Lessons from Successful Recruitment on Spotify, Nextdoor, and Threads

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: Can you share any lessons learned or surprising insights from successful patient recruitment efforts on less conventional channels like Spotify or Reddit?

Bullock: Yeah, for sure, I've got two successes, and one where we're just still kind of discovering. So the first one is Spotify. Spotify is not just an ads-only platform. Our team has been finding some really great success with having banner ads in place for Spotify—again, that passive consumption of ads. You wouldn't typically think a banner ad would work on an audio-streaming platform, but we're finding, for some indications, and for some of those ages, genders, locations, etc., that Spotify is working from a static banner ad perspective. So kind of interesting there.

The second one is Nextdoor—it isn't just a space for complaining about your neighbors. We're finding that it's actually been pretty intriguing and [we're] getting some pretty good results based on some older individuals and some specific indications, staying curious and testing it out for maybe a little bit younger here and there. But again, I think based off of, I think, what everyone's kind of hunches around a Nextdoor-type of individual—it is for individuals kind of 45-aged plus, maybe more in suburban areas, not so much rural. But we're still exploring, and we're seeing some pretty good results for Nextdoor in the United States specifically.

And then I mentioned Threads previously, but Threads really isn't threading the needle for us quite yet—there's a volume issue there. I think that's the biggest one. So Threads is easily something that advertisers can select in their Meta ad campaigns—Meta ads being Facebook, Instagram, and now Threads, this third option—and we're seeing mixed results thus far. Again, it's a volume issue. But as I've mentioned previously, volume isn't necessarily the end-all-be-all; it's quality. So we're still evaluating whether it's effective or not. But just want to kind of call it out that it's an intriguing platform. We're just still kind of trying to discover who is the right individual that is on Threads, what are they engaging with? We haven't really come up with a great answer yet.