BioBM's Life Science Marketing Blog
Browse by topic
Showing 49–72 of 255
The New Permission-Based Marketing
I want to take you on a trip into the future of life science marketing, not because I'm some kind of prophet (I didn't come up with these ideas, nor did anyone in our industry) but because if the predictions of many marketing futurists come true, and if trends continue.
Case: Distributor Incentives
Case studies from BioBM are fictionalized, although the situations are faced by leaders at real companies. LabTherm, a small, US-based manufacturer of laboratory incubators and ovens.
Best Practices Aren’t Enough
Many marketers look to market leaders for examples on what to do. The thinking is: if I can replicate what the largest and most successful incumbents in my market are doing, I'll be just as successful as they are. While there are times when best practices are useful, there are many times when they are not enough.
Research Sans Assumptions
In most market research, you start with a hypothesis or a set of assumptions and you take it from there. Those assumptions often aren't conscious – for instance, when asking a user to rank a set of product attributes you're assuming you know which attributes are most important – but they're almost always present.
Transform Your Next Launch
The average product launch has a lot in common with a firework show. A lot of effort goes into it and it's relatively expensive. It makes a big splash and does a fairly good job of getting a lot of attention.
Organize Your Content
So you have a really good content marketing program up and running. You and / or your team are routinely publishing high-value content for your target scientists – blog posts, white papers, webinars, and maybe even podcasts and other forms.
Shift From a Product Focus
Most life science companies still have a product focus, and many can get away with it because our industry, along with many other B2B industries, is a bit behind the marketing curve. Many companies place a very high priority on operational efficiency and building better products.
SEO Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Changed
It's no secret that the SEO world has changed. Ever since Google's Panda and Penguin algorithm changes, and the subsequent updates to them, prior best practices fell apart. There's no doubt about that. Things that were once highly effective tools of SEO, like link wheels, are no longer relevant.
Content is for Your Customers
One of the biggest pitfalls of content creation – and by far the biggest content mistake by amateur life science marketers – is forgetting that your content isn't just directed AT your target audience, but is FOR your target audience.
Carlton Hoyt to Present at ACP-LS Meeting
The ACP-LS annual meeting is the only time of the year when you can surround yourself with the best minds in marketing and sales of life science tools and services! This year's meeting will be held on Thursday, September 18th and Friday, September 19th at the Boston Marriott Quincy in Quincy, Massachusetts.
Personalized Experiences
The image below is of a Target which is near me. It shows what you would see if you just walked in the exterior doors of the Target. Can you think of any problem with this? You could walk in that Target looking for a sweater, I could be looking for toothpaste, and someone else could be looking for an end table.
Demand Problem? Brand Problem?
"But our product performs better than the competitors! And it performs better for almost all applications!" This is the cry of one too many life science companies (especially smaller companies) who thought that an incremental improvement – and a bit of advertising money.
Content First, SEO Second
By now, any decent SEO-er knows that the old way of performing SEO – basically, manipulating ranks through inorganic backlinks – is worthless. Google caught on and killed it. As of Panda 4.
The Role Of Branding – Part 3
This is the final post in a three-part series on branding. For the first post, go here. For the second, go here Last week, we discussed solving the above equation which tells us what the most powerful brand positioning opportunities are.
The Role Of Branding – Part 2
This is the second in a three-part series on branding. For the first part, go here. The third part can be found here. As mentioned last week, the ideal brand position can be thought of in formulaic terms; it is all the "valid" brand positions, less the positions that are occupied strongly by competitors.
The Role Of Branding – Part 1
This is the first in a three-part series on branding. The second part can be found here. The third part can be found here. Branding is an abstract concept, and a lot of marketers have different ideas of what the act of branding really means from both a strategic and tactical perspective.
New Paper: Superior Experiences
BioBM Consulting has published a new paper entitled: "Superior Experiences – How Small Life Science Companies Can Out-Compete Large, Established Competition."
Captivating Your Audience
Captivating your audience should be priority #1 for high-level marketing communications. Before you get into the details of whatever it is you want to say, you need to make sure that you have the audience's attention, will maintain it for as long as possible.
Maximizing the Value of Content
Creating quality content takes a good deal of effort. When marketers endeavor to create marketing content, it is generally created for a particular purpose. That's usually out of necessity – marketers identify a need for content then design the content to fill that specific need. There's nothing wrong with that.
The Power of Expectations
For most of you reading this, your company will have a LinkedIn profile. It doesn't require much – upload your logo, post some basic company info, and copy-paste a paragraph or two from the "about" page of your website and you're just about set.
Content Is Not Enough
Very few things are immune to the law of diminishing returns. Content marketing is certainly not one of them. As content marketing has surged in the life sciences over the past few years, we've seen a very predictable trend: it's become less effective.
Branding vs. Demand Gen
When considering where to advertise, marketers frequently – and rightfully – consider how targeted / relevant the audience is. However, marketers often fail to consider the commercial intent (or " intent to purchase ") of the target audience within that channel.
Prepare for the Contact
A lot of focus goes into optimizing marketing activities. That focus is important and very helpful in numerous ways, but all the A/B testing and conversion optimization in the world gets flushed down the drain as soon as a customer actually contacts your company.
Experiences Over Awareness
Take a look around – at the marketing efforts of your company, your competitors, and others in similar life science markets. I'm sure you'll still find a lot of marketing efforts centered on building awareness. Quite frankly, efforts to simply build awareness are a waste of your audience's attention.
Get the latest Life Science Marketing Insights directly in your inbox
Occasional articles, reports, and practical ideas from BioBM — no spam, unsubscribe anytime. We’ll email a confirmation link before you’re added to the list.