Curing diseases. Developing life-saving medications. Testing and refining less-invasive treatments and therapies. When it comes to cutting-edge clinical research, the field is very competitive, and it can be difficult (but crucial) to find the right patients to participate in clinical trials.

One way to distinguish a particular clinical trial in a crowded market: Partner with a clinical research marketing agency.

After all, recruiting eligible patients is not like selling them sneakers or shampoo. Clinical trial recruitment is a highly specialized process requiring highly specialized digital marketing.

Clinical research organizations (CROs), sponsors, and research sites must attract the widest possible pool of eligible patients, and those patients need the information to make informed decisions, begin the screening process, and continue in the process.

Estimated clinical trial dropout rates range between 15% and 40% of all participants. A more successful patient recruitment process is one that engages patients and motivates them to remain active, helping to significantly reduce those figures.

A successful outcome depends on what a clinical research marketing agency does to drive clinical trial patient recruitment.

What Is a Clinical Research Marketing Agency?

Marketing agencies generally work with businesses or clients to promote products or services to potential customers, whether those customers are other businesses or individual consumers.

This is the same basic framework for working with a clinical research marketing agency. However, communication is more specialized and highly regulated when marketing to potential clinical trial participants.

Clinical research marketing agencies use unique, targeted expertise in the clinical research space; from knowledge of the regulatory landscape to a core understanding of their target audiences. Those audiences include sponsors, physicians, caregivers, and potential patients.

Benefits of Partnering with a Clinical Research Marketing Agency

Clinical trials cannot proceed without a sufficient number of qualified patients. By some estimates, more than half of all clinical trials fail to advance due to patient enrollment issues.

While these issues may become impossible to ignore at the trial’s median stages, they are likely to have roots in a much earlier part of the process: Patient recruitment. Recruitment and enrollment efforts targeting the right patients establish an essential foundation for any clinical trial’s ongoing (and lasting) success.

Partnering with a clinical research marketing agency can streamline the patient recruitment process. Here are a few benefits of partnering with AutoCruitment:

Expertise in Regulatory Compliance

Clinical research must manage and account for overlapping interests and concerns, including medical ethics, patient privacy, and healthcare best practices.

These same guidelines and expectations apply to clinical research marketing, where agencies must follow strict rules set by agencies and regulations that include:

• Institutional Review Board (IRB)
• Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
• State-specific consumer data privacy laws, where applicable

Crafting marketing materials that adhere to industry-wide ethical standards, avoiding legal pitfalls, and telling a compelling story that draws potential patients in can be complicated. Partnering with AutoCruitment often makes it considerably easier.

Patient Recruitment and Retention Strategies

Many racial minority groups often go underrepresented in clinical trials, with some estimates positing that enrollment numbers among these groups decreased further between 2019 and 2022.

Gathering the best and widest-applicable trial results demands working with a sufficiently randomized population sample. That’s why clinical research marketing agencies must create campaigns targeting different demographics. Gathering the best and widest-applicable trial results demands working with a sufficiently randomized population sample.

This approach to patient recruitment and retention in clinical trials may include:

• Thinking local: SEO digital ads, social media, and localized outreach can increase engagement within specific communities.
• Reaching out: Marketing strategies should seek to keep patients engaged throughout their trials, maintaining their interest and fostering a commitment to the trial.
• Teaming up: Whether it’s an advocacy group or a community organization, the right partner from within a community will be a trusted voice to share clinical research marketing with potential patients.

A lack of diversity among trial participants can compromise the data generated, which results in lower-quality clinical research. Thoughtful targeting and marketing early on will make a trial more likely to attract a diverse patient pool.

Tailored Marketing Strategies

Clinical trial marketing is never “one-size-fits-all,” and best practices vary across clinical trials.

The right clinical research marketing agency will understand that individual trials require customized campaigns for each phase, potential patient population, and therapeutic area or treatment type.

In some cases, a research team might focus primarily on spreading the word about the trial to as many potential patients (who meet the inclusion criteria) as possible.

