5 Common Clinical Trial Patient Recruitment Strategy Mistakes

Planning out a detailed clinical trial patient recruitment strategy takes time, and an immense amount of patient population research. Unfortunately, sometimes not everything clicks as it should, causing problems with conversions, and patient eligibility.

Here are 5 of the most common clinical trial patient recruitment mistakes, and some advice on how to fix them. 

1. You Haven’t Done Enough Audience Research

The research you do on your audience is critical to how successful your recruitment campaign goes. Without the right understanding of your audience, you may end up using language that is too technical, or images that don’t capture the experience your audience associates with their condition.  To help with audience research, do the following:

Conduct patient sessions or surveys that garner insight into what it’s like to live with their condition.

Spend time on social media, forums, and patient blogs to understand the language patient’s use to describe their condition. 

Connect with patient advocacy groups who can help offer insight into a patient’s daily challenges and motivations.

Connect with patient organizations to open up dialogues with your audience.

2. Your A/B Tests Aren’t Effective

Creating ad variations and testing them is critical to the success of your clinical trial marketing strategy. If you aren’t A/B testing effectively, then you won’t get usable results.  Make sure to:

Test one variable, like your call-to-action buttons, images, or headlines, at a time. 

Define advertising success? Will this be clicks on your ads, pre-screen completion, or in-person calls, etc. 

Use the winner from each A/B test and make it the control variable in the next test.

Understand how statistically significant the results of your A/B tests are. 

While running A/B tests does take time, it is a reliable way to gain insight into optimizing your ads, so that you get the best combination of images, headlines, and call-to-action buttons. 

3. Your Outreach Materials Are Too Technical

A large portion of the American population only reads at the 7th/8th grade level, and only about 12% are health literate. This means that if you use language that is scientific, your patient population may have a hard time understanding what your trial is about. 

Make sure your outreach materials reflect the language and terms used by your patient population audience, as this will be the most effective way to let them know about your clinical trial.

4. Something is Amiss With Your Landing Page

If you are getting clicks through to your landing page, but lack conversions, there may be something amiss with your landing page.

Is there a common point where your audience drops off from the pre-screener?

Are questions skipped in the pre-screener? 

Do patients get to a certain point on the landing page, and then exit?

Are patients asking clarifying questions on your social media pages?

Make sure that your landing page’s language is consistent with your advertising copy and your creative outreach materials. Varying messages sow distrust, and can be misleading. 

5. A Portion of Your Audience is Ineligible

If you are noticing that you have a lot of bounce/exit rates or unfinished pre-screeners, it may be because your ad targeting is bringing in ineligible patients.  For instance, they may have another underlying medical condition that makes them ineligible, or your audience may be too general, and you’re finding individuals who are interested in the research but don’t want to participate in the actual trial. 

Contact us today to learn more about how to avoid these mistakes and optimize your patient recruitment strategy.