The Power of Print
Carlton Hoyt
If the forecast calls for rain, followed by ever-increasing amounts of rain thereafter, what is the end result? Assuming the forecasts are correct, you would have one heck of a flood.
That’s what the state of content marketing currently is. It’s a constantly-increasing deluge. We’re flooding our audiences with it, and they don’t have the attention spans to pay attention to even a small fraction anymore. As a result, content is becoming less effective, and marketers need ways to ensure their content stands out and successfully captures that scarce customer resource: attention.
Oddly enough, one of the most valuable ways to do so is to use a rapidly-forgotten tool.
Put Your Content in Print
Which of the following are you more likely to read: A) An email newsletter with links to a bunch of different articles, or B) A magazine that you’ve subscribed to which contains those same articles? Which of those is easier to ignore? Which is easier to unsubscribe to?
The fact of the matter is that if you put something in print it is more likely to get attention. There are other benefits as well. Long-form printed materials (for example magazines or books) convey more authority than do digital content. They also have more perceived value. This means that customers will give more up to obtain it, and you can use that to collect more information from them. At minimum, they expect to have to give up their address since the content will be physically mailed to them.
Some tips for life science marketers considering printed content:
- Not all content is suitable for print. You need to ensure that the bulk of the content is of high value to the audience, or else your mailing will simply end up in the trash. Product- or service-specific content should be avoided as it will come off as pitchy.
- If you want to use your printed content to more directly generate demand, place “advertisements” for your products and services within your printed materials.
- To convey authority, try to adopt a magazine-style format. This requires a significant amount of content. If necessary, publish less often to ensure both the perceived and actual value is high
- Get creative. Simply reprinting your blog posts is boring. Do something different. If the creative juices aren’t flowing, you can always do an interview or highlight some recent industry news just to mix things up.
There have been a lot of people who have given the advice: “look at what everyone else is doing, then do the exact opposite.” While that’s not exactly a principle to live by, it can help find opportunities. Content is overwhelming the digital realm, but if anything it is retreating from print. As print becomes less and less common, it may become easier and easier to use that medium to get your audience’s attention.
The New Permission-Based Marketing
Carlton Hoyt
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, the future will catch you by surprise and it won’t be a pleasant experience. It just could threaten your entire ability to be successful as a marketer.
Before we go into the future, to give us some perspective, let’s take a very quick look at where we are today and how we got here.
How we got here…
Once upon a time there was no internet and everything was print. (Last time I checked, CROs and manufacturers of lab equipment weren’t advertising on TV or the radio, so we can ignore those.) Then there was the internet, and marketers saw that it was good. They could easily reach large audiences at very low incremental costs. There was email marketing and banner advertising, and those were very successful tools for a long time. We could put ourselves directly in front of our target audiences, seemingly at will. Marketers got fat and happy, feeding off the plenty that the internet provided for them.
But customers got tired of interruptions. They responded with spam filters and ad blockers. They became numb to the constant barrage of ads and learned, consciously or not, to tune out the ads that marketers were throwing at them.
Marketers sought to save their valuable channels, and came up with new ways of increasing ROI. The rich media ad was born, as was the native ad. Clickthrough improved, and marketers breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Email was never the same. Marketers couldn’t keep up. Where unsolicited email was once extremely popular, now most marketers use double opt-in lists. List sizes shrunk precipitously.
…and where we’re going
We’re in the midst of the death of unsolicited email marketing and opt-in email marketing is by no means future-proof. Display advertising is threatened as well. What comes after native? Maybe there are more evolutions of display (and / or text) advertising to come, but we can’t just keep filling webpages with junk. The audience – especially our well-educated and knowledgeable audience of scientists, will find a way to take back and protect their valuable attention. So what happens when they do so to an extent that the traditional marketing-by-interruption approaches are no longer effective?
Email and display advertising goes away. You can’t go back to print: we already know that’s not effective, and who actually reads things on pieces of paper anymore? Content marketing is valuable, but that doesn’t solve the problem either – it may help keep the audience’s attention but you still need to get their attention in the first place. Conference attendance is steadily declining and an opportunity that only comes once a year isn’t enough to prop up a marketing program. So what’s left?
Barring new channels being invented between now and then, it leaves search and social media.
The value of search is abundantly clear to most marketers, and while its value increases as it becomes more difficult to reach people through other channels, search won’t necessarily enter a new paradigm because of it.
Social media marketing, on the other hand, changes immensely. Social media essentially becomes your new permission-based marketing. It’s a group of people who you can actively reach out to with your marketing messages. You expand your list disseminating valuable, share-worthy content. The rules and best practices of social media won’t change so much, but its role without your marketing program will transform. That’s why it’s so important to start building your audience now, while you can still pull people to you with advertising.
