Don’t Fail Because of Scale
Carlton Hoyt
We see it again and again, and it’s often the fault of investors. A promising technology, a talented team, and what would otherwise be a great young company fail. A life science tool doesn’t become the blockbuster it was pitched as, and because the company was created with the vision of huge sales numbers that never materialized, it goes under. Often it doesn’t go under until multiple additional rounds of financing are pumped into the fledgling company. The company never goes into the black because everyone bet too big, and everyone loses.
You don’t have to have a blockbuster product to be a successful life science tools company. Realism is every bit as important as ambition. If you bet big then you often grow too fast, take on too many liabilities, and end up with a structure that relies on a great deal of success to support. If you can employ lean operations and build success a little at a time, however, your life science tools company will have far more staying power.
We know that not every company or technology is amenable to slow growth. Some take massive resources just to develop and therefore necessitate a bigger payout. However, every company can, in some way, become leaner. In doing so, you can greatly reduce your business and financial risk.
The specific ways that companies can / should lean their operations is heavily dependent on each company’s needs and situations, but we’ve provided a few ideas just to get your creative energies flowing:
⢠Outsource! (administrative duties, financial / billing, warehousing, manufacturing, etc)
⢠Leverage a contract (commission-based) sales force, or only sell through distributors
⢠Release beta units into the market with fewer features to test both the market and your technology prior to full product launch
⢠Virtual operations
With leaner operations, young life science companies can reduce the threshold to becoming sustainable and successful. Planning on rapid growth or huge sales feels good, and sounds good to investors, but often leads to unnecessary risk taking.
Making Decisions Simple
Carlton Hoyt
This is the second part in a two-part post on the importance of simplicity to the decision to purchase. For the first post, which explains why simplicity is important, see Make Purchasing Decisions Simple.
As scientists are presented with ever increasing options and information, the traditional purchase funnel model is breaking. Research has shown that as consumers are overloaded with information and choice, more are adopting a dynamic buying cycle, adding and dropping products from consideration nearly continuously as they progress towards their decision. Others are focusing in on a single brand, excluding any others from consideration. Furthermore, overabundance of choice is decreasing consumers’ satisfaction with both the purchase process and their purchase. There is a way to benefit from this, however. In doing so, you’ll obtain more customers and increase their satisfaction: Make their purchasing decision simple. But how do you do this? The answer comes in three parts.
First, users must be able to easily navigate your product information. Independent of format, they must be lead to the information that they need easily and the information must be presented neatly. In many cases, this means that you’ll need to present information for many different applications, but finding the information for each application must be obvious. It should come as no surprise that the easiest format to provide such a broad amount of information is on your website. Users must be able to find as much information as they want without being overwhelmed. Good navigation will provide easy access to a lot of information with a lot of opportunity to move to the next step.
Secondly, users must be able to trust the information they find, which means that life science tools companies need to provide trustworthy information. Some level of trust will be built by validating your marketing messages with data and other proven information. Testimonials may help somewhat. Reviews and information from independent scientists on third-party websites will imbue even more trust. (Want to lead people to content on external websites then easily guide them back to your website? Ask us about our solutions.) However your company attempts to build trust, your marketing and sales teams need to take a proactive role in doing so.
Lastly, life science tools companies need to make it easy for customers to weigh their options. Note that weighing options does not mean comparing all the options that are out there – again, too much information and choice is often the problem and not the solution. However, over the course of providing customers with information, you’ve likely established many choices (even if they are all your own products, as may likely be the case). Now you must assist the customer in making the final decision. Does your product have multiple models? Help select the one that is best for them. Are there different feature sets available? Help guide customers through the process of choosing which features are right for them. This can be a hands-off or hands-on process, depending at what point you generally convert prospects into leads.
By providing easily navigable, trustworthy information, and helping customers weigh their options, life science marketers can make their purchasing decisions far simpler. By being the one that does so, you not only gain the opportunity to tilt the scales heavily in your favor, but you ultimately increase customer satisfaction by making your customers more certain that the decision to buy your product was the correct one.
Make Purchasing Decisions Simple
Carlton Hoyt
Researchers from the Corporate Executive Board analyzed results from multiple surveys that totaled over 7,000 consumers, as well as interview with hundreds of marketing experts and executives, trying to figure out what makes a product “stick”. They looked at over 40 variables, trying to figure out what is most important in the choice of one brand over others. The results, discussed in a recent Harvard Business Review article, may surprise you. The key wasn’t frequency of interaction with the brand, nor was it price, nor was it the consumer’s initial perception of the brand. In the end, the purchasing decisions are most influenced by which company makes the decision to purchase simple.
Just so this doesn’t get taken out of context, we’re not talking about making the purchase simple. Putting up big red flags that says “buy this here” isn’t going to help you. We’re talking about making the decision simple. As Spenner and Freeman describe it in the HBR article: “the ease with which consumers can gather trustworthy information about a product and confidently and efficiently weigh their purchase options.” The reason for this? In a new world of marketing flooded with choice, driven by content, and with staggering amounts of marketing messages, many customers are simply overloaded with information. They’ll reward the brand that best helps them make things simple again.
