Clinical Trial Marketing: Social Media

Christine:

Hello! With today’s interview, we are wrapping up our 8-part series dedicated to marketing for clinical research sites.

You will remember my next guest from her fabulous chat with us about SEOs. Kayra Velez is the Senior Digital Communications Specialist from the clinical trial marketing company Research Designed, and today she’ll be talking to us about social media. Welcome back, Kayra! Teach us all the things!

Kayra: Thanks, Christine! Hey everybody, glad to be back. Today we're going to talk a little bit about social media. I'm not going to get into super technical details or a lot of know-how, but I do want to provide some really practical tips for your business to adopt in order for you to have a really good presence online.

Kayra:

So, tip number one: know your audience and know what platforms they're on. I think it is a huge myth that your organization has to be on every single social platform at all times. That is really overwhelming and frankly, it's just unrealistic. So, the best thing to do is figure out who you're trying to reach and where that audience exists. Where are they having conversations? Where are they talking and socializing? Find them there. If you're looking to make connections with other clinical research sites, colleagues, CROs, sponsors, LinkedIn is going to be one of the best places to have those conversations; Twitter as well. If you're looking to reach patients, obviously Facebook and Instagram are really good platforms for that. But if you wanna drill down a little bit further, like let's say you're trying to attract some new patients to your clinical site and you're looking for those of Gen Z Age, you may want to get a little creative and look at TikTok. A lot of Gen Z is living on TikTok these days. They're consuming a lot of video content. So that could be something that you want to consider. So, figure out what your primary audience is, and exactly where they reside.

Tip number two: use your social media to really enhance your brand. How are you going to do that? Visually. So, here's what I'm talking about. Whenever you make certain posts, especially if they're videos or static images or graphics, look at the color palette that you're using. Are you using your brand colors? Are you using a certain font consistent across all posts? Are you using the same style? When we look at these things, we should be able to look at a post and immediately identify, “oh, that belongs to so and so organization,” right? In the same vein that we see ads from Nike, or we see ads from Netflix, and without seeing that brand name, we automatically know that it's theirs. That's kind of the level that you, the level of thinking that you wanna have behind the visuals that you put out on your social media. So, make sure to keep everything very consistent and on brand for the story that you're trying to convey.

Tip number three: be mindful about the time of day that you make your post on social media. This really does matter and you can get really, really technical with it. But just to keep the concept super simple, think about the times of day when people are usually scrolling through their phones, right? If you make a post at 11 o'clock at night, I mean... I might see it because I tend to be a night owl, but the majority of your audience isn't going to see it. So, maybe reconsider posting it at a different time. Likewise, if you post super, super early in the morning, maybe before people have woken up, that post may sit there before it actually ever gets seen. So, think about, you know, posting kind of around lunchtime, maybe in the evenings as people are going home winding down for the day. Those are typically your best times to post.

Tip number four, and this is probably the most important, but perhaps not the most obvious one: be social! That is the whole point of social media is to be social, have conversations, interact and build relationships. So, simply making a post or reposting somebody else's content is not necessarily enough. If someone is commenting on that post, comment back, talk to them. If someone asks you a question, whether they send you a DM or they ask you a question in the comment section of your post, respond to that. Talk to them. Really, really build these relationships because at the end of the day, a few likes and a few shares here and there is not necessarily what you want. You want to build those lasting relationships that are going to help you achieve your business goals.

So, I hope all of these tips were super helpful for you. One thing that I would love for you to walk away with is that the more simple of an approach you can take to social media, probably the more successful you'll be. When you start overthinking it or when you start getting a little too into the weeds with this is probably where you create a lot of sense of overwhelm, but if you can just kind of keep it to those high-level basics, you'll have success with this. So, good luck with your efforts.

Christine:

Those were great tips, Kayra, and it’s always been so evident how passionate you are about using social media wisely. I am 100% with you on knowing which platforms to use for which purpose and using social media to enhance your brand! Being social, though…. You nailed it: it’s the most obvious and possibly the least followed concept. Thank you, as always, friend.

Thank you for joining me, and I’ll see you in 3 weeks!