Growing an audience organically takes a lot of time and effort. Right now you can “cheat” with social advertising, but how long will it be until that becomes ineffective as well? Start growing your audience now and you’ll be prepared for the future of permission-based marketing.
Best Practices Aren’t Enough
Carlton Hoyt
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. More often than not, a copycat marketing strategy will not replicate competitors’ success.
There are a number of times when marketing best practices are insufficient. These include (but are certainly not limited to):
- When incumbents have a brand advantage that biases customers in favor of your incumbent. All else being equal, if your competitors have a brand advantage they will continue to outcompete you.
- When there are a large number of incumbents and no one or two competitors that dominate. You certainly can’t dominate your market by following in the footsteps of other companies who don’t dominate either.
- If the product or service you are selling is not sufficiently differentiated from competition. All else being equal, scientists will prefer to stick with what they know.
- When the marketing practices of your competitors are misinformed or – for whatever reason – just not that good.
In these instances, you need to go beyond best practices. You have to choose which elements of your marketing program are of the greatest strategic importance and surpass competitors in order to gain advantage and capture market share. But how do you know what to focus on?
The answer should be rooted in two things: customer value, and differentiation. Differentiation is somewhat obvious – we can’t create advantage by doing the same thing as our competitors, so those things cannot be the focus unless you know you can do them substantially better and there would be some barrier to your competitors replicating your success. Unlocking customer value is often far more obscure of a goal. To do so, adopt a customer-centric viewpoint and consider what needs they have that lie beyond the realm of commercial products and services. Uncover needs that are related to your business and your offerings and align with your values, then create branded solutions which address them. (For more information on that topic, see this post.) Once you understand how you can create value for customers that goes beyond products, the possible natures of the delivery of that value will become relatively obvious. (More on value that isn’t intrinsically linked to your products here and here.)
Unless you have a vastly superior product or brand value, best practices can get you no further than your top competitors. To surpass them, become a market leader, and truly dominate your markets, you need to do things differently.
Research Sans Assumptions
Carlton Hoyt
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. For most research that’s fine, however for problems that are large and unknown these assumptions hinder our ability to identify a solution. This is true not just for traditional market research efforts, but for analytics-driven research as well. Diving into data – big or small – to try to answer a question doesn’t guarantee a correct result.
For those big, vexing problems, we need another approach.
Customer Research Without Assumptions
Serendipitous discoveries require that we shake those assumptions. We need to be able to observe and learn without our questions or research getting in the way of themselves. In order to do this, we need to adopt a customer-centric perspective. We once again need to stop thinking about the customers and start thinking like the customer.
Obviously, in order to perform research you still need to know what it is that you’re seeking to understand. We therefore still need to be able to ask questions and set goals, but we need to ensure those goals are assumption-free. To do so, start with the problem you want to solve or question you want to ask, and then convert that into a broad but addressable customer-centric issue. In other words, you need to be able to frame it as a human experience.
Addressing problems framed in this manner is not something that can be done with surveys or some kind of defined Q&A process – both require questions which embody assumptions. Instead, such research must be primarily observational. You want to be able to gather information in an open-ended manner. Questions should only be asked in response to observation. The primary issue in the design of such studies must be: what about our customers can we observe in order to gain the necessary understanding?
When to Take an Assumption-less Approach
The assumption-less approach to market research should only be undertaken for big, unknown problems. If you are even moderately familiar with the customers and the market, can envision a defined set of possible outcomes with a good degree of certainty, and can frame a set of hypotheses, then the problem is capable of being defined in a manner which does not necessitate an observational, assumption-less study.
The assumption-less approach is best when:
- You are highly unfamiliar with the customers, market, or problem.
- The problem at hand is novel.
- Other methods of research or analytics cannot be used or have failed.
- You cannot define a set of likely outcomes and have no hypothesis to test.
Aided by technology, many life science marketers who perform market research are increasingly relying on a combination of surveys and analytics to perform market research. These methods, however, cannot answer all questions. Hypothesis-driven market research imparts assumptions which can confound the understanding of unknown problems. To best tackle those big problems, take an assumption-less approach and perform an observational study which seeks to better understand unadulterated customer experiences.
Transform Your Next Launch
Carlton Hoyt
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. Also like a firework show, after the big launch effort is over, the audience goes about their lives as if it never happened. People won’t think about it much after it’s over, and within a few weeks it’s lost to history.
