Patient recruitment marketing, both kinds.

Patient recruitment for practices and telehealth

Reaching people with a condition or need, answering the questions they decide on (insurance, how soon, what the first visit is), and booking them into a real calendar. Covered in depth on the patient acquisition guide and the service-line pages for telehealth, mental health, primary care, and specialty practices.

Patient recruitment for clinical trials

Sponsors, CROs, and research sites recruit participants against a protocol: inclusion and exclusion criteria, a site radius, and an enrollment target on a deadline. The marketing is the same shape as patient acquisition, with three differences: pre-screening is the qualifying step (not insurance), IRB approval governs every piece of creative, and speed matters even more because interested participants are rare and perishable.

What works

• Condition-adjacent creative that never diagnoses the viewer. "A study for adults managing type 2 diabetes is enrolling near you" passes IRB and platform review; "Do you have diabetes?" does not.
• Pre-screener in the first reply. Within a minute of an inquiry: the four or five criteria questions by text, then a call with the site coordinator for anyone who passes.
• Site-radius targeting on Meta and Google, with budget per site and per-site enrollment tracking.
• Referral nurture. People who inquired but did not qualify for this study qualify for the next one. A consented database compounds across protocols.

What fails

Sending inquiries to a coordinator inbox that gets checked twice a day. Trial recruitment loses more participants to slow callbacks than to any other cause, exactly like practice marketing loses patients.

Compliance for both

Health advertising rules on Meta and Google, no personal-attribute targeting, no PHI in tracking, TCPA consent for text follow-up, and for trials, IRB approval of all recruitment materials before they run. The compliance checklist covers the platform side.