After clinical trials receive the green light and assemble the budget to kickstart patient recruitment, the next crucial step is clinical trial advertising.

However, 80% of clinical trials face delays due to patient recruitment challenges.

Campaigns demand careful planning and execution to engage patients. They must navigate strict rules set by governing bodies, such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), while delivering targeted messaging to ideal patients.

To help navigate these challenges, this post covers the steps for getting started with clinical trial advertising and the best practices for success.

Understanding Clinical Trial Advertising

Clinical trial advertising involves promoting clinical studies to find potentially eligible patients while complying with the FDA and IRB regulations.

To this end, the campaign must clearly articulate the trial’s purpose, eligibility criteria, and benefits to potential participants. It can leverage different channels, such as print, broadcast, social, and digital platforms, to advertise the clinical trial.

Despite seeming simple, clinical trial advertising faces unique challenges, including a lack of trial awareness, stringent eligibility criteria, limited patient engagement, and ethical concerns regarding safety. It’s no surprise that most trials end prematurely.

Navigating these challenges requires a thoughtful plan prioritizing study awareness, effective patient recruitment screening, patient engagement, and compliance.

Steps to Getting Started

Here are the crucial steps to launching a successful advertising campaign for any patient recruitment drive.

Step 1: Identifying Your Target Audience

Before initiating outreach, identify and define the ideal target audience for the trial to boost recruitment, engagement, and participation. This involves determining the health characteristics and demographics of the patients that best suit the research.

Consider key factors like age groups, health status, geographical location, and socioeconomic conditions. By narrowing down the campaign to a specific audience, the campaign can achieve precision targeting, ensuring the right message reaches the right patients.

Use strategies like interviews, online surveys, EMR data analysis, open-source data review, and community participation for target audience research. You can also work with clinical trial recruitment companies to connect with highly targeted audiences relevant to the specific disease and treatments in the trial.

Step 2: Setting Clear Objectives

Establishing well-defined campaign goals is crucial in ensuring success. The goals must align with the study and adhere to the SMART framework—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. 

Examples of campaign goals include:

• Recruit participants: Identify patients and attract those who meet the trial’s eligibility criteria.
• Boost awareness: Educate the public on ongoing trials and the benefits of participation.
• Enhance brand image: Build trust and credibility by showcasing your commitment to patient care and medical advancements.
• Address misconceptions: Combat myths about clinical trials to improve public confidence and participation.
• Build a patient community: Develop a sense of community among participants to foster connections and improve engagement.

Avoid vague goals that can lead to challenges like inconsistent results, patient dropouts, and low recruitment. Ensure all team members understand the goals to ensure consistency and clarity in targeted messaging.

Step 3: Choosing the Right Advertising Channels

A robust advertising strategy requires a multi-channel approach, utilizing channels like social media, paid search, display ads, email, and traditional media. This allows you to distribute your efforts, broaden your reach, and ensure accessibility.

When selecting channels, a given trial’s ​​particular outreach methods must focus on the channels its target audiences engage with regularly. For example, a 21-year-old patient is more likely to rely on social platforms, while a 70-year-old patient may turn to TV, radio, and newspapers for news.

Pay attention to the features and capabilities that channels offer. Social media platforms like Facebook and X have advanced targeting capabilities, allowing campaigns to refine target audiences by demographics, age, and interests. They also provide analytics for actionable insights into campaign performance.

Also, weigh the pros and cons of digital versus traditional channels to assess their impact. For instance, digital advertising supports two-way communications, enabling direct interaction with potential patients, while traditional media like radio and newspaper advertisements do not facilitate such engagement.

Step 4: Creating Compelling Messaging

Campaign messaging must resonate with target audiences to support patient recruitment efforts. Leverage insights from patient interviews, advocacy groups, and health professionals to craft advertising materials that offer value to potential patients.

Messages must empathetically communicate the benefits of participation and how the trial will work to inform patients. Avoid making claims, guarantees, and promises like new treatment, free treatment, or monetary compensation in your ad copy.

More importantly, your messaging must be transparent and trustworthy. Share the procedures and risks involved in the trial and outline the safeguards to protect participants.

Remember, campaign messaging offers an opportunity to build trust and confidence from the outset.

Best Practices for Clinical Trial Advertising

Here are the best practices to follow for a successful clinical trial outreach.

Compliance and Ethical Considerations

The FDA and IRBs establish guidelines for clinical trial advertising campaigns to protect patients and ensure honest messaging. Working within these guidelines doesn’t mean outreach must be dull; it must be clear, transparent, and sincere.

According to the FDA, direct advertising for trial participants is part of the informed consent process, meaning all patient-facing outreach materials must be submitted for IRB approval. This includes ad copies, photos, videos, drafts, pre-screeners, mockups, and other outreach materials.

The IRB will review content, language, format, and font size to determine whether the messaging is too promissory. Avoid phrases like “new drug,” “new medication,” or “new treatment.” The images and content must not imply any benefits—the IRB reviews expressions, actions, and settings to prevent implicit communications.

Bring in legal and medical professionals to review your ad copies and materials to ensure compliance.

Measuring Success

Monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) is vital to measure the success and efficiency of any advertising campaign. It also facilitates fine-tuning campaigns as needed for optimal performance. 

Here are the KPIs that campaigns must track:

• Patient enrollment rate: The percentage of interested patients who enroll in the trial after engaging with ads
• Conversion rate: The percentage of participants who complete a desired action like signing up, inquiring, or visiting a site.
• Qualified lead rate: The percentage of leads that meet the eligibility criteria for the trial.
• Cost per enrollment (CPE): The total cost of the campaign divided by the number of successful enrollments.
• Engagement rate: The level of participant interaction with ads—likes, shares, and comments represents engagement.

KPIs can vary by channel and your campaign goals. For awareness campaigns, pay more attention to the engagement rate with patient engagement tools, while patient recruitment efforts should focus on metrics like patient enrollment and qualified lead rates.

Leveraging Technology

Wrestling with the technical aspect of advertising campaigns isn’t necessary—clinical trial recruitment tools will do much of the heavy lifting.

For instance, advanced algorithms and data analytics can be used for precise targeting, allowing campaigns to serve ads to specific audiences. With programmatic advertising, automated ad placement and optimization adjust campaigns according to KPIs for maximum cost-efficiency.

AI-powered targeting even spices things up by tailoring ads based on user behavior and preferences, delivering personalized ads to potential participants. Social media advertising on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn provides a broader audience for trials, boosting visibility and awareness.

Accelerate Patient Recruitment for Clinical Trials With AutoCruitment

Securing trial approvals is only one daunting part of clinical studies—the patient recruitment bottleneck poses a significant challenge, too. Even with advertising budgets, some trials still fall short of their minimum patient enrollment goals.

That doesn’t need to be the case—a well-planned and executed clinical trial advertising strategy makes a huge difference in attracting and engaging the right patients. Focus on social media, native advertising, and paid search to reach and educate your target audience.

AutoCruitment provides a direct-to-patient, web-based technology platform that simplifies the approach to patient recruitment for clinical trials. Tailor-made screeners help speed up enrollment and intelligent targeting to deliver highly qualified patients.

If you need help with patient recruitment for clinical trials, don’t hesitate to contact AutoCruitment today.