5 steps to effective clinical trial branding

Your clinical trial branding consists of more than just a logo and a name. While your design is important to get people to read the materials, it’s the content that’s going to get your message across. Plus, your strategy around it and how you’re going to raise awareness is important too. And with all these factors considered, the combination of strategy, insight and creativity for your clinical trial brand, should guide you to improved patient recruitment and retention.

So, where do you start? Let’s break it down into 5 key steps:

Step 1 – Strategy and insights

First up, know your audience. Before you begin branding your clinical trial, who are you intending to speak to? Are you going to market your materials to patients, their caregiver or their doctor? Plus, have you considered your patient demographics, including their location, age, and disease type? These are all things to think about when it comes to your strategy.

Gaining insights from those who may want to join a study is an important way to tailor your brand to the people you’re targeting. So, to make sure your clinical trial is suiting your patients’ needs, you need to learn more about them, their day-to-day lives, and what’s affecting them the most. That way, you can reflect these insights into your brand and create materials that are relevant for them. And while some factors might be subjective, there can sometimes be a general consensus as to what patients do and don’t like when it comes to materials, from the colours, the copywriting and the visuals involved in clinical trial materials.

Step 2 – Identity and brand values

This is where you start to give your clinical trial its personality. Give your clinical trial a name, a logo, a colour palette, and its brand values that you want to communicate. So much time and effort go into clinical trials, it’s worth spending that little bit of extra time to give it an identity to remember. Plus, this is your chance to share the values behind your clinical trial and to communicate its true intentions. This shows the confidence in your trial and makes it more reputable and trustworthy.

It’s the part where you can put your patient insights into practice, too. Do your patients like to see illustrative representations of the tests and procedures involved in the clinical trial? Or would they prefer to see the real deal? Do they like minimal copy on their materials, or would they prefer to read as much information as possible? This is your chance to show that you’ve listened to your patients and incorporate it into your branding.

Step 3 – Benefits and risks

When launching a new company, you always look at value differentiators. So, what is the value differentiator of your clinical trial? Why should anyone care? You should highlight the benefits and risks of your clinical study within your branding and be sure to explain it in lay terms. Yep, all the important information can be found on clinicaltrials.gov, but it’s much better to communicate in a way that your patients are really going to understand.

Side note: it’s also important to consider the competition within the clinical trial space when looking at value differentiators. If similar products are under investigation and the clinical trial will be competing for recruitment, you’ll need to find ways to differentiate.

Step 4 - Awareness

So, you’ve given your clinical trial a name, a logo, a whole host of materials that represent your clinical trial perfectly. But how will anyone know about your trial if you don’t talk about it? Raising awareness is the next step. Think of different ways to advertise your trial and how you can let doctors, patients, and caregivers know about it.

And while a lot people go online for information these days, it’s still good to have the basic print materials too. Who doesn’t love a handy leaflet that they can quickly read to get all the important information they need?

Step 5 – Social media

Many years ago, this wouldn’t haven’t even been a thing that you’d need to consider. But nowadays, we’re living in a social age and there are 3.80 billion social media users worldwide. So, as part of building awareness, think about the impact that sharing information about your clinical trial on social media could have. Plus, it’s worth noting that social media can help you to get further insights that you might otherwise not find, through a social listening approach.

Brand your clinical trial to get the patient engagement you need

So overall, the key message here is that giving your clinical trial a reputable brand can help you to tailor your messaging, raise awareness and familiarity, and ultimately improve patient recruitment and retention.

This blog was originally published here.