Unless you’ve been living under a rock or spending an excessive amount of time binge-watching Netflix, you know that artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere. It’s being used to read your digital x-rays, create your patient’s clear aligners, and even diagnose your treatment plans for you.
Are You Using AI in Your Dental Marketing?
It kind of makes you wonder why you spent all that time in dental school.
But there’s one place you might not have considered using artificial intelligence: in your dental marketing. We live in a world of content—websites, blogs, social media posts, email marketing, and more. That’s a lot of writing. And using AI tools can be a very tempting idea to help take the heavy lifting out of content development.
But is it up to the task?
As a bit of a science experiment, I decided to test ChatGPT. If you aren’t yet familiar with ChatGPT, it’s an AI chatbot system created primarily for online customer care. ChatGPT has gained a lot of attention recently because it can give natural answers to questions in a conversational tone and even generate articles, blog posts, and other content. You simply type your request into the chatbot, and it will access textbooks, websites, and various articles to model its response in a matter of seconds. Simply amazing!
(Note: if you have some concern that ChatGPT may eventually become self-aware, view mankind as a threat to its existence, and build an army of robots to wipe us out, that remains to be seen. For now, let’s just see if it can write a decent blog article.)
To evaluate just how good ChatGPT is and whether or not it has any true merit as a marketing writing tool, I put myself in the shoes of a dentist and gave it this prompt:
“Write a 300-word blog article explaining the benefits of flossing your teeth.”
Almost instantly, here’s what typed itself out before my eyes:
Maintaining good oral hygiene is essential to achieving overall health and wellness. Flossing is a crucial part of this process, yet it is often overlooked or disregarded by many people. In this article, we will explore why you should floss your teeth and the benefits that come with this simple yet effective habit.
Flossing helps remove food particles and plaque that can get stuck between your teeth, which brushing alone cannot reach. This can help prevent tooth decay, cavities, and gum disease. Gum disease, also known as periodontal disease, is a severe condition that can lead to tooth loss and even increase the risk of heart disease and stroke.
Flossing also promotes healthy gums. When you floss regularly, you help to stimulate the gums and increase blood flow to the area. This can help prevent inflammation and swelling, which can lead to gum disease.
Furthermore, flossing can help you maintain fresh breath. When food particles are left between your teeth, they can begin to decay and produce an unpleasant odor. Flossing helps to remove these particles and prevent the buildup of bacteria, keeping your breath fresh and clean.
Regular flossing can also save you money in the long run. By preventing tooth decay and gum disease, you can avoid expensive dental procedures like fillings, root canals, and gum surgery.
To floss effectively, use a piece of floss about 18 in and wrap it around your fingers, leaving about an inch or 2 to work with. Slide the floss gently between your teeth, using a back-and-forth motion to remove any food particles and plaque. Be sure to floss both sides of each tooth and reach all the way down to the gumline.
In conclusion, flossing your teeth is an essential part of maintaining good oral hygiene and overall health. By removing food particles and plaque, promoting healthy gums, preventing bad breath, and saving money on dental procedures, flossing is a habit that everyone should adopt.
Overall, not bad. In fact, many dental offices would be content to copy and paste it onto their blogs as is. It is factual. It is informative. It is on topic. It is the right length.
But does it have personality? Specifically, does it have your personality?
The brand for your dental practice should have, in addition to its visual elements like its logo and colors, a clearly defined voice. That voice should be woven into all of your written content, including blog articles. Currently, AI like ChatGPT can’t process “write a blog post so it sounds like I wrote it.” (And when it does reach that ability, we may want to revisit that whole robot-apocalypse concern.)
In the meantime, ChatGPT can certainly be a boost to your content creation if you use it properly. First, AI is still very much in the imperfect stages, so you do need to fact check. Then you need to put on your editing cap and rework the content so that it has your voice and personality. If you are the serious, academic type, you may not actually need to change much, but if you are more on the funny end of the scale, adding some humor will make the wording sound more like it is coming from your head and not a bot.
For example, I took the example above and added a little of my own personality to it:
Hide and seek may be fun, but not when it comes to stuff concealed between your teeth.
You already know that good oral hygiene is important to your overall health and wellness. But far too often, flossing is a forgotten counterpart to brushing.
Let’s explore why you should floss your teeth daily and the benefits that you’ll get.
First, flossing helps remove food particles and plaque that can get stuck between your teeth, which brushing alone cannot reach. This can help prevent tooth decay, cavities, and gum disease. When you floss regularly, you help to stimulate the gums and increase blood flow to the area, which can help prevent inflammation and swelling.
Second, flossing can help you maintain fresh breath. When food particles are left between your teeth, they can begin to decay and produce an unpleasant odor. Flossing helps to remove these particles and prevent the buildup of bacteria, keeping your breath fresh and clean.
Finally—and maybe this will get your attention—regular flossing can also save you money in the long run. By preventing tooth decay and gum disease, you can avoid expensive dental procedures like fillings, root canals, and gum surgery.
To make the most of your flossing, grab a piece of floss about 18 in and wrap it around your fingers, leaving about an inch or 2 to work with. Slide the floss gently between your teeth, using a back-and-forth motion to remove any food particles and plaque. Be sure to floss both sides of each tooth and reach all the way down to the gumline. It’s as easy as that!
So if promoting healthy gums, preventing bad breath, and saving money on dental procedures all sounds good to you, remember to find your floss every time you brush!
Admittedly, not prize-winning work, but it took a heck of a lot less time than writing the entire article from scratch, and I would challenge you to pick this out as an “imposter” in a pile of human-authored articles. I also completely avoided the common pitfall of writer’s block since the content just dropped itself onto my laptop in a matter of seconds.
That’s great news for dentists who are hands-on with content creation for their blogs. Using AI as a time-saving hack allows you to focus your time on treating patients rather than spending hours researching and writing content. Without that burden, you’ll also be able to be more consistent with your content output, which is necessary for content marketing and dental SEO.
The Future of Artificial Intelligence in Dental Marketing
We are in the early stages of using AI, so remember that these applications are in their infancy. As the world adopts these tools at break-neck speed, AI software will learn the nuances of billions of different human-generated prompts, getting more sophisticated by the day (or likely by the hour, maybe even by the minute or second). It’s a fascinating evolution to watch.
It’s hard to predict at this point exactly how far AI will eventually progress and change the way dentists market their practices. But it’s safe to say that these technologies will become new tools for dental marketing agencies, not our replacements, and we’ll stay well ahead of the curve in terms of blending talent and technology to promote dentists in an effective, authentic, and—yes—human way.
Stay tuned for more articles from me (here, and in my dentistrytoday.com column) on a variety of topics that will impact your practice and help you get the best possible ROI from your marketing. To quote actor, politician, and lovable T-800 Terminator cyborg Arnold Schwarzenegger, “I’ll be back.”
(That is assuming, of course, that the whole end-of-the-world scenario doesn’t come to fruition. Then it will just be “Hasta la vista, baby!”)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ms. Winans is owner, president, resident visionary, and lead strategist of Golden Proportions Marketing. She brings decades of real-world experience to dental marketing, ensuring that the marketing solutions she and her team develop are both creative and easy for dental offices to execute. She also writes a regular column, Xaña’s Marketing Gold, on dentistrytoday.com. She can be reached at xwinans@goldenproportions.com.
Disclosure: Ms. Winans reports no disclosures.
FEATURED IMAGE CREDIT: TierneyMJ/Shutterstock.com.
