Patient recruitment: How to address your audience and advertise Clinical Trials on social media

A lot of us find it hard to keep pace with not only the many channels of, but also the ever-changing ecosystem of digital media.
This post will explain digital media, by focusing on how to improve digital advertising for clinical trial patient recruitment, how to address your audience and engage with them.

1: Addressing your audience
With any marketing programme, the first footfall involves building a buyer persona of your target client/patient. As a starting point, we suggest answering all the questions below –
1. What is the age range of these patients?
2. What are their online hobbies?
3. Where are these patients located?
4. Do they have any health-related issues, if so what?
5. How would you describe the performance of these patients?
6. What can you offer that helps alleviate these problems?

Allowing time/concentration for each of these questions are important and doing your research will help.

Social media research will not only help you identify which channels are most relevant for your target patients, but it will also help you understand your patients in more detail. It will also take the guesswork out of defining contextual data for your target population.

You will quickly learn about levels of patient engagement:
1. How active are they in seeking information about their conditions/problems?
2. What is the general sentiment about available treatments and finding the right treatments?
3. What do they think about side effects of medication/treatment?
4. How do they feel about managing their symptoms?
5. Do many patients act as helpers for other patients in the same situation?

While a lot of recruiters use Facebook and Google+, there are many other options to reach out to the right audience. Social Media platforms such as Twitter, Snapchat, Tumblr and Instagram should be considered when clinical trial populations involve younger demographics.
The optimal digital mix will be highly inclined by country-specific preferences, age-related preferences, disease characteristics as well as patient satisfaction with the effectiveness of currently-available treatments.

Another avenue to explore is keyword search as this gives a better understanding to patient needs. Exploring and manipulating keyword phrases your patients uses will help determine interests, behaviours and pain points while also informing your content strategy. There are many ways to keyword search, but a recommended source is Google AdWords key planner tool. This will provide estimated search volume and can predict the cost of running paid campaigns for these terms.

We deliver digital marketing campaigns that work. Our team of digital experts have developed a deep understanding of online consumer behaviours and motivations, allowing us to create online solutions that resonate with target audiences and prompt action. We assess all channels to understand their impact on a brand’s overall performance and select the one most appropriate for the desired outcome. Whatever the channel, we can help.

If you’d like us to take a brief, get in touch – lisa@absolutely.health