Choosing Nontraditional Digital Platforms for Patient Recruitment

In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Christian Bullock, digital marketing director at Trialbee, discussed strategies for using nontraditional digital platforms to enhance patient recruitment. He outlined three key factors—audience relevance and intent, content fit and creative potential, and quality of engagement—as critical for determining platform suitability. Bullock explained how platforms such as TikTok, Reddit, and Spotify attract distinct demographics and require tailored messaging, creative formats, and calls to action to support multi-touch recruitment funnels. He highlighted operational and compliance challenges on emerging or entertainment-focused platforms, noting the need for ongoing communication with ad policy teams and careful evaluation of platform restrictions. Bullock shared lessons learned from successful campaigns on Spotify, Nextdoor, and other emerging platforms, emphasizing the importance of testing, monitoring both engagement and conversion, and applying a data-driven approach to optimize ROI while maintaining compliance.

The below interview transcript was lightly edited for clarity

ACT: What factors do you consider when choosing which nontraditional digital platforms—like TikTok, Reddit, or Spotify—to use for patient recruitment in a given trial?

Bullock: Sure, there are three specific factors we look at when we're making that determination [to see] if it would fit within a trial’s digital marketing campaign. So the first one is audience, relevance, and intent. We have historical data ourselves firsthand, as well as obviously reaching out and seeing credible third-party resources that show things like user bases per platform and by geography, [which] allows us to [see whether] this platform aligns with the audiences that we're trying to target ads [to], right around a patient and their care partners, demographic information, psychographics, and behavior.

So for instance, we know that TikTok typically caters towards a younger audience, younger caregivers, [and] health-conscious millennials, whereas Reddit skews a little bit more male, or those that identify as male, as well as just having a little bit more of an intentional research and discussion via subreddits, joining subreddits, commenting, and otherwise. So that's audience, relevance, and intent.

Secondly, we also look at content fit and creative potential. We evaluate whether that ad platform’s content formats allow us to serve ads in ways that we want to. We know that some platforms invest heavily in having video ads that may be more storytelling-based or even quick video advertisements. However, we also know that there are platforms on the opposite side of that spectrum—some that really rely on serving static banner ads, or passive kind of consumption, so to speak, during daily routines.

And then, thirdly, we look at [the] importance of quality. We know that nontraditional platforms typically almost always have lower patient and care partner populations for us to get ads in front of—just purely, that's a numbers game. From a volume-based perspective, what our delivery team is curious about is not only the number of potential participants we receive from these nontraditional platforms, but the quality of those [participants]. So just not focusing on a numbers game aspect, but also understanding and knowing that maybe a smaller pond, but we're getting a higher quality of fish, so to speak.