Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust provides a range of acute services at Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth, Hampshire. Tillison’s Pay Per Click (PPC) team was approached by Dr Will Storrar, a Clinical Research Fellow at the Queen Alexandra Hospital, to discuss the possibility of using digital marketing to help publicise and increase recruitment for a forthcoming LASER medical trial.
Funded by the National Institute for Health Research Health Technology Assessment (NIHR-HTA) programme and sponsored by Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust, the trial aimed to assess whether a new treatment device, Airsonett, might help to reduce the frequency of asthma attacks in patients with severe allergic asthma. In order to determine whether the treatment device would be effective, the trial was looking to recruit 222 participants in the UK.
After gaining a good understanding of the trial and the type of end-user that the NHS trial team was trying to engage with, our PPC Specialists assessed the different possibilities for the Trust.
With the target audience being so varied, we needed to adopt a strategy that would get the maximum exposure for the trial and enable the Trust to reach its recruitment goals. The team recommended using social media advertising and promotions as the best engagement tool as it could reach a large audience cost-effectively with great targeting options.
Initially, the social media campaign focused on Facebook and Twitter. Ads on these platforms directed potential participants to the LASER website where they could register their interest in the trial. The trial team then contacted participants directly to discuss their participation.
Both the Facebook and Twitter campaigns produced really good results but with limited budgets, the trial team decided to try different advertising platforms to see if these could increase participation. After running newspaper and radio advertisements with very limited success, the team re-engaged Tillison’s services and our social media campaigns were resumed.
After a few months, the recruitment targets were achieved with an amazing 222 participants signed up for the trial. The NHS Trust viewed the campaigns as a tremendous success, with Twitter Ads contributing 1,647 website clicks and Facebook PPC Ads doing even better with 4,640 website clicks. In addition to this, there were 611 post likes, 83 page likes, 207 post shares and 118 post comments.
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