5 Clinical Trial Advertising Services to Boost Recruitment

When planning out your clinical trial patient recruitment strategy, it is advisable to partner up with patient recruitment companies such as trial sponsors, research sites, or even Contract Research Organizations (CROS). These types of companies can provide you with digital and traditional advertising services, either for a particular element of your recruitment campaign or as a full-service offering.  Here are 5 trial advertising services you’ll want to purchase when boosting recruitment. 

1. Copywriting

When seeking candidates for a clinical trial, there are guidelines from the Food and Drug Association (FDA) and Institutional Review Board (IRB) that must be followed to the letter. This can be tricky, as your ad copy also needs to be intriguing and engaging to candidates. A clinical trial recruitment company has the experience and knowledge to create an ad campaign that will satisfy all parties without the worry of having to resubmit to the IRB more than once. This keeps your timeline on track and ensures that you can continue to optimize your campaign in the future.

2. Design Development

Your outreach materials must be rooted in patient research, reflecting that of the language your patient population uses, and their medical experience. Choosing images that your patient population can connect with will improve your ad performance, and create a familiar journey for the patients interested in the trial. The trick here is high-quality design, rigorous A/B testing, and an easy-to-follow patient journey from ads, to a landing page, to pre-screener.  A patient recruitment company can give you access to professionals that can get it done right.

3. Campaign Management and Optimization

When it comes to ad campaign management and optimization, there are a few areas that patient recruitment companies can help with.

They have access to ad copy collections to run A/B tests against. This gives them the ability to tweak your ad campaigns as needed to ensure you’re using the best performing and targeted ads throughout the recruitment process.

They have access to lookalike audiences and insight into proprietary data that helps them reach your patient population. They know which patients can be targeted based on their interests, behaviors, and keyword phrase use, as well as, which advertising channels work best.

They can use their own creative materials if you have none, across both digital and traditional advertising channels like: online ad campaigns, billboards, radio, and print media.

4. Landing Page/Pre-Screener Creation

Going beyond outreach material design and copywriting, a patient recruitment company may offer a dedicated service for creating landing pages that explain your trial, and encourage your patient population to take the next step. This could be answering a few online questions (pre-screener), directing volunteers to sign up, or even sending patients directly to research sites.  

A pre-screener garners valuable information from potential candidates and, more importantly, creates an image of what the cost per candidate looks like. This key metric showcases which of your ads are working most effectively, and helps direct future ad strategies.

5. Partnership Support

Partnerships are a great option for reaching out to various candidates you may not be aware of, or otherwise, have access to. Community groups, health nonprofits, and patient advocates are just some examples of networks that a patient recruitment company can call on. For your campaign, this means more qualified candidates in less time, and a point of contact to better involve these candidates with the trial itself.