CONTENT THAT CLICKS: Effective Social Marketing for Clinical Trial Recruitment

Clinical trials are a high-stakes endeavor for all parties. For pharmaceutical and biotech companies, they represent a huge investment geared toward bringing treatments to market that can alter the course of a disease. For people enrolling in clinical trials, they represent a new – and sometimes last – hope for meaningful change in disease progression. Although people have a need for trials, and trials have a need for participants, all too often they fail to connect: nearly half of all clinical trial sites fail to fully enroll.¹

Increasingly, search and social marketing have taken on an important role in clinical trial patient recruitment. With 75 percent of Americans looking up medical-related information online at least monthly, it makes sense to provide clinical trial information online.² From a sponsor’s perspective, search and social marketing offer more granular targeting capabilities, efficient pricing for ad delivery, and variability in creative execution than traditional forms of marketing. But with just 11 percent of clinical trials currently using social media to recruit participants,³ there is huge room for growth.

At Syneos Health Communications, we set out to better understand what potential research participants think of receiving clinical trial advertising online, how much they trust different online delivery channels, and what messaging and design elements help motivate potential research participants to notice and click on social media advertisements that lead them toward enrollment in a clinical trial. According to the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative’s Recommendations on Efficient and Effective Clinical Trial Recruitment,“ by developing more engaging messages deployed through the right channels, it is possible to gain the attention of the right target audiences⁴ .” In our research, we sought to deepen this insight by searching within the word of social marketing for what those channels are and what those messages should be.

<sub>1. Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development Impact Report January/ February 2013 https://static1.squarespace.com/ static/5a9eb0c8e2ccd1158288d8dc/t/5aa2c29e4192023932fec8 9d/1520616094463/02+-+Jan+15%2C+2013+-+Recruitment-Retention.pdf
2. Consumer Health Online: 2017 Research Report https://get.health/blog/ research17/
3. Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development Impact Report March/ April 2014 https://static1.squarespace.com/ static/5a9eb0c8e2ccd1158288d8dc/t/5aa2c0b953450a076cf df621/1520615609748/PR-MARAPR14.pdf
4. CTTI Recommendations on Efficient and Effective Clinical Trial Recruitment https://www.ctti-clinicaltrials.org/projects/recruitment</sub>

To get to the bottom of content effectiveness, in September 2018 we surveyed 432 potential clinical trial participants in the United States. To ensure we were examining a relevant target audience, we limited the survey to people who have searched for health information online and use Facebook. In order to isolate how particular health conditions could impact people’s responses to content (i.e., likelihood of clicking on ads), we limited our survey to two conditions where researchers are actively recruiting participants for promising drug studies – epilepsy and migraine [Figure 1]. Survey respondents were asked demographic information; general questions about their health condition and the impact it has on their quality of life; their awareness of clinical trials; and their trust in various online channels of information. They were also shown different forms of mock promotional materials for their condition and asked which they’d be more likely to click on for more information about a trial. From there, the results were tabulated three different ways: by condition, by intent to join a clinical trial (170 respondents indicated a high intent to join a trial, 126 indicated a low intent), and by the self-reported impact their condition has on their overall quality of life (169 respondents indicated their condition had a high negative impact on their quality of life, 141 indicated it a low negative impact). Among our survey respondents, 60 percent indicated they are familiar with clinical trials, and 16.7 percent self-reported they had participated in a clinical trial before (16 percent for epilepsy, 17.3 percent for migraine).

For clinical trial sponsors who are hesitant to invest in social media channels, our survey returned some encouraging results. Among places where people are seeing clinical trial advertising, Facebook ranked as the second most-recalled medium for people with epilepsy, trailing only behind television. For people with migraines Facebook ranked third, after television and doctor’s office [Figure 2]. Furthermore, the people who are most apt to benefit from clinical research appeared to be the easiest to reach online. Those who indicated their disease had a high negative impact on their quality of life used social media more [Figure 3] and had a higher recall of trial ads on social media than those saying their condition had a low impact on their quality of life. It stands to reason that people who are more negatively impacted by their condition would be more engaged with their health and more willing to seek options for treatment.

Although pinpointing individuals who have a quality of life that has been severely impacted may help recruitment efforts, improved ad targeting alone is not enough to boost enrollment. In October 2018, clinicaltrials.gov listed 71 active migraine trials and 146 trials for epilepsy. The sheer competitiveness among sponsors for participants creates a major challenge that underlines the need for ad creative that will truly capture your audience’s attention.

Many companies use a patient journey map to understand how a patient progresses through a condition and to map out communication opportunities. While this is a useful exercise, it may not be at a level deep enough to completely inform content creation. By employing a survey, we were able to uncover distinct needs, preferences, and characteristics of our audience that would help shape the messaging and channel strategies tailored specifically to address them.

For example, in our survey, epilepsy patients cited “transportation issues” and “lack of payment for my time” as the biggest barriers to participation in clinical trials; while migraine patients specifically pointed to the “concern about receiving placebo” [Figure 7]. For people living with epilepsy who may not be able to drive due to their condition, highlighting how sponsors intend to solve transportation challenges would be critical. Similarly, a set of content that outlines exactly what the compensation policy is for an epilepsy clinical trial could allay those concerns. This is different from the issues of a person living with migraines. that educates them on the role of placebo, the probability of receiving it, or even the absence of placebo messaging may better address migraine patients’ motivations.

Understanding the way people living with a specific medical condition relate to other members of their community can also inform channel and content insights. In our survey, people living with epilepsy were more likely than those living with migraines to say they trust others with the same condition. Because of this, we would consider using content that features other epilepsy patients. It also suggests that tapping into online influencers who have built trust and credibility with the epilepsy community could be an effective strategy. Patient forums also emerged as a valuable source of information for the epilepsy respondents. These kinds of forums often facilitate authentic conversations about a person’s experience but are seldom viewed by sponsors as a source of communicating clinical trial information.