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Monthly Archives: April 2012

Life Sci Tools Market Outlook

Carlton Hoyt 10:15 am , April 16, 2012

There’s been a lot of negativity in the life science tools market recently, at least with regards to the economic outlook. European government austerity, a possible US sequester, and cooling Asian economies have given a lot of people a sense of unease (or downright fear) about sector growth. Over the past two months, however, there’s a bunch of data that says things probably aren’t going to be so bad after all.

Back in late February, a MarketsandMarkets study projected the life science and chemical instrumentation market to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.4% from 2011 to 2016. Morgan Stanley analyst Daniel Brennan then noted in early March that commercial sales of publicly traded life science instrument companies had been stronger than expected and is less vulnerable to the economy than many had feared. A DeciBio study released last week projected that the life science tools market will grow by about 4% per year over the next 5 years. Sure, 4% isn’t a great growth rate, but it’s certainly enough to sustain the industry. Last Thursday, Goldman Sachs analyst Isaac Ro said that company performance in the life science tools industry for the first quarter of 2012 “appears to have trended better than initially expected” and noted that academic spending trends have improved.

While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we’re in the clear, and there are certainly still hurdles the industry faces moving forward, we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief. The life science tools market isn’t in nearly as bad of shape as many had feared.

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Blog / Marketing Strategy 10:15 am , April 16, 2012

Market Research Using AdWords?

Carlton Hoyt 11:20 am , April 11, 2012

Life Science Market Research using AdWordsLife science market research can be a tricky, and often expensive, endeavor. You need to find a suitable population that meets your study requirements, recruit individuals to actually participate in the study, and building the survey. You have to worry about introducing bias, sufficiently powering your study, ensuring your population is representative, and many other factors. However, there is one tool that can, in many situations, make your research easier, faster, and cheaper: AdWords.

Yes, that AdWords. Pay-per-click Google Adwords.

AdWords has many desirable qualities that one would want in a market research platform. It has a huge audience, and our in-house research has shown that it is overwhelmingly the search engine of choice within the life sciences. Google is used by a billion unique individuals every month. The audience is easy to segregate (albeit in limited ways: by keyword or by geography). It’s easy to reduce both population bias and question bias. With market research via AdWords, you often don’t have to even ask a question – the question is implicit rather than explicit since the unwilling participants are looking for information, products, services, or content. While you’ll be limited by language, in most places English is the language of science and users select themselves by using relevant keywords.

That said, AdWords is obviously not designed for market research and its capabilities as a life science market research platform are understandably limited. You only get to “ask” each participant a single question. The types of information you can gather are relatively limited. You can’t segregate the audience by job title or other useful demographic information.

Still, you can get insights on a surprising amount of questions. For example, the following information can often be reasonably obtained using AdWords:
• The relative popularity of a basket of products or brands
• Which prospective name for a new product would be better
• What method are researchers using more often
• What nations are most frequently using a particular method or type of product
• An attractive price for a particular laboratory product
• A fair deal more…
Note that some of the above information would require the use of Google Analytics (or similar) in conjunction with AdWords.

While not a fully capable replacement for traditional market research studies, a lot can be done with Google AdWords for as little as $0.10 per participant ($0.10 is the minimum cost-per-click in AdWords). Next time you’re looking for market data, especially if the data you’re looking for isn’t terribly complex, you may be able to save your life science company a lot of time and money by turning to the reliable old pay-per-click advertising platform.

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Blog / Market Research 11:20 am , April 11, 2012

The Purpose of a Website

Douglas E. Rogers 10:16 am , April 3, 2012

The purpose of a life science websiteWe work with all sorts of life science company websites for a multitude of purposes. One thing strikes us over and over and over again. A lot of life science websites seem to be designed without a well-defined purpose in mind. Companies (and the life science marketers working for them) seemingly treat their websites like a chandelier – they want really pretty websites that you can’t really do much with. Likewise, a lot of designers know that an eye-catching, flashy site will earn the rubber stamp of the executive who needs to sign off on it, regardless of whether or not it’s particularly functional. That’s simply no good.

If you don’t know the purpose of your website, you are most likely losing lots of money because of it.

The first thing I ask our clients when designing sites is “what is the purpose of this website?” It seems like a simple question, but a lot of people don’t have a straight answer for it. Those that do often have a simple answer such as “provide information about our company and our products” or a vague answer such as “project our brand identity.” That’s not good enough.

The purpose of your website should be centered around the customer.

Ultimately, your company exists to sell a product or service to scientists and / or clinicians. What is it that your website is doing that is moving them closer to a purchase? Is it doing as much as it can? For example, if you want your website to sell your products, then ask yourself how you intend to sell your products and design your website with that in mind. Do you need them to contact a distributor? Are most of your customers going to want to talk to an application scientist? Can they purchase on-site? … Your website needs to provide prospective customers with everything they need to take the action that you want them to.

How good it looks is not the metric that measures the quality of a website. Sure, everyone like an attractive website, but at the end of the day your website is there for a purpose. How well your life science website serves that purpose is the true measure of its quality, and defining and understanding that purpose is critical. (P.S. – Don’t forget to measure how well your website is performing!)

"Do you know the purpose of your website? How well is it meeting your goals for it? If you can’t answer those questions, you’re almost guaranteedly costing yourself leads and / or sales. Don’t leave sales on the table because of an under-functional website. Call BioBM and get your website performing like it should. In many cases we can even fix your existing website rather than needing to create an entirely new one, saving you time and money. Learn more about BioBM’s life science internet marketing services."
Blog / Digital Marketing 10:16 am , April 3, 2012