I sat down recently with a healthcare publication and answered questions about my work in digital marketing with clinical trial sponsors. Below is a summary of that conversation. Enjoy!
Why do clinical trials constantly run up against recruitment and enrollment issues?
Most sponsors of clinical trials aren’t proactive in their approach to recruitment. Limited exposure to potential patients can drag recruitment on for years. Time is money, especially in the clinical trial business, and pharma companies don’t have the time to “hand out fliers” at random in the effort to enroll patients. Unfortunately, most sponsors of clinical trials aren’t leveraging ad technologies (i.e. Facebook advertising) to their full potential to prospect qualified candidates.
What is your agency doing that works so well in digitizing the recruitment process?
We ARE executing on a proactive, digital recruitment strategy. Digital marketing, and Facebook advertising more specifically, allows pharma companies to quickly get the enrollment messaging out at scale, to a specific set of qualified users (expedited by machine learning through the ad platforms). To ensure that digital ad campaigns can perform to their full potential, we make sure all technical elements are up to par before launching any media. It doesn’t take a marketing expert to launch a Facebook ad campaign, but ensuring all the necessary tracking and targeting capabilities are in place requires a bit more technical knowledge and application.
When activating a clinical trial campaign through digital marketing, we make sure there’s a tagging/tracking strategy in place. We use specific identifiers in UTMs to account for the different channels and target audiences we might be using.
Proactive recruitment needs to go beyond just geographic targeting in order to fill the funnel with a more qualified candidate pool. From a Facebook Advertising perspective, we ensure that the Facebook pixel is implemented on the website and set up to track relevant events (i.e. “are you eligible?” clicks). Once that is in place, we leverage Lookalike audiences to help prospect more relevantly (especially for clinical trials catering to rare diseases).
With Lookalike Audiences, Facebook essentially takes an audience source (like people who have already visited your website) and identifies the common qualities of the people from that source (for example, demographic information or interests). Then, we deliver your ad to an audience of people who are similar to (or “look like”) them. If the pixel did not exist on the website, we would not be able to leverage these lookalike audiences.
How do you optimize active recruitment?
First and foremost, we make sure we’re using consumerized language and creative assets that clearly and concisely get at the heart of a clinical trial’s purpose. What I mean by that is – many clinical trial sponsors are so ingrained in the medical science behind the study that they forget they are speaking to (for the most part) regular people. We try to avoid any overly-complicated language and instead speak directly to the qualifying symptoms of the disease the trial is trying to treat. There’s an art and a science to creating digital ads, and with strict ad policies regarding personal attributes, we have to make sure we’re simultaneously complying with those guidelines and efficiently getting the message and appropriate call to action across.
Additionally, we’re constantly assessing performance across channels. Understanding where media is being spent most efficiently, and being quick to adjust when needed allows us to streamline exposure to the most qualified users.
Anatomy of a Facebook Ad for a clinical-trial sponsor:
What are the value points in gauging whether or not a marketing program is successful?
This is why a tracking/tagging strategy is so important. Being able to accurately measure and segment things like clicks to screener and screener completions across channels is what makes digital marketing so valuable. Unlike a billboard or a brochure, we can digitally track the steps along a patient’s medical journey.
Can you give us an example of success?
Digital ad efforts accounted for 91% of the screener clicks during the recruitment period for a clinical-trial client of ours. Patient recruitment completed in just 3 months!