Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here to stay, bringing a whole new twist to the marketing scene! This innovative tech is helping marketers like you reach out and connect with audiences from all walks of life in a more personalized way. These tools are even helping scientists and marketing teams bring much-needed diversity to health research studies.

Have you considered how each of us can experience the same disease in different ways? According to the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD), how a disease affects a specific individual depends on several factors, including (but not limited to) our geographic ancestry, age, environmental factors, resources, and habits.

In this article, we’ll look at how AI tools can be used to bring diverse volunteers to Alzheimer’s disease research. Of course, these techniques can be used across the spectrum of clinical and pharmaceutical trial research.

Historically, research trials participants haven’t broadly represented the multitude of factors that determine how a disease impacts different individuals. Typical research study participants have been non-Latino white individuals, leaving a deficit in understanding diseases and treatments for several communities. This gap leads to disease prevention guidance, treatment responses, and intervention developments that don’t apply across all populations.

To overcome the need for more diversity in disease studies, researchers collaborate with marketing teams to develop culturally informed digital marketing initiatives to recruit diverse participants. For example, the Brain Health Registry (BHR) teamed up with Alaniz Marketing in 2021 to successfully enroll 3,603 older Latino adults into BHR. And this was accomplished before the AI revolution!

Now that AI is transforming everything from education to art to healthcare, it’s time for marketers to master the AI tools that can best help increase diversity in clinical research studies.

Curious about how you can harness the power of AI to connect with audiences of all backgrounds? Stick with us! We've prepared some helpful tips to guide you on your journey.

1. Create Personas:

The community you want to reach isn’t a monolith. It’s important to take a closer look at who you want to speak to and create specific personas that are subsets of your audience. For instance, one persona might be an individual in their 60s experiencing early Alzheimer's symptoms; another persona could be a younger, healthy individual passionate about medical research.

Those personas are a good start, but they could be stronger. By using real-time data and feedback rather than assumptions or stereotypes, AI can help you develop more unique, realistic, and empathetic personas. Creating the best personas possible empowers you to respectfully communicate with audiences across a variety of cultures and backgrounds.

To learn more about how to guide your content and marketing strategy using AI-driven personas, check out what Andy Crestodina at Orbit Media has to say. Andy breaks down how to do it and why it matters.

2. Shape a Compelling Message:

It’s been widely reported that AI writers and content generators have baked-in biases, so you might find it odd that we recommend shaping your content using AI tools. While it’s true that there are flaws in generative AI writers, they still have a place in your content creation process.

Different messages will resonate with different personas. For an Alzheimer’s patient from a community that’s underrepresented in clinical research, you might emphasize the potential to lower healthcare disparities. For healthy volunteers, you can highlight how their involvement could contribute to future treatment advancements that benefit all communities.

To create content that is culturally appropriate and respectful takes a human hand. But once you’ve developed your core content, you can use AI tools to shape it for various platforms. Shorten it for Twitter. Make it keyword rich for digital ads. Brainstorm and outline an article for your blog. Your AI tool of choice can do this quickly and efficiently, saving you time.

3. Leverage AI and Machine Learning:

AI can help you optimize your campaigns by analyzing the performance of your ads, suggesting improvements, and identifying patterns in who responds to your calls to action. Employing this information can help you adjust your approach for better results.

Some inherent AI features in social media and performance marketing platforms do a lot of analytical heavy lifting for you, including:

Optimization: AI can continually monitor your ad performance and make real-time adjustments to improve the effectiveness of ad campaigns.

Predictive Analysis: Using machine learning (ML), AI can predict future audience behavior based on past data, helping you reach potential volunteers more effectively.

Automated Learning: As AI continues to run campaigns, it can learn from its successes and failures, refining its approach and improving its ability to deliver your ideal audience over time.

Of course, while these tools help identify search patterns, audience behavior, and content preferences, AI algorithms can't feel emotions or make choices based on gut feelings. Without expert oversight, things can easily go awry. Humans will always be needed to help guide AI and make sure the right decisions are made.

4. Track and Adjust:

Finally, a crucial aspect of any marketing campaign is to constantly track, analyze, and adjust. By using AI tools to analyze the performance of your ads, the engagement on your social media posts, and the traffic on your website, you can understand what is working and what isn't and adjust your campaign accordingly.

In Improving Representation in Clinical Trials and Research, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine noted that “currently, large swaths of the U.S. population, and those that often face the greatest health challenges, are less able to benefit from these discoveries because they are not adequately represented in clinical research studies.”

By following this targeted approach, you can connect across cultures with the people who are most needed as clinical trial volunteers and encourage them to take action.