Tailoring Recruitment Strategies Across Platforms and Patient Populations

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: How do recruitment strategies differ across platforms, and are certain platforms better suited for specific therapeutic areas or patient populations?

Bullock: Yep, so we understand that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to digital patient recruitment. So absolutely to your question, there is, and we know that there is a need for different types of messaging per channel and per country and even sometimes per region.

So already talked about TikTok, but TikTok and Instagram [are] emotion-driven, creative, and influencer style, [with] authenticity, if at all possible, which is sometimes [hard] to convey in a patient recruitment campaign, but you can try to highlight that as much as possible in your creative. But even if you can't do that, delivering something that is in the language that a patient or care partner would use and understand is of utmost importance.

Another non-emerging kind of platform, Reddit, again, focuses on transparent, value-first discussion. These are individuals that are typically seeking answers and having discussions around those answers. Spotify also just relies on more passive kind of engagement in terms of listening. But we all know that each one of those platforms—whether it's high in the awareness scale, such as Spotify, or medium, or something that's very decision-driven, like maybe Reddit or Google search ad—they all make sense within an entire digital marketing funnel.

But for younger individuals, it's really kind of important that we engage them where they're at. So for individuals 40 and under, we're going to get ads in front of them at TikTok, on Reddit, on Instagram. Those are key platforms that our team utilizes to get ads in front of patients and care partners.

So we've also been looking into things like Threads—low volume. It's one of Meta’s platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and Threads—and we're starting to see some user behavior show up. So don't really have any answers quite yet as far as some determinations, but always again, curious about these new emerging platforms.

Lastly, around kind of different recruitment strategies that you're mentioning, [I] think it's important to also call out creative and call-to-action tailoring. So already kind of talked on this a little bit, but every single platform has a need to have a distinct tone based off of how you're serving those ads. Again, TikTok for storytelling, Reddit for credibility, Spotify for curiosity. Really high up in that kind of marketing funnel.

From an awareness standpoint, it's important to also then have a user [be] led through that ad click to a landing page experience that speaks to whether they're at, and from a curiosity standpoint, they're ready to start filling out forms and seeing if they're eligible for a study. So supporting all kinds of parts of that funnel. So the ad strategies are different based on the different platforms, and you need to ensure that your landing page experience supports all those different strategies you have in place.