Building a Facebook Ad for Clinical Trials, Part II: Design for Success
Design effective, eye-catching Facebook ads to reach your clinical trial recruitment goals.
Facebook is one of the most effective advertising tools for clinical trial recruitment, thanks to the social network’s powerful targeting tools and unparalleled reach. Boasting more than two million users, no social network can provide a larger audience for your ads. In addition, many Facebook users take to the platform to ask peers for medical advice, and to join groups and pages related to their medical concerns, making clinical trial ads a natural fit for the platform.
Not to mention, Facebook ads are just an incredibly quick, easy, and cost-efficient manner of recruiting patients. In Part I of this guide, we broke down the basics of setting up a Facebook campaign, from identifying your goals and defining your audience to deciding where to run your ads and setting your budget. Now we want to take a deeper dive into designing your ad for success, from the look to the landing page.
Designing Eye-Catching Facebook Ads for Patient Recruitment
Facebook ads should be informative and functional, but the most successful ads are also visually appealing. Facebook allows advertisers to choose from a number of formats, including photo, video, and carousel styles. Choose the style that best fits your purposes, but no matter which style you select, your ads should follow design best practices.
Design best practices include:
- A relevant and pleasing image
- Clearly defined borders, so that your ad won’t blend with the background
- Minimal but informative text that makes sense alongside the image
- Most important features of the ad at its focal point
Patients will scroll away if they can’t deduce your message almost immediately, so keep your ad simple, elegant, and to-the-point for the best results.
Perfecting the Call-to-Action
Ultimately, your ads should inspire potential patients to engage with the call-to-action (CTA). With your call-to-action, you display your value offer and prompt patients to click, subscribe, sign up, call, or whatever action best fits your trial’s needs. Your ad should work as a funnel toward the CTA.
Ideally, your ad will first grab the consumer with a clear value offer, like “Live a pain-free life” or “Help us develop a cure.” From there, it should direct the consumer to an action item, such as signing up for the clinical trial or downloading more information.
Once potential clinical trial patients engage with the CTA, make sure that your ad is designed to carry them to conversion. That means that your landing page should be optimized to make it easy to contact you. If you need potential patients to fill out a questionnaire with some background and contact information, keep it short and simple; don’t scare them away with a 100-question survey. Your goal is to create a landing page that attracts quality leads, but you’ll actually do the vetting later on.
Make sure that your landing page, like your ad, foregrounds important information. Include easy-to-find links to further reading about the trial; make your landing page as easy to navigate as possible, so that patients don’t become confused and navigate away. Remember that consumers’ attention spans have never been shorter – optimize your Facebook ads to carry them from initial interest to conversion as seamlessly as possible for the best results.
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