Using Facebook Ads to Hit Patient Enrollment Targets for Clinical Trials
Many clinical trials are notorious for not achieving their patient recruitment targets – thus leading to a waste of everyone’s time and resources if the trial is unable to go ahead due to the desired number of people not being enrolled.
As a result, patient recruitment teams are often left frantically scrabbling around to try and generate more interest for their study by placing last minute adverts in the press or poring over their database of contacts – yet again – to see if there’s someone relevant they might have missed.
There is, however, an easier method of initiating one final push for trying to achieve your recruitment targets:
Facebook advertising.
With over 2.4 billion active Facebook users worldwide – over 35 million of these based in the UK – it’s a safe bet that your target audience is using the platform on a regular basis. (Or if they’re not personally using Facebook, there will certainly be someone who knows them that uses it).
Which is why putting out trial-specific messages on Facebook is such a valuable tool for clinical trials patient recruitment.
Now, obviously this doesn’t simply apply when you’re approaching the recruitment deadline – and I would certainly always advise you to have an ongoing campaign to at least build up your database of potential participants for the future.
But there are certain facets of how Facebook works that make it an ideal medium for ‘last minute’ promotional activity if your other efforts have failed to deliver patients for your trials in sufficient numbers:
1) Demographic Targeting
If your trial is short of – for example – women aged over 45, Facebook is an ideal platform for targeting people within a specific demographic group. So you’d be able to show your ads only to women over 45 in locations from where they would be likely to travel to your site. (Such as within a 30 mile radius).
2) Audience Targeting – Engagement
Facebook’s ‘killer app’ of Interest Targeting is great for showing ads to people with specific interests – such as asthma, Alzheimer’s etc. (See this blog post – https://www.rossjackson.co.uk/rare-disease-patient-recruitment-using-digital-ads/ – for more on attracting people onto trials for rare diseases).
An additional facet that can be extremely valuable when trying to ‘top up’ your participants is being able to target people who have Engaged with your Facebook Page or website.
This is particularly useful if you have a Facebook Page or page on your website that is dedicated to content relevant to the condition in question. You can then utilize the targeting capabilities of the Facebook Pixel to target your ads to people who have viewed your relevant content – thus enabling you to present your message to people who are already going to have an inherent interest in the condition the trial is recruiting for.
3) Audience Targeting – Lookalikes
Another extremely valuable tool within the Facebook armoury is the ability to target ‘Lookalikes’ of people who have Engaged with your content. Lookalikes are essentially people for whom Facebook has identified that they have similar characteristics to people who have viewed your content – thus being more likely to be the type of people you wish to reach.
This can be made even more valuable through targeting a Lookalike audience of people who have already Registered for the specific trial in question. Facebook will then show your ads to people with similar characteristics to those who have already expressed an interest in participating in the trial – thus giving you a highly-targeted audience to aim at with your ads.
4) Recognition and Sharing
As discussed in a previous post, this is one of the most effective aspects of how Facebook Advertising works – as people who are living with a particular condition are almost certainly going to be interested in learning more when they see an ad that references it. As well as this, people who know someone else who has a particular condition are predisposed to want to share ads with them if they believe they may benefit from the contents – thus giving you a ‘referral-based’ method of disseminating the information about your trial.
Dealing with Potential Registrations in a Timely Fashion
As much as can be done through Facebook to recruit potential trial participants swiftly, one of the key factors for success is the speed of your follow up in contacting people who register for the trial. Ideally, you’d be contacting the potential patient the moment you receive the registration form – though obviously that isn’t always possible without the use of eg having people on site who are always available to deal with incoming enquiries, or outsourcing the role to a call centre.
Managing Facebook Ads for Clinical Trials Patient Recruitment
If you’re interested in using my Facebook Ads management service to recruit patients onto your clinical trials – whether to hit the numbers as you near your deadline or through adopting a more long term approach – get in touch to chat through the options.