In others, grassroots community awareness campaigns about an underlying medical condition or health issue might come first, so a particular community is already familiar with the landscape when a clinical trial is announced.

Still, useful educational content associated with the CRO or trial sponsor might establish those organizations as trusted voices in the field. Potential patients would be familiar with them when a clinical trial opens its enrollment process.

Access to Specialized Tools and Technology

While clinical research marketing agencies can bring field expertise and digital media savvy to their work with CROs, they should also bring advanced analytical capabilities.

Useful clinical trial recruitment tools include:

• Existing patient information databases and registries
• Customized patient recruitment screening and engagement
• HIPAA-compliant electronic medical records (EMR) capture and intelligence
• Targeted social media and online advertising campaigns

The right clinical research marketing agency can use these recruitment tools and sophisticated marketing analytics to track campaign responses and provide data-driven insights. In turn, the agency can assist CROs and sponsors with optimizing future recruitment campaigns.

Cost and Time Efficiency

The recruitment and enrollment process can be so time-consuming that it can risk a drop in the quality and attention to detail of the team’s clinical work.

Clinical research marketing agencies can provide more efficient patient recruitment services, allowing research teams to outsource their trials’ marketing and promotional needs to experts.

A faster, more precise patient recruitment process will accelerate campaign timelines and lead to more efficient trials with higher retention rates that provide more useful data. Clinical trials that meet timelines also avoid bloated budgets that often accompany delays.

Strengthening Relationships with Stakeholders

Each stakeholder is only one small piece of the puzzle, and all the pieces must come together seamlessly to create a final, effective product.

CROs and research teams producing brilliant clinical research may not be clear, approachable communicators. Savvy marketing minds may not be experts in the latest medical technologies. And patients who meet the specific inclusion criteria may not be either!

That’s why clinical research marketing agencies, and their specific expertise, can make the lives of sponsors, investigators, CROs, and patients so much easier.

Targeted messaging, informative presentations, and timely stakeholder-specific progress updates are essential to keeping everyone on the same page. Consistent branding between trials and across communication channels will build trust between patients and their trials.

A multi-stakeholder approach to patient recruitment will ensure that each piece of the puzzle feels like so much more than that: Patients will feel empowered, educated, and aware.

How to Choose the Right Clinical Marketing Agency

The benefits of working with a clinical marketing agency are clear. However, how can CROs and sponsors determine which agency is the best partner?

This process involves asking the same questions you’d ask about any expert whose advice you’re seeking. Evaluate an agency based on their experience, their portfolio of current work, and, perhaps most importantly, testimonials from recent, satisfied clients.

It’s also important to select an agency whose employees and experts demonstrate a deep, nuanced understanding of the specific clinical research landscape in which a clinical trial will occur.

Above all, it’s essential to ask these questions upfront. While the most experienced partners offer rescue study services, don’t wait until clinical trial recruitment and enrollment struggle to hit benchmarks to consider whether to partner with marketing experts.

The best clinical trial recruitment companies combine marketing expertise with a technology-backed, end-to-end method for advertising trials and recruiting potential patients. This seamless, full-service approach optimizes clinical trials while improving patient experience.

Boost the Benefits of Your Clinical Research Trial Marketing with AutoCruitment

Clinical trial marketing must attract patients and provide them with sufficient information to inspire a sense of agency and ownership.

After all, it’s not enough for you to inform patients about your clinical trial. It’s not even enough just to enroll them in it, either. You want to engage them long-term, retain them throughout the clinical trial, and establish your organization as one they can trust.

AutoCruitment will partner with you in this work, marketing your trials with an authoritative, industry-specific approach.

Interested in learning more about leveraging these benefits to improve patient recruitment and retention?

Contact AutoCruitment today to learn how we set CROs, sponsors, and research sites up for patient enrollment success through the use of:

• Clear, digital communication strategies
• Specialized tools and technology
• Proven patient engagement methods
• Site support

Are you in the middle of a trial that is falling behind on recruitment? Talk to us about our rescue study expertise.