The clinical trials market is growing at 6.3% annually, poised to hit $73.2 billion by 2028. This growth presents unique opportunities for biopharma companies looking to attract patients to their studies in 2025. Notably, it highlights the increasing patient interest in clinical trials and new therapies.

Despite the opportunities, however, biopharma still faces challenges such as increased competition, regulatory complexities, and logistical issues. These often lead to missed patient enrollment targets and trial delays. Ultimately, four out of five clinical trials fall short of their recruitment targets.

However, there are recent solutions for such hurdles. For example, innovative marketing approaches can address patient recruitment bottlenecks. One way is through direct-to-patient (DtP) digital recruitment, running personalized campaigns that resonate with potential trial participants.

And as 2025 starts, now’s the time to adopt technology-driven strategies to streamline patient recruitment and drive results. Below, explore the best practices for ensuring effective clinical trial marketing and advertising.

Understanding Clinical Trial Marketing and Advertising in 2025

Clinical trial marketing and advertising prove essential to attracting eligible patients for drug research. It involves using different channels like print, broadcast, social media, digital platforms, and display ads. 

While effective, biopharma companies face varied challenges when using these strategies, including:

• Competition for patient attention
• Compliance with advertising regulations
• Trust issues among patients
• Ethical concerns regarding safety
• Limited patient engagement

For instance, the overall success rate of clinical trials is 7.9%, which is high risk for biopharma companies. This is primarily due to low patient recruitment and poor engagement. Traditional recruitment methods (e.g., healthcare provider referrals) also contribute to this, failing to reach underrepresented or hard-to-reach populations.

Yet, biopharma companies can employ modern online advertising tactics to boost trial awareness, improve patient engagement, and address ethical concerns. For instance, DtP recruitment leverages digital methods to target, screen, educate, and qualify participants, improving patient engagement levels.

Best Practices for Clinical Trial Marketing in 2025

For successful clinical trial marketing in 2025, here are the best practices biopharma companies must implement.

Clear and Engaging Messaging

Clinical trial advertising guidelines require CROs and biopharma companies to create ads in simple and clear language. However, language regulations don’t prevent clinical trials from tailoring the messaging to specific audiences, boosting engagement and response rates. 

Messaging must:

• Focus on patient-centric language.
• Address patients’ concerns directly.
• Be transparent about treatment options and risks.
• Use simple terminologies.
• Include personal stories.
• Adhere to ethical guidelines.

Empathy is at the core of clinical trial messaging, so biopharma companies and CROs must refine the message to the patient’s needs to appeal to their target audiences. Also, consider motivating patients to participate in the study by providing the benefits for enrollment—just avoid overpromising or making unsubstantiated claims.

Digital-First Approach

Online channels like social media, websites, search engines, and email marketing have proven effective in promoting clinical trials and targeting potential patients. They enable highly targeted messaging and ad placement based on patient demographics, channel preferences, and health concerns.

For instance, search ads allow CROs to target patients based on keywords they use online, such as “local clinical trials” or “ADHD trials.” Social media advertising on platforms like Facebook enables organizations to target specific audiences or patients (e.g., age, location, and gender) via paid ads by leveraging filtering tools. Online advocacy groups and forums like Reddit make engaging with a specific patient community easy.

By targeting a much broader audience across the digital and physical spaces where they spend time, clinical trials can significantly increase the chances of finding eligible patients beyond the typical 5-10% participation rate. 

A recent AutoCruitment patient survey revealed that about 10% of patients hear about clinical trials from their providers, highlighting the limitations of traditional referral methods. Through a digital-first (and compliant) approach, trials can now effectively reach the remaining 90% of the target patient population.

By adopting best practices for digital marketing campaigns, such as audience segmentation and continuous message refinement, clinical trials can further enhance recruitment efforts. Traditional, non-digital methods simply can’t achieve comparable recruitment outcomes or provide sufficient randomization and diversity for optimal data collection. 

