Advertising to Attract Patients for Clinical Trials – 4 Effective Methods
Anyone involved in the provision of clinical trials knows how difficult it is to attract patients – with a high proportion of all trials not reaching the minimum number of participants and many not managing to recruit anyone at all.
Obviously, when trials fail to recruit people in sufficient numbers, the consequences are a massive waste of time and resources, potential lowering of credibility in the eyes of the trial sponsors and ultimately the delaying of potentially-successful treatments coming onto the market.
Which is why choosing the right method of advertising to promote your trials is essential for ongoing success.
Here’s an outline of 4 of the most popular methods – including scores out of 5 for:
Ease of Implementation – the amount of effort you have to put in yourselves to see the ads through to being live.
Effectiveness at Recruiting Patients – how likely each method is to attract relevant people to your trial.
Value for Money – the amount you’ll have to invest divided by the number of patients you’re likely to attract.
1) Radio Ads
A time-honoured method for promoting your trials to a wide audience within specific geographical regions.
Scores out of 5:
Ease of Implementation: 3.5
Effectiveness at Recruiting Patients: 3
Value for Money: 3
It’s relatively simple to get your radio ads developed – with every radio station providing support and assistance when it comes to getting your message recorded and broadcast. There is also a wealth of historical data available regarding demographic characteristics of the audience – enabling you to tailor your message and broadcast it to the right type of people for your trial.
Radio ads are still an effective means of reaching a wide audience – though their reach is shrinking as people move away from traditional media towards the online variety.
2) Press Ads
Another well-established method of getting your message out to a wide number of people in a particular demographic audience.
Scores out of 5:
Ease of Implementation: 4
Effectiveness at Recruiting Patients: 2.5
Value for Money: 3
Similar to radio ads, press advertising is a fairly straightforward process, with every publication able to offer an advert design service. Each newspaper or magazine will also have a range of demographic information for you to be able to direct your message to the right audience for your trial.
Press advertising is probably still the most common form of advertising used for clinical trials – despite suffering a steep decline in effectiveness due to the growth of the internet as a means for people to get their fix of news and comment.
3) Flyers in Dr’s Surgeries
The original ‘old school’ method of reaching people who you expect to be interested in your message.
Scores out of 5:
Ease of Implementation: 2
Effectiveness at Recruiting Patients: 1
Value for Money: 1.5
Developing the flyers might be quite easy – with the help of your in-house or a local design team – but distributing them is a key drawback of this method. Plus there is no real means of ensuring the flyers are actually posted on the walls in a timely fashion, without visiting the surgeries for yourself – which is obviously an extraordinarily time-consuming process.
Probably most effective for rare conditions that patients will self-identify with when they spot the name of the condition in the flyer – the hope being they will either mention the trial to their GP (who may or may not have heard of it), or jot down the website address for viewing later on. Evidence suggests that flyers in Dr’s surgeries are unlikely to attract patients in sufficient numbers to be useful as a standalone promotional strategy.
4) Facebook Advertising
The ‘new kid on the block’ when it comes to advertising to the general public, hence not currently having as wide an adoption as the other platforms for promoting clinical trials.
Scores out of 5:
Ease of Implementation: 2
Effectiveness at Recruiting Patients: 5
Value for Money: 5
Facebook has a difficult to use interface and a steep learning curve when it comes to understanding how best to use the medium to promote your trials. However, if you can spend the time to learn its intricacies and gain the relevant experience – or want to fast track your results by bringing on board a Facebook Ads specialist – the rewards are second to none. The extremely sophisticated and accurate targeting capabilities enable you to show your message to the right people in the right geographical region.
Facebook quite simply provides the highest quality, lowest cost and largest quantity of patient registrations for clinical trials of any form of advertising currently available. As such, it should certainly be something you consider at the top of your list when promoting your next trial.
Conclusion
One of my contacts said to me recently that I only talk about how effective Facebook Ads are for recruiting patients because that’s what I specialize in. But I corrected him with the truth of the matter by turning the statement around – the reason I specialize in Facebook Ads is specifically because they are the most effective means of recruiting patients.
That said, each of the advertising formats outlined above can be beneficial for your trial recruitment purposes and some trials will have better results from one medium compared to the others – so it’s worth trialling each method for yourself to determine which works best for you.
And if you’re interested in exploring the capabilities of Facebook Ads for patient recruitment – get in touch and I can talk you through the possibilities.