How great is this effect? Spenner and Freeman created a “decision simplicity index” that graded brands on how easy it is to gather, navigate, and assess information about them. Those that scored in the top 25th percentile were 86% more likely to be purchased and 115% more likely to be recommended to others than those in the bottom 25th percentile. That is awfully dramatic.
Now all of this requires our usual grain of salt (I’m a scientist by training as well and as such am a naturally skeptical creature). These are general-purpose consumers that were studied and analyzed. The scientist is not the average consumer. The scientist is more skeptical, more analytical, and more capable of dealing with large amounts of information. However, even scientists will have a threshold at which an abundance of information will become too much information and the effect that decision simplicity has on the purchase decision will be significant. As the growth in the life sciences in general leads to the growth in life science tools, an abundance of options may eventually lead to information overload for all scientists, and those who simplify the decision making process will be rewarded.
Even now, however, life science marketers stand to benefit from making decision processes simple. We’ll be following this post up with another on how to simplify the purchase decision. Be sure to check back for more information.
Life Sci Tools Market Outlook
Carlton Hoyt
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.
Market Research Using AdWords?
Carlton Hoyt
Life 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.
The Purpose of a Website
Douglas E. Rogers
We 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!)
Free Life Science Marketing
Carlton Hoyt
Need to do a product launch on a shoestring budget? Is your ad budget almost expended but you wish you could do more? Don’t start worrying quite yet… There’s a few avenues to leverage FREE life science marketing that you can take advantage of at just about any time. All you need is some content.
Protocol Submissions.
While there are other sites that allow you to upload protocols, the one that carries the most weight is likely Nature Protocol Exchange. You get the gravitas of the Nature name, their signature online look and feel, and protocols are generally posted very quickly. While the benefits are a far cry from that of an actual peer-reviewed methods paper, posting protocols online is easy, relatively fast, and free. Similarly, Nature Methods has a section for suppliers to post application notes.
Press Releases
Have company news? There’s a whole host of sites out there that will either allow you to submit life science press releases directly or through an editor. LabGrab is a personal favorite, and of course there’s our own LifeSciPR, but that’s just a small sampling. More traditional “news” sites such as Lab Equipment Magazine or GEN will often accept news as well, as will many other laboratory and life science news sites. Getting a release published in a printed publication often costs money, however doing so isn’t important. There’s also a huge amount of free press release sites, but unless they’re targeted to the right audience their value is marginal at best.
Similarly, many relevant websites and publications will accept new product news as well. There are even some life science forums that allow companies to post information on new products and services.
When posting press releases or other news items, don’t forget to link back to your company or product website for a little SEO kick!
Blogging
Have content, will write? When done well, blogging is great for both branding and SEO. You have an opportunity to project your company’s expertise in relevant areas by writing and publishing great content, and there’s no limit to how much you do so! Does your life science company’s website not have a blog? Don’t know how to install one? Don’t worry about it! Start up a WordPress blog and you can port it over to your own site later. If you write really good content of a solid length, consider eschewing the blog post and submitting it to a relevant online & print publication instead (again, I’ll use Laboratory Equipment Magazine and GEN as examples.)
Social Media
Many social media channels are readily adaptable to life science marketing use. Our favorites are Twitter and LinkedIn. On both, users effectively tell you what their interests are. LinkedIn is particularly good because of groups. You can read more on using LinkedIn for life science marketing here.
The aforementioned methods are far from comprehensive. For instance, if you’re not lacking in time but are lacking in money, you could write white papers, which are a great way to generate leads. Depending on the price and nature of your product, and assuming you’re both a little more sales oriented and sell in the US, you could search the NIH RePORT database for prospects for highly targeted cold calling and cold e-mailing.
While we would never recommend trying to base your marketing around free methods alone, they can be used to stretch a budget or just get a little extra publicity. If you have more time than money, then the above methods can be a very productive way to boost your life science marketing efforts.
Website Entry Points & SEO
Carlton Hoyt
Somewhat recently, another life science marketing agency (who shall remain anonymous), wrote that “No one ‘peruses’ websites from the homepage anymore. Sites need to be optimized to have an infinite number of ‘front doors’.” They’re largely correct on the first part – many users today will find your web content via search or other avenues which will lead them to an entry point that is not your homepage. However, the claim that every page should be a “front door” is flat-out wrong. If you’re not controlling the entry points to your website, you need a good dash of … SEO.
SEO, despite its name, isn’t all about simply ranking our website higher in the search engine rankings. Another crucial component of SEO is controlling which one of your website’s pages will show up highest for any given search term. Life science companies need to not only assess what terms they want to optimize for, but what content they want searchers for those terms to find. The best SEO plan is the one that executes on both of these factors.