This challenge is underscored by findings from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (TCSDD), which showed that physicians and nurses refer just 0.2% and 0.04% of their total annual patient volumes, respectively, and mainly to trials organized by colleagues or familiar research centers.

Continuous Optimization

Digital marketing and advertising campaigns for clinical trial recruitment are flexible. Researchers can monitor and adjust different aspects of a campaign throughout its lifecycle. This involves analyzing the real-time performance data and making tweaks to targeting parameters, distribution channels, and creative assets to improve results.

Real-time campaign monitoring and continuous optimization offer several benefits to biopharma companies, including:

• Rapid response to market changes, staying ahead of the competition
• Data-driven decision-making guiding informed campaign adjustments
• Optimized budget allocation to direct funds to successful recruitment tactics
• Improved targeting and personalization based on patients’ demographics, needs, and preferences

As the campaign’s data becomes available, researchers can leverage it by adjusting ad copy, modifying bidding strategies, and re-targeting audience segments to reach a more relevant audience. This continuous optimization is crucial, as it allows CROs and biopharma companies to directly target (and actually reach) highly motivated patients, minimizing dropouts and boosting engagement.

The Role of Technology in Transforming Clinical Trial Marketing

Technology transforms clinical trial marketing campaigns by improving speed, accessibility, and data reliability. It expands the coverage and improves the targeting of clinical trial ads, allowing CROs and biopharma companies to target a broader audience.

For instance, AutoCruitment’s technology-driven approach involves using advanced algorithms to identify and target specific patient populations to recruit motivated participants. The company also offers a patient management portal to centralize all campaign data and streamline enrollment, enhancing recruitment efficiency.

Centralized campaign data is particularly important as it enables real-time reporting, which:

• Provides stakeholders with invaluable insights
• Enables effective campaign optimization
• Fosters trust with key stakeholders

Technology can also reduce enrollment time by providing digital forms, mobile apps for registration, electronic medical records (EMR), and HIPAA-compliant consent captures. Clinical trial staff no longer need to waste hours coordinating between sites, physicians, and participants to recruit and onboard patients. AI’s role in patient screening further enhances these capabilities and grows steadily, thanks to its ability to quickly automate data analysis and identify qualified participants.

By adopting a DtP approach, technology helps boost the return on investments (ROI) for patient recruitment campaigns.

Measuring Success: KPIs for Clinical Trial Marketing in 2025

Healthcare organizations must measure the success of their clinical trial advertising campaigns to inform future campaigns and create accurate reports. 

This involves tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) like:

• Patient recruitment rate: Identify the number of patients enrolled in the trial compared to the target goal.
• Diversity metrics: Analyze the different patient demographics a campaign successfully recruits, taking into account the study’s eligibility criteria.
• Cost per enrolled participant: Calculate the cost associated with enrolling a single participant and determine its impact on campaign budgets.
• Social media engagement: Measure ad engagement and interaction on social media by analyzing likes, shares, comments, and time spent on pages.
• Website traffic: Review the number of unique visitors to the clinical trial website over the campaign period.

When tracking these KPIs, CROs and biopharma companies must associate them with the specific patient population they’re targeting and analyze performance across channels like website, social media, email, and paid ads. 

Implement Clinical Trial Marketing and Advertising With AutoCruitment

Adopting innovative marketing and advertising practices is critical to overcoming clinical trial patient recruitment challenges in 2025. These practices provide better-performing alternatives to traditional methods, like site and physician referrals, that can no longer meet the demands of today’s CROs and pharmaceutical manufacturers.

With the right technology-driven, patient-centric strategies, AutoCruitment simplifies targeting and recruiting highly motivated, eligible patients for studies. CROs and biopharma companies partner with AutoCruitment over other clinical trial recruitment companies to utilize advanced data analytics and detailed patient profiling, alongside other clinical trial recruitment tools, and additional qualification services, like second-line, phone-conducted eligibility screening.

Explore how AutoCruitment’s expertise and solutions support clinical trials through effective DtP digital recruitment, and start leveraging intelligent targeting to recruit more qualified participants.