It’s no secret that the Rare Disease Clinical Trials industry is struggling to keep operational costs under control. Between 2008 and 2013, clinical trial costs went up by a full 60%, and Tufts research indicates that the average cost of a new prescription drug approval is now more than $2.6 million. It’s worth pointing out that much of this struggle can be attributed to the enrollment process — in fact, 27% of clinical trial costs can be attributed to recruitment inefficiencies, which isn’t very surprising when you consider that today, 37% of investigator sites fail to meet enrollment targets and 10% are unable to successfully enroll a single patient.
Rare Disease Clinical Trials are particularly vulnerable to low enrollment — not only are these patients relatively few in number and geographically scattered, but according to Global Genes, approximately 50% of people affected by rare diseases are children. As a result, these patients are much less likely to travel to trial locations or be registered in existing trial databases. And unsurprisingly, nearly 30% of Phase 3 rare disease trials fail to secure approval due to enrollment problems.
Today, more than 77% of online healthcare research takes place on search engines, and the vast majority of that research is conducted on Google. In fact, Google processes about 89% of all search engine-based health queries, which amounts to more than 28 billion searches per year in the United States alone. It should therefore come as no surprise that Google AdWords has emerged as a strategic cornerstone of any successful clinical trial recruitment campaign — just look at the numbers.
However, it’s not just the massive audience volume that makes SEM such a valuable asset. When it comes to digital marketing, simply focusing on hitting the largest possible number of prospective patients won’t ultimately produce optimal results — in reality, this approach fails to capitalize on many of the key functional advantages of digital recruitment.
Tapping into Human Nature on Facebook
As well as the obvious capabilities of Facebook, we can also use these 2 elements of human nature for promoting our message through other advertising media – such as the Native Ads platform Outbrain.
Like Facebook, these Native Ads platforms can target people using demographic and geographical data, plus there is also an element of interest-targeting available that enables you to have your ads displayed on websites that are in the health sector. (Which is likely to be a relevant content category when promoting clinical trials for rare diseases).
