The world is going digital — are you? How to amp up your clinical trial digital recruitment
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems like everything has gone digital, from scheduling video chat appointments with your doctor to Zoom conference calls, reading your newspapers online, and ordering groceries via an app. With the ability to reach more people online than ever before, clinical trial recruitment companies, too, have begun turning to digital channels even more to reach the right patients. So, the world is going digital – are you? We look at three ways to amp up your clinical trial digital recruitment.
Get creative
Traditional print advertising lends itself to static images and copy. Digital advertising opens the door to an array of formats, many of which are still evolving: video, static images, GIFs, audio, memes, link sharing, and responsive graphics. Amping up your clinical trial digital recruitment should also mean getting innovative with the creative that gets paired with your digital ad and e-mail campaigns. For example, Instagram is all about visual content, and if your patient population is largely on Instagram, it’s important to optimize your content visually. There are free websites like Canva that make your content into visually appealing ads, optimized by platform.
Test, test, and test
Given the massive amount of people who are online at any given moment, there’s a good chance that your patient population is active somewhere in the digital space. But with so many digital channels, where do you even start to look for them? Testing a variety of pointed content and ads that are relevant to your patient population on various platforms will help you find the right patients online. It’s important to test different copy, images, videos, and graphics within your ads – what works best on Facebook might flop on Twitter. Remember that each platform has different rules and policies when it comes to advertising, so make sure you’re adhering to those as you run your testing.
Work with a recruitment company
Patient recruitment companies like Antidote are experts at finding the right patients for your trial. Most agencies use a variety of outreach approaches to connect with patients, including digital advertising, partner networks, patient databases, and connections with physicians. Recruitment companies conduct extensive patient research and campaign optimization to execute successful campaigns, while continuing to connect with clients about how their campaigns are running. Agencies also stay up to date with the ever-changing landscape of digital media and pay close attention to how any changes in platform policies might impact advertising campaigns. They’ll make sure your content is optimized per platform, with the creative aspects of it looking and feeling sharp.
The bottom line
Get started now on amping up your digital recruitment for clinical trials. In our recent whitepaper, we dove into the impact of COVID-19 to-date on consumer behavior and digital marketing, focusing on clinical trial patient recruitment. We found that for Antidote’s clinical trial campaigns, the engagement rate has increased 27% since the start of the pandemic. This means that a higher percentage of people who see a digital ad for a clinical trial are engaging with it. More people are finding clinical trial ads relevant to them during the COVID-19 pandemic than before it began.
There is a heightened interest in clinical trials at large, so maintaining meaningful digital patient engagement through this difficult time when patients are listening will be key to successful recruitment going forward.
