Using marketing strategies to improve recruitment and retention in clinical trials: a scoping review

Participant recruitment and retention into randomised trials (RCTs) is key to the success of any trial yet remains a major challenge. Recruiting and retaining trial participants is akin to an organisation trying to engage with new audiences. Marketing is one way in which organisations engage with audiences as a strategic approach to create, communicate, deliver and exchange offerings of value to consumers. Clinical trials could benefit from strategically implementing a broad array of principles and practices from marketing theory. It could enable trialists to better understand how to improve the value of the trial experience for the various stakeholders involved i.e. participants, recruiting sites, clinicians, and policy makers. The aim of this scoping review was to investigate the landscape of marketing use in clinical trials literature to inform future and best practice. This work is part of a wider programme of work aimed at developing a marketing toolkit to support people designing and running clinical trials.

Medline (OVID), Cochrane Library, CINAHL (EBSCO), Web of Science, SSRN, Clinicaltrials.gov and Google Scholar databases were searched for relevant articles. Eligible articles were screened by independent reviewers. An extraction table was created and used in Covidence to extract and manage the data. The scoping review was conducted and is reported using PRISMA-ScR.

A total of 61 articles were eligible and included in the review. Most (75%, n = 46) of the articles reported on marketing used in the context of trial recruitment, while 25% (n = 15) focused on both recruitment and retention. No articles focused solely on retention. Varied marketing activities and approaches were described. Promotional aspects of marketing accounted for the vast majority of all reported activities. Social media and online advertising were the most reported promotional activities. The use of multiple promotional activities in a trial was reported to be beneficial in improving recruitment.

Trial teams are already utilising different marketing techniques with the aim of improving recruitment and retention. However, there is a selective concentration on promotional techniques especially advertising, which limits the potential of marketing to improve recruitment and retention of participants.