Today we embark on a new series, which is going to be about marketing in clinical trial research. It is something that some companies do extremely well, and others don't necessarily focus on as much, and for a very good reason. Sites do not always have a lot of money to spend, and it can be very difficult to prove the return on your investment of marketing. That, I completely understand. But we're going to talk about some ways that you can do it fairly easily and inexpensively over time. There will be things that are not inexpensive, but I'm going to put all of it out there for you to kind of choose your favorite.
The main things I want to focus on are the future and the present. When you're thinking about marketing and about anything in life, you don't want to think just about the short term at the expense of the long term and vice versa. You do need to make money right away, and you do need to look out for your future. So, in terms of the future, you're really talking about branding. And by that, I don't simply mean you have a logo and you have some letterhead. It goes into so much. It goes into how you show up on social media, how you do your website, billboards perhaps; it's just a throughline of everything. But it does come to show that you can be trusted and that you are a respected company.
So that's what I want you to think about. Your future has to be respectful, reliable. That's really what people want. Your clients, especially; patients, especially – so everyone. In clinical trials, you have to be a reliable clinical site in many ways, and we can start doing that through branding. Then at the same time, you have clinical trials that you want to promote and get patients into so that you can make revenue and fulfill your responsibilities and your commitments to your sponsors and your CROs. In that case, you have a more immediate need for trial advertising, so that will be another thing we talk about with marketing. Short-term might be advertising and community events. Long-term is going to be various types of branding and marketing collateral. So, we will talk about those over the next few weeks. All I really want to say in terms of this is that it has to be congruent. If the promise you've made to the industry and the promise you've made as a company is, for example, to be ethnically diverse in your patient population, then you do not want either trial ads or branding to lack ethnic diversity. Right?
Spend some time before our next post thinking about who you want to be and portray yourself as. For the newer sites and for the sites that are currently doing marketing, think about, “Are we hitting the nail on the head on this? Did we say we're someone and we're actually not showing that off appropriately?”
That’s it! We'll see you in a few weeks. We'll start with branding, which will be both personal professional branding and company branding. I'll have two parts but remember – branding is in everything, so we're going to go all through it. I hope you make a case (and I'll talk to people on your team if they don't believe in marketing) for why marketing is important to you as a company as a whole – short-term and long-term. I'll see you very soon!