Using Content Marketing And Native Marketing To Recruit For Clinical Trials
By Dian Griesel, Ph.D.
Choosing the best strategies to enhance the recruitment process for clinical trials is a hot topic these days. One step worth taking to help aid recruitment efforts is to look at a rivalry that is currently brewing in the business world: that of content marketing versus native marketing.
Content marketing agencies produce campaigns for brands and then pitch these to multiple top-tier publishers for coverage. Each time a publisher writes about a campaign, it will usually link back to the company as the source. These links increase a company’s organic search rankings, direct traffic to the company’s website, and drive user engagement for the brand via social media. Meanwhile, native marketing promotes content by paying to partner with a single publisher. It offers a guaranteed placement with a top-tier publisher that might have monthly unique visitors in the multi-millions.
Each of these approaches has distinct goals, key performance indicators, benefits, and challenges that can inform clinical trial recruitment. However, the ideal strategy for clinical trial recruitment combines the best elements of both. A pharmaceutical company should be able to gauge the number of leads, links, and social media shares generated when content regarding an upcoming clinical trial is published. The aim is to create an innovative, large-scale campaign that reaches all potential audiences.
For pharma companies interested in using native marketing to publicize recruitment for a clinical trial, one of the biggest barriers of entry is the high costs of marketing associated with placement with a top-tier publisher. Ideally, therefore, a cooperative content marketing platform may offer the best and most cost-effective option. An article posted on such a platform has the potential to generate hundreds of media pickups as well as thousands of shares on social media.
What features do the most effective examples of content marketing possess? There are several. First, never discount the power of the image. A color photograph — especially of a face — accompanying a story has been shown to enhance the story’s appeal significantly. It instantly “humanizes” the topic — in this case, an upcoming trial that the reader might be interested in learning more about or sharing with others who might be interested.
A second feature of successful content is relevancy. If you can tie in the news of your upcoming clinical trial to a news item — for example, a news report on the need for better treatments in a particular area of medicine — you are sure to draw in a bigger audience than if you merely announced the trial recruitment without any context whatsoever.
Third, the more helpful information you can include in your content, the more likely others will share the message, because just about everyone wants to help out their friends. This can be accomplished, for example, by including accurate information about the medical condition that the trial is investigating. This can be as simple as a bulleted list, such as “5 Facts You Didn’t Know About (Condition).”
Fourth, it is vital to stress quality over quantity. A single well-crafted, carefully composed story can live for years online. Therefore, it is important to put as much thought and time into its creation as possible. The best in-house or contract writer should be engaged to compose the messaging.
Related to this point is another: when you find a good story that resonates, do what you can to keep it alive by slightly tweaking the title or aspects of the content to keep it relevant and timely. Even after you have successfully completed enrollment of your initial clinical trial, you can reuse this content in other contexts — perhaps to recruit for future trials.
Also, it is important to keep the power of hashtags in mind. Although they can seem awkward to the uninitiated, hashtags represent a language worth learning in order to sustain meaningful conversations on social media. Hashtags make it easier for anyone with an interest in a particular topic to search for and locate your company and the trials it is conducting. Posts that incorporate hashtags are 55 percent more likely to be shared than those that do not — something worth keeping in mind for Twitter and Facebook posts that either refer directly to your trials or that contain links to longer articles with more information.
In summary, remember that thoughtful storytelling — when harnessed as part of a content marketing strategy — isn’t just a clever way to package news about your clinical trial recruitment. Stories help our minds process information, and they are how pharmaceutical companies can make themselves and their drug development efforts unforgettable. Knowing what your intended audience’s expectations are for a treatment will help you craft a relevant message when it comes to conveying your messages about clinical trial recruitment. The more engaged your readers are by your content, the more likely you are to meet with success in recruiting for your clinical trials.
Dian Griesel, Ph.D. is the founder and president of Dian Griesel International, a corporate communications firm in New York City. Over the course of her career, she has guided the public relations programs of more than 300 companies in the life sciences sector.