At the Healthcare Internet Conference in Austin, Penn Medicine and Fathom representatives, told a packed room (seriously, standing-room-only) how they use AI tools to transform campaign planning, optimization and measurement — without sacrificing personalization or overspending their campaign budget.
With 52% of marketers reporting that inflation is squeezing their budgets, strategic resource allocation is important. Here are a few AI tools that Penn Medicine uses:
- Perplexity: An AI-powered search engine that cites its sources.
- Akkio: A generative AI tool for analytics and predictive modeling platform.
- ChatGPT: You know this one, right?
Elise Horst, director of AI solutions at Fathom says that using AI has been a great way to do research and understand the best time to run certain campaigns.
“For example, when we were researching peak times to run content about sports-related injuries, Perplexity gave us insights backed by authoritative sources like the American Association for Orthopedic Surgeons,” Horst says.
One valuable application involves audience size estimation — a main factor in budget allocation. The speakers highlighted the limitations of platform-provided estimates, noting that even Meta Business Center has a disclaimer that says the audience size isn’t reflective of the number of people who are viewing your ads.
Instead, they advocate using tools like Akkio that analyze U.S. Census Bureau and Pew Research Center data for more accurate audience sizing. This approach allows for granular targeting at the zip code level, which is helpful if they are marketing their service line to specific areas.
Liz McGonigal, manager of digital strategy at Penn Medicine, says that AI is helpful for managing copy ad copy across multiple campaigns.
“At any given moment, Penn Medicine is managing 80+ campaigns,” McGonigal says. “You’re looking at more than 5,000 ways you can optimize campaign copy.”
To make sure the copy is being read by the right audience, the team uses a combination of their AI-based tools to analyze:
- Historic ad performance
- Competitor messaging
- Audience personas
- Landing page content
However, the speakers emphasized that AI doesn’t replace human expertise. (“Phew,” says Jessica Levco, as she’s writing this story.)
“We're not talking about AI writing the ad copy,” Horst says. “There’s still a need for our content experts to be part of the equation.”
With Google pushing toward broad match keywords, analyzing search terms has become complicated. The team uses ChatGPT to categorize search queries into three groups:
- Wasteful terms unrelated to campaign goals
- Terms disconnected from primary objectives
- Upper-funnel terms from users not ready to convert
For performance measurement, the team uses Akkio to analyze campaign data and identify trends. The tool helps:
- Flag significant performance changes
- Identify optimization opportunities
- Create visualizations for stakeholder reporting
- Enable collaborative data analysis
McGonigal emphasized the value of how AI has backed up Penn Medicine’s data-driven approach to marketing.
“AI is a great way to take an objective approach to things,” McGonigal says. “You may have some preconceived notions about what's working and what's not, and AI doesn't have those.”
This article was written by Jessica Levco, Writer & Event Strategist, who covered HCIC 2024 for Greystone.Net.