Ophthalmology Marketing: 13 Emerging Technologies You Need To Know About

If you don’t have your finger on the pulse of today's advancement in technology, you will be left behind but this isn’t a reason to worry, it just means it’s time to adapt.

There will be disrupters that will listen and watch for the consumer pain points and advance ophthalmology or industries that subsequently affect Ophthalmology (like Warby Parker) that will continue to affect the way your brand is exposed and the number of patients that you can acquire for your practice.

To lead a technology-driven strategy and innovate, we must be willing to explore future scenarios, distinguish improvements, prepare for disruptions, and take an outside-in view. Only those that can navigate the changing environment while identifying and prioritizing new technologies will succeed.

Here are 13 emerging technologies you need to know about.

Conversational Agents

A Conversational Agent is a software program that chats with humans through face-to-face conversation such as Amazon's ‘Alexa’ or Apples ‘Siri’. As voice search grows, it will completely upend tried-and-true practices around paid search and organic content strategy. Conversational agents will begin to meditate more transactions with patients.

Atomic Content

Atomic Content structure allows users to select the information they need without forcing them to sort through information they don't want. Users can easily find the ‘atom’ of content they need. Atomic content represents the building blocks of more advanced and comprehensive forms of personalization and makes it easier to determine (through analytics) what content is used more often. This next wave of personalization will customize multiple dimensions of a consumer’s experience based on demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data.

Programmatic Placement

Programmatic Placement is buying digital advertising space automatically, with computers using data to decide which ads to buy and how much to pay for them. Programmatic placement puts brands everywhere. Programmatic advertising has been growing for almost a decade and continues its steady march beyond the web into native mobile formats, television, radio, and out-of-home media.

Shopping Bots

A new generation of Shopping chatbots go beyond immediately answering simple queries. A computer program automatically searches the internet for particular products or services, compares their prices, and often gives customers' opinions of their quality. Shopping bots are immune to marketing tactics that draw on human emotion.

Dynamic Pricing

Dynamic Pricing, also referred to as surge pricing, demand pricing, or time-based pricing, is a pricing strategy in which businesses set flexible prices for products or services based on current market demands. Most of us have seen this style of pricing with companies like Uber, but don’t think for a second that ophthalmology services are immune to this. Dynamic pricing algorithms are now used across large and small enterprises. Pricing is an important and increasingly dynamic element of marketing strategy.

Smart Contracts

Smart Contracts can be fully executed in computer code without the requirement of physical documentation, and they enable autonomous negotiation among smart agents of buyers and sellers. The transactions between payers/providers and patients/providers will become more efficient. Smart contracts will create new virtual marketplaces and their emergence will change in the way ophthalmology services are sought and presented to consumers.

The Sharing Economy

The Sharing Economy already disrupts our notion of sales and ownership. Many ophthalmologists ‘share’ a surgery center while many choose to own one, this is just one example. Every industry needs to look ahead and see how and where sharing dynamics will have an impact, and how this may change their basic value proposition.

Anthropomorphic VoT and IoT

Anthropomorphic (having human characteristics) Vot (voice of things) and IoT (Internet of things) technologies are becoming ingrained in our culture. Anthropomorphic techniques that use human language and symbolism, and devices such as virtual assistants and chatbots, can promote natural interaction, trust, learning, and empathy between artificial intelligence (AI) software/models and humans. Ophthalmologists (and medical providers in general) must tread lightly in this arena as a strong anthropomorphic approach is not always best. In sensitive situations (such as a robot providing medical advice to a user), overly anthropomorphic approaches could make patients uncomfortable and prevent them from disclosing essential information.

Multi-Touch Attribution

Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) is a way to allocate credit towards marketing touch-points that preceded a conversion within a patient's journey. When you couple MTA with atomic content, you have the power to analyze each marketing touchpoint definitively. Marketers using MTA find they can better allocate their budgets to those touchpoints that work best for anyone particular outcome.

Cross-Device Identification

Cross-Device Identification (XDID) can match a smartphone, laptop, tablet, Fitbit, Smart TV, or any connected device to a specific individual and track how consumers use these devices to navigate between websites, social channels and public portals. Sophisticated ad targeting, personalization, and measurement capabilities allow delivery of a consistent content experience for potential and existing patients across user channels.

Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics are a variant of machine learning that anticipates future behaviors and estimates unknown outcomes. Marketing leaders explore its potential for churn management, cross-selling, propensity to purchase, multichannel campaign management, and customer lifetime value prediction, as well as new applications to improve business decision making.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI has the potential to revolutionize patient interactions over the next decade by enabling conversational experiences, real-time personalization, and content generation.

Customer Data Platforms

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a type of packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems. Data is pulled from multiple sources, cleaned, and combined to create a single customer profile. This structured data is then made available to other marketing systems. CDPs have the potential to transform how you deliver consistent, targeted, and relevant patient experiences across channels.

Potential patients are displaying an intense desire for customized engagements and content across channels, particularly on mobile devices. As a result, patient experience, patient retention and growth, and patient analytics will be the most vital areas to support marketing outcomes in the foreseeable future.

Ophthalmology companies, and more specifically marketers, that are driven by technological advancements specific to customer acquisition, will win the race.

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