How to measure and maximise your patient recruitment spend ROI

Measuring your return on investment (ROI) lets you gather data on the results, which helps you to make any adjustments needed to maximise the value of the advertising you’re doing – proving its worth.

So to help ensure you’re getting the most out of your advertising strategy, and recruiting the participants you need, we’ve put together proven tactics to get and track results.

Use checklists to improve engagement

Research shows more than 65% of pharmaceutical and biotech organisations surveyed are looking at ways to increase patient engagement during the development of new treatment drugs. And checklists are just one way to do exactly that.

For example, when you’re developing your clinical trial advertising materials, using checklists helps make sure you don’t overlook issues such as:

• the diversity of your audience,
• cultural backgrounds, and
• first language requirements.

It will help you to better tailor your materials to reach the widest possible audience, making your development process smoother.

Naturally, by increasing your level of patient engagement, you can improve your recruitment, retention and adherence to the trial, all of which help to reduce the trial’s timeline.

Understand participant profiles

All clinical trial advertising should be based on insight, otherwise it’s little more than information. To gain insight that can direct your materials, you need a solid understanding of your personas. Unless you take the time to know your participant profiles in depth, you could end up with a bland campaign that misses the point and fails to engage the audience. You’ll get better results by having detailed knowledge of the people you’re targeting, what their day-to-day and long-term needs are, the messages most likely to resonate with them, and then addressing these in your campaign.

Take a holistic approach

Using emotion to connect with people through your clinical trial advertising is important. But it’s not enough to rely on emotion alone. Taking a holistic approach that includes scientific evidence and focuses on delivering accurate information can go a long way towards making your campaign stand out in the market. This is a target market in which creativity is often missing, so companies that find a way to hit the ‘sweet spot’, bringing together all the right information through a campaign that targets people on both a rational and emotional level, can expect excellent results.

Test your ads

Testing is crucial for every advertising campaign, but to really reap the benefits, there are tricks you could be missing. Including an early testing phase in your development process helps to keep costs down and allows you to make adjustments before racking up large amounts of expenditure. Using actual health seekers as your test subjects, rather than random focus groups and respondents, is more beneficial as they’re better positioned to provide real insights you can use in the development of the campaign.

In our increasingly consumer-driven healthcare market, it’s important to note that health seekers are now also viewed as customers. This is particularly true in the clinical trials advertising environment, where the decision on whether to participate or not ultimately rests with the consumer. It’s not enough say you’re committed to patient centricity and engagement—unless you rethink your approach to participant recruitment, trial design and execution, you’re unlikely to see improved efficiencies or outcomes in the near future.

Measure the results

It’s one thing to measure your success by the number of participants you’re able to recruit and retain, but don’t overlook the measurement options available on digital platforms. Key metrics that will help you determine the effectiveness of your campaign include:

• Improved trial performance — for example, faster planning and approvals, increased enrollment levels
• Enhanced study volunteer feedback and patient activation measure (PAM) scores
• Better visibility and reach through the use of digital technologies and marketing tactics
• Upgraded long-term drug development portfolios.

Programs like Google Analytics can provide valuable insights, such as whether your content is reaching the target audience and if they’re engaging with it. Social media analytics can help you identify what followers are saying about your campaign and the trials, and whether any of your competitors are talking about you.

Tie it all together

As clinical trial costs continue to increase, companies are constantly looking for new ways to make recruitment and retention more efficient. Customised, adaptable digital marketing campaigns, better sharing and transparency of data, health seeker-centric trial design, and remote patient monitoring techniques, together improve the participant’s experience during the process. It’s essential to tie the threads together by developing your understanding of participants as real people, because making your advertising more human will create deeper connections. And with the constant stream of information coming at consumers daily, your materials need to really speak to them if you want them to have the desired effect of recruiting participants for a study.

This blog was first published here: https://www.couchhealth.co/post/how-to-measure-and-maximise-your-clinical-trial-advertising-roi