Digital Healthcare Marketing: Predictions for 2024
By Terrence Brown, VP, Digital Strategy and AI
The future of healthcare digital marketing in 2024 will include AI-powered bots that help engage patients, augmented reality that finally realizes its potential for patient education, and biometric sensors that sync with IoT (Internet of Things) devices to enhance personal healthcare management. The following technological developments will soon be the standard rather than the exception, making technology more ubiquitous and vital than ever before.
The Personalized Era––Serving “N=1” Needs
The pinnacle of marketing has always been a hyper-personalized experience. About 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands provide tailored experiences (Epsilon, 2018). From customized preventive healthcare treatments to the distribution of health information, this hyper-personalization is set to revolutionize every aspect of healthcare marketing. With the combination of AI and Big Data, healthcare marketing may redefine customization by 2024, shifting from group segmentation to customized patient targeting, or “N=1” marketing.
From Idle Patients to Active Participants
Patients will change from being “recipients of care” to knowledgeable “healthcare participants” in 2024, thanks to the power of digital platforms and tools. This significantly alters the burden on healthcare marketers to give people clear, reliable health information to make educated decisions.
Nearly 93% of American adults reportedly use the internet to research health-related topics (Pew Research Center, 2019). In 2024, improvements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing will enable semantic search, providing patients with the appropriate information rather than only facts or just data.
Understanding Emotions: The Future of Patient Care\
Technology will continue to become a more integral part of human interaction in healthcare. In 2024, emotion AI—a technology that can recognize and comprehend human emotions—will revolutionize healthcare marketing. Healthcare businesses can improve patient relationships by using emotion AI to recognize and address patient problems more empathetically in situations where previous interactions have been mostly transactional.
Data Privacy: Uncharted Territory
Issues about data privacy will undoubtedly grow this year as healthcare marketing becomes more digital and data centric. One of the key developments in healthcare marketing may be the use of technologies such as blockchain technology to secure health information. The global market for blockchain in healthcare is anticipated to reach $5.61 billion by next year (BIS Research, 2019). Patient trust in digital healthcare services will increase as a result of safe data exchange.
Given the trajectory from the last year and a half, AI looms large over all aspects of business, and that certainly includes healthcare marketing. In 2024, technology will drive more and more personalized experiences with a lot more empathy than they have in the past, as AI-generated content, processes, and interactions become the norm, not the exception.