The most basic tool for life science SEO is the landing page. Landing pages are single web pages that are designed to provide highly targeted content for a particular purpose. In the context of SEO, landing pages are often “one-way” pages designed to be content-rich on a particular topic, pulling in searchers for that term. Targeted audiences might be for a particular type or class of product, researchers using a particular type of sample or organism, or scientists looking to perform a specific type of analysis. Often the content of landing pages is too specific to make sense having on the more general sections of your website, but provide information that is highly relevant to your audience.
Landing pages are just one tool in the life science SEO toolbox, however. There are many other methods to control entry to your website, and not all of them even occur on your own site. For example, there are ways of “donating” SEO from one page to another. There are ways of creating super-effective landing pages outside your main website, then using those to drive traffic back to your site. The list of tools in the toolbox goes on…
Your website is not simply at the mercy of the search engines. Search engine optimization can be used to not only improve search rankings, but also to channel search traffic through specific paths and optimize how viewers interact with your website. Your website is your most important internet marketing tool, and controlling entry points is a key factor in wielding that tool properly.
Products With Purpose
Carlton Hoyt
Life science companies, and indeed companies in many industries, often get caught up in thinking about their products or services in terms of their features and benefits. Customers are often grouped by demographics. This type of thinking, however, often doesn’t lead to the best solutions for your customers needs.
There is a common saying that circulates among business and marketing aficionados (that I believe originated from a Harvard business professor) that no one wants a quarter inch drill – they want a quarter inch hole. If there was a tool to perform the task of making a quarter inch hole that was better suited to the job than a quarter inch drill, people would use it. Despite that, most companies selling drills focus their marketing on the drill, not the holes that the drill produces. When not focusing on the tool, many marketers focus on the customer or the market – trying to segment them into demographic baskets based on any of a wide number of criteria.
What doesn’t get the necessary amount of focus is the job that needs to be done. While life science companies actually do a better job of this than companies in many other industries, many life science marketers still lose sight of the purpose of the tool. No scientist has an inherent need for a thermal cycler. What the scientist needs is more copies of a genetic sequence. The thermal cycler manufacturer that will be positioned to have the highest ROI is the one that understands that and focuses on the job that needs to be done – amplification of DNA.
I won’t spend any more time on this topic because I don’t believe there is an epidemic lack of focus on the jobs that life science tools are meant to perform. However, there are many exceptions, and there have been many instances when a life science marketer or an entire company lost focus on the job that needed to be done and placed a highly disproportionate amount of focus on the product or the customer. Be sure you’re not the one that loses focus. Ask yourself on occasion what the jobs are that your products and services are being “hired” to perform. If you don’t have a solid answer, or if you’re not basing decisions on that answer, then it may be time to refocus.
The Power of Targeting
Carlton Hoyt
Consider this seemingly obvious statement: the reason your life science company can sell products or services to scientists is because they have needs. These needs, in turn, create demand for solutions. Life science marketing is the tool by which we identify those needs and pair them with the solutions we offer. However, scientists don’t want you to solve any old problem, they want you to solve their problem. The closer you can get to conveying a solution to an individual scientist’s particular problem, the closer you’ll be to generating a lead and / or making a sale.
Yet how close to solving specific problems are life science marketers really getting? It is very common to see the same message sent repeatedly across different channels to different audiences. Even on life science company websites, where it is very easy to customize lots of content for specific needs, we most often see an incredible lack of targeting. While non-targeted messages still drive product and brand awareness, they do ensure that prospective customers will think of your products or brands on their own when a need is recognized (some more information on that topic can be found here). Therefore, a lot of marketing is effectively going to waste because it’s not the right message, and in many cases not delivered at the right time. The right message is the one that matches needs with what you have to offer.
Only a certain amount of market segmentation is practical. With too much segmentation, you end up tailoring messages and solutions to extremely small, niche audiences and going beyond the point of diminishing returns. However, few life science marketers have that problem. The far more common problem is leaving too much on the table – not segmenting the audience enough.
For example: If you’re going to be growing a cell line, ultimately you don’t care how well an arbitrary cell line grows on a given surface. You want to know if your cells, or at least highly similar cells, grow well on that surface. Life scientists do a ton of cell culture. The research component of the cell culture market (as opposed to cell therapeutics) is estimated to be worth about $600m, and we estimate the plasticware component of that alone to be almost 60% of that. That means about $350m are being spent by research laboratories just on cell culture plastics. That’s a very large market – about half the size of the market for sequencing instruments. And while there are many cell lines, there are certainly a lot of popular cell lines out there. But even for those popular cell lines, go around to the websites of manufacturers of cell culture plasticware and see how many provide information on the use of the popular cell lines with their plasticware. Look for application notes, data, protocols, anything. Chances are you won’t find it.
Scientists don’t want to waste their time trying solutions that may have worked for someone else who has a different application. They want solutions to their specific problems. The closer you come to demonstrating that your products will solve their particular problems, the closer you’ll be to generating a lead or a sale.