Your goal:
Helping clinical trial data reach and impact the right healthcare professionals.
Your hurdle:
Cutting through the noise, the static, the thousands of messages competing every day for the attention of HCPs.
How can you ensure that important clinical trial data break through the onslaught of work email, social posts, advertisements, and texts?
For starters, recognize that 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual.
People respond to imagery. Present your audience with graphs, images, and headlines that grab their attention, impart key takeaways, and keep them reading. Before people get into the details, it’s essential to get them to take notice.
Address Key Challenges
In our experience, HCPs spend less than 5 minutes reading posters and manuscripts of clinical trial data. Convey the crux of your findings quickly or risk the HCP walking away without a firm grasp of the data’s significance — meaning they lost the opportunity to learn and you lost a potential connection.
Two ways to mitigate this common problem:
- Make it compelling. Make the findings interesting and understandable for someone not fully familiar with a study protocol.
- Get to the point. Share a main takeaway quickly while emphasizing clarity and compliance. If possible, distill key points into one or two bullets.
With these strategies at hand, you’re already closer to reaching your target audience — but there’s more you can do.
Leverage Technology for Better Results
Disseminate information visually, effectively, and quickly.
- Share on social. Something as simple as posting a published study on LinkedIn or X can spur widespread engagement for a nominal amount of effort. (Bonus: Social analytics can tell you precisely how big an impact you’re making.)
- Create and captivate. Bring your data to life with animated graphs, interactive results graphs, and publication extenders — all of which can be produced with simple design software.
- Recap visually. Our brains process images 60,000 times faster than text, so it stands to reason that data visualization may increase HCP engagement. Help HCPs see study results with a one-page visual summary of a clinical trial or key analysis.
- Exploit the algorithm. Algorithms drive content to viewers — and they can help you target the appropriate HCPs and digital opinion leaders (usually for a fee).
Next up? Creating digestible content that productively discusses in-depth trial data.
Additional Winning Communication Strategies
- Graphical abstracts. In many journals, the abstract is merely a figure from the manuscript. Take it a step further and create unique graphics that summarize the study while encouraging people to keep reading.
- Unique tactics. Back when X was Twitter, our client needed a “poster” for the platform. We created a dynamic series of cycling slides that showcased key points, set the ideal pace for these slides to rotate, and distributed data on a platform not often used by our current clients.
- Identify the audience. Even the most groundbreaking data is futile if it doesn’t appeal to stakeholders — that’s why a tailored approach is so important. For a nonexpert audience, use lay language and employ more graphics and color. For specialists in a field: cut to the key message.
- Grab attention. To help one client stand out at a conference packed with poster sessions, we generated an eye-catching image to entice conference attendees.
- Less is more. Numerals and graphics go a long way to communicate complex data and difficult concepts. The more vividly you can paint a picture, the more likely your audience is to remember the information.
What’s Your Story?
In our ever-evolving world, one thing hasn’t changed: People love good storytelling — especially storytelling that incorporates visual aids that illustrate its message. Distinctive imagery intrigues people and focuses their attention, and that’s precisely why it’s such an important aspect of disseminating trial data to HCPs.
So, what’s the story behind your trial data? What are you doing to make sure your message is seen, heard, and remembered? We’d love to hear your examples.