In healthcare, you often have your work cut out for you.
Providers fill out an average of 20,000 forms each year. Almost half of all physicians report at least one symptom of burnout. Patient charts can’t be found on 30% of visits.
With there already being so much to worry about, any kind of digital marketing can often feel like a luxury. But without any personalization, providers may miss out on building loyalty and relationships.
That’s why a lot of healthcare companies are focusing on patient-centric marketing. That means that healthcare professionals are giving patients the power to drive their own health journey. Each individual patient’s health needs determine the kind of content they receive, when they receive care, and more.
At Bitly, we’ve seen insurance companies, medical device companies, hospitals, and others use the link to build patient-centric marketing initiatives. The link can go a long way by helping you learn more about patients, streamline processes and ultimately strengthen the patient-provider relationship.
Here’s how:
1) Track SMS Engagement
Health insurance providers and practitioners are becoming increasingly digital.
In an age where consumers are constantly on-the-go and expect to have information at their fingertips, most patients want electronic access to their health records. Research shows that apps and online portals are shown to boost engagement rates by 60% or more.
Reduce churn and accounts sent to collections by sending patients SMS reminders.
You can text patients custom Bitly links that direct to a personalized landing page. For example, my local clinic might text me a reminder about an upcoming appointment with the Bitly link “hos.pal/denisechan” linking to a calendar reminder and directions.
This not only makes it easy for me to keep track of my visits, but it also feels special that the link is branded with my name. At Bitly, we’ve seen custom branded domains (that’s a branded link that replaces the generic bit.ly domain) drive up to 34% increase in click-through-rate.
Back in the Bitly dashboard, you will be able to see exactly how each individual is interacting with your content, where patients are engaging from, and how custom landing pages are performing as a whole.
2) Measuring Offline Collateral
Health is pretty personal. Finding the proper care or service is often a big commitment. That’s why medical device and insurance companies still find a lot of success with offline initiatives.
In-person conferences and word-of-mouth boost trust and credibility. It helps to put a face to the name.
But it can be hard to measure ROI on traditional advertisement since there’s no way to tell how many people have seen your collateral or are engaging with it.
Using a Bitly link, you can track exactly how many times people are visiting your site from offline collateral you hand out at a conference. Simply add a link to your business card or flyer and watch the engagement populate in real-time on your dashboard.
You can then determine, depending on the number of conference attendees that sign up for your service, if the conference was worth attending. You can also use the link to track ROI on other offline efforts such as direct mailers, subway ads, and brochures.
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3) Track Engagement Across Teams & Offices
Whether you’re a nationwide clinic with locations in multiple cities or you’re a health tech startup with 80 employees, it can be hard to keep tabs on all of your initiatives.
Using Bitly Brand Manager, your organization can easily share, organize, and compare data across teams and offices.
Under Brand Manager, you can create multiple user seats under one central account. You can also create an individual dashboard for each physician, team, or location. This allows you to compare performance across silos, integrate across channels, and create specific permissions to ensure patient privacy.
By breaking down silos, you can maximize resources to better serve the patient. For example, a medical device company might find that a landing page with instructions for a specific feature has very low engagement. Perhaps this is an indicator that users don’t know how to find this page or are not using the feature very heavily. This can be an opportunity for the marketing and product teams to work together to boost usage.
4) Prove ROI & Cut Costs
Digital budgets are hard to come by in healthcare. In recent years, healthcare and pharma digital ad spend has only represented 2.8% of total spend.
That’s why testing and tracking is all the more important. The social media team at WebPT uses Bitly to find their most effective marketing channels and identify content pieces to produce.
“With Bitly, not only can I tighten up our social messages, but I’m also able to track UTM data, see clicks on our links, monitor “dark social traffic,” gather location data, and even track down referral data…”
– Courtney Lefferts, Social Media and Content Specialist at WebPT
The WebPT team uses Bitly links with UTM parameters in form fields on their landing pages which helps keep things neat on the front-end while collecting data on the backend. “It’s this comprehensive information (in a tidy package) that helps me make the best decisions about what content to produce—and where to share it on all of our social channels,” Courtney says.
We’ve seen many companies use Bitly Campaigns to track whether paid social is worth the investment. They simply double down on channels that perform well and phase out ones that don’t.
5) Tracking Patient Referrals
Close to 75% of internet users go online to search for treatment options and information about side effects.
There’s no knowing what patients will say about your brand online and there’s no real way to control your reputation, but you can turn existing patients into loyal advocates.
Using Bitly Camapigns, you can track how patients are referring friends and family to your service. For example, you can assign a unique Bitly link for each channel; social media, email, and offline collateral, to see which channels patients are using most to spread the word.
Back in the dashboard, you will be able to see both a micro view of how the referral program is performing at a patient level and a macro view of how it’s contributing to your overall patient acquisition numbers.
Building An Experience Patients Can See Clear Across
Inaccessible patient records, unclear communication, and high costs all contribute to the lack of trust in pharma and healthcare.
“There’s a lack of patients that think companies are putting their best interest at heart,” says Beth Snyder-Bulik, Business Journalist and Contributing Writer at FiercePharma.
A recently released report also showed that only 9% of the entire U.S. population thinks that pharma and biotech puts patients in front of profits. And only 36% of the U.S. thinks that doctors and nurses put patients in front of profits.
But data can help combat this. Data can help create personalized communication that makes patients feel like they’re having a one-on-one conversation. Data can help healthcare insurance companies understand what kind of topics consumers would like to learn more about. Data can also help you understand what types of initiatives help your business grow and what might be holding it back.
It all starts with the link. Every tap, swipe, or click is an engagement that can help you better understand your patients and let them know they’re heard. By using Bitly, you can better understand your patient’s concerns, habits, and goals.
Keeping a pulse on how your patient is engaging is the first step to building trust and a long-lasting relationship.