has to be through that lens. We also look at it through two different bookends, if you could say. First is, is it improving our internal processes or is it improving our customer’s experience? Or patient experience? If we’re talking specifically about media being delivered? And so as we consider our prioritization of AI processes and tool usage within our organization, that are that is the two different ways that we think about how and what we prioritize as an organization.

So paid media has been a big area that we’ve been focused on finding efficiencies and improving the output of our clients media spend. So paid media is huge at Hedy & Hopp. And we manage millions and millions every month on behalf of our clients. We manage digital, but also traditional across the country. Buying billboards, radio, TV, all of the things to be able to make sure that our clients are really showing up where their patients need to find them.

So that really presents an opportunity, right? How can we use AI to be able to improve the budget allocation and the results? While also making sure that we are compliant? So the five pillars of AI within paid media that we’re going to talk about today are first, smart planning and budgeting, precision persona building through the lens of compliance, emerging channels, real time insights, and creative optimizations.

So let’s dig in. First, let’s talk about smart planning and budgeting. So typically whenever you’re looking at setting up a paid media strategy, there’s a couple of different ways, or steps that we do upstream as we’re doing research to provide recommendations for a client. One of the ways that we were able to improve this process and use AI to increase the efficiency and the strategic output, is use a variety of tools to be able to analyze over 400, 1st party data points, and then use real inventory data and performance signals to dictate exactly how budget should be distributed across those channels.

We wanted to make sure every dollar had a specific role, and in that full funnel that we were designing for our clients, and AI helped inform that with a lot of data points that would have taken hours and hours to be able to review and aggregate together in a traditional fashion. So one of the tools that we used is called AI Digital.

It is a favorite of ours. We use it in a variety of different parts of the process, but we have other tools that inform this step as well. But what it allows us to do is really move past those platform- suggested default. So for example, if you’re going in for a service line campaign and you’re trying to understand, you know, for orthopedics, perhaps we have 25 different DMAs that we need to show up for.

Google or Meta will tell you what’s available from an inventory perspective based off of your targeting. We like to go at this point deeper than that, and use additional first-party data points to really understand what the best optimized approach is to be able to drive those conversions and appointments. Next, let’s talk about targeting. So developing personas for each of your campaigns is foundational, right?

We’re going to be looking at a paid media brief really making sure that we understand the audience and the purpose for doing this campaign strategy and placement. But as budgets get larger and there are more moving pieces, often we found that there may be a primary persona, but we’re missing out on the opportunity to have more personas that allow us to do deeper level targeting.

So with some of our tools, we now have the ability to actually create precision personas, focusing on some granular audience data around demographics, median age, household income, and personal values across Google, LinkedIn and other platforms. And then once those personas are developed, our team then pressure tests them. Makes sure that they are accurate based off of the information that we understand within the health care landscape and the specific audiences that we’re looking at.

And then we have the ability to do a lot more strategic targeting across a variety of platforms using these personas than we would had we not had the ability to create additional personas at scale. So this really allows us to leverage many more personas and have precision targeting against those than if we were using old, more standardized persona developing processes that are a lot more time consuming to review data aggregation at scale.

Next, let’s talk about emerging channels so everyone understands that at this point, consumers are going to ChatGPT or other LLMs, and they’re asking healthcare-specific questions. They’re trying to find answers before they book that appointment. Well, at this point, we’re recommending and we are placing our clients in those LLMs as results. So in ChatGPT, for example, we can actually do placements within ChatGPT results.

Of course, we have the entire organic AIO/GEO optimization. We do that for a lot of our clients. I did a previous podcast episode about how successful we have been about having our clients show up organically in LLM recommendations, so that is a separate work stream. That is very important. But we also can prioritize placement through paid media placements, and that is always something that we’re thinking about now whenever we’re doing paid media recommendations, really guaranteeing those placements.

Sort of like if you think about Google Search, you have organic and you have paid. Kind of think the same thing about LLMs, now you’re going to have organic, then you also want to try to have paid whatever it’s available on that specific platform. Real time Insights is the fourth pillar. So we’ve never been an agency that would wait until the end of a flight to be able to talk about what worked right?

We are always an agency that’s going to be bringing up recommendations at a, at a minimum monthly, depending on the size of the budget, because sometimes if it’s a smaller budget, you can’t do insights faster than that. You need time for things to run to be able to have statistically significant results. But the cool thing about integrating AI into our custom Data Studio dashboards, which, by the way, for a lot of our clients, now includes Epic patient appointment and revenue data.

Using our UTM connect tool, we’re able to put those paid campaign UTM parameters directly into the patient records and then export them. So our campaign dashboards now often include full ROI, right? We’re not only looking at the number of people that attempted to book appointment, we’re looking at the number of people that showed up to the appointment and the amount of revenue that was driven. Right? Full cycle. Within these dashboards. 

We now have AI layering on top of these dashboards. And the raw paid media data to be able to understand trends before the human eye could actually identify them. So that’s one of the cool things about the capabilities of AI, is the massive amount of data that it can ingest and be able to identify trends faster often times than humans can.

Even if you have a dedicated analyst, having AI look, when you’re having, you know, dozens of campaigns and ad groups or placements across a variety of channels, AI accelerates those insights. So we’re able to have faster feedback loops and faster optimizations, because AI is identifying and flagging those insight opportunities for us at a much faster rate than was available traditionally.

And then finally, pillar number five is creative optimization, something that we have begun integrating recently that I am really, really excited about is actually including the creative production within our paid media fee. So it used to be that, all creative was outside of paid media management fees. But what we have found is whenever we actually include it, we can now use a variety of different AI tools to do quick, say, regional variations for a service line campaign.

And it drives much stronger results. And whenever we just include that in the fee, our team can act much faster because it’s all inclusive. So we have a variety of tools that we use for creative asset production that allow us to do those iterations that really speed up the optimization and results of campaigns. A huge, huge, huge caveat: we will never use AI for creative concepting.

We very much believe concepting still needs to be done by humans. So for us, when we talk about creative optimizations using AI, we’re really talking about creating versioning. Again, a perfect example is regional variations for a service line. If you want to have that specific neighborhood or specific DMA name in, and you have say, you know, 40 different areas that you’re optimizing for, you can, you know, crank that out in less than five minutes with some of these great AI tools, and then a human will QA it before it goes live, can save you a lot of time and money.

Then if you were trying to actually have a human go in, you know, and type in all of those individual DMA or city names. We are very excited about the direction that AI is going. I think this is probably our fourth or fifth podcast on AI, and it really is reshaping the way that marketers think about processes and optimization opportunities.

We still firmly believe humans are not going to be replaced in marketing. Sort of like when the onset of digital and the internet happened. Humans still are very, very important. But if you are not actively looking at ways that I can improve your speed to market and the results that you’re getting for your paid media management, then you’re really missing a key opportunity.

So again, the five pillars: smart planning, precision personas, emerging channels, real time insights, and creative optimization. This isn’t just about automation, it’s truly about smarter, human-led paths to performance for paid media. Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. If this episode was helpful to you, we would love if you would give us some stars.

Some comments. Share it with a coworker that you think may find this episode helpful. Subscribe so you receive a notification when future episodes drop. And if you want to chat with us more about either how you are currently working to integrate AI into your own marketing processes, or about how Hedy & Hopp can help you with your paid media management.

We would love to hear from you. Shoot out, shoot us a message and give us a call. We would love to dig in and chat further. That’s it for us today on this week’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Have a great rest of your day and we hope to chat with you soon. Cheers!