That is not a satisfactory outcome for a product launch, but it is the outcome for most launch efforts. A lot of this is due to planning and strategy – marketers plan big splashes and track their âsuccessâ with vanity metrics so it looks like goals were met. That’s not how things should be done. A product launch shouldn’t just create a splash. It should start a movement. The goal shouldn’t be to get “x” number of people’s attention. That’s fleeting and far removed from the things that matter. The goal should be to change the way that your target scientists think; to change their opinions on how they should do things.
That begs the question… What do we need to change in order to move from this paradigm of creating big, splashy launches to creating ones that have a more profound impact – ones that start movements?
Three Things That Will Transform Your Next Launch
Beyond the standard things that companies normally think of for product launches, such as positioning and ways to reach the target audience, there are three key things that life science companies need to do in order to make their launch be the start of something that grows and becomes stronger with time instead of fizzling away.
1) Captivate the Audience
Captivating your audience should be priority #1 for most high-level marketing communications, but it’s especially important for product launches. As we’ve discussed previously, there are a number of things you need to do to ensure you get your audience’s attention and keep it for as long as possible.
First, start with your reason. Why did you develop this product or service? Why does it exist? Do NOT start your message by saying what the product is. You might genuinely care about your new product, but remember that your scientist-customers do not. Leading with a product-centric message is a sure-fire way to ensure a lackluster response.
Secondly, make the message something the audience can agree with – and is likely to agree with. You want them to buy into your message up-front in order to make them more receptive to everything else you have to say. Show the audience that you understand them and that your goals and values are aligned with theirs.
Lastly, make it emotionally compelling. This is what will really give your message the power it needs to drive people into action. Frame the message around something they care about and make it sincere.
Note that these three core components to captivating messaging remain true regardless of the format you’re using to deliver your message. However, using more highly engaging formats such as video or interactive content helps to both attract and maintain your audience’s attention.
2) Provide Genuine Value
Don’t just ask of your scientist-customers; give to them. In order to create a memorable, lasting experience, they need to be able to derive genuine value from it. If they do not, the experience will be fleeting. This is one of the reasons so many launches fall short – if the goal is just attracting attention and the metrics used to show success are things like visits or clicks, marketers are rewarded for creating stimulating and entertaining but ultimately shallow experiences (like fireworks).
The common intermediate goal of delivering a digital download or something similar is also insufficient in most cases. White papers are most frequently skimmed once and never touched again. Case studies focus on the wrong stage of the buying journey for most of your audience. Your goal should be to create a genuine resource for your customers related to the product or service being launched. Ask yourself: what are the needs of our target audience and how can we address them in a way that both is relevant to the product / service and creates value for our brand? Answer that question and deliver on it, and you’ll create a lasting, positive experience for your customers that is perceived over and over again.
3) Build On It
If you’re going to create lasting change in your market, a one-off event isn’t enough. To keep your movement going, you need to support it. The ways in which you can do this are myriad, but should be guided by your launch. Strive to create value and create experiences which build on those created in the launch itself. Even better, have the launch itself leave behind something tangible which can be built on or built around over time. Whatever you do, don’t just walk away. If you’ve come this far in the creation of a successful launch, keep going.
Which kind of launch do you want, the firework show or the movement?
Organize Your Content
Carlton Hoyt
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. Your content is getting a lot of views out of the gate, and it’s helping to generate leads for your organization. Sounds great, right?
The problem is, for most organizations, the value that any particular piece of content provides diminishes rapidly over time. Content is most often organized chronologically, and even for the content that isn’t, pieces of content have a habit of fading from view over time for one reason or another. This is true even for content that doesn’t become outdated. Blog posts get buried in archives. Webinar recordings get taken down with site updates and never reused. Etc. Much of the long-term value and potential of this content is being lost. So what can we do about it?
The answer is simple: Get organized. Instead of the traditional content repositories where content goes to die, create repositories that act as genuine resources for your customers. In building a repository, not only will you continue to derive value from your content over a much longer time frame, but you’ll also provide more value to customers by enabling them to find more content which provides the information or experience they’re seeking.
Creating a Valuable Content Repository
When creating a content repository, start with taking an inventory of your content. Secondly, organize that content into topics, ensuing that the topics are customer-centric and not solely company-centric or product/service-centric. These first two steps are relatively simple. The last is far more complex: create a well-designed repository for your content. What does a repository need to be “well-designed?” It needs to:
- Have intuitive navigation. If people can’t find what they’re looking for, the repository is useless.
- Focus on a central theme. If, for instance, you have two business units that are fairly disparate, it may make sense to have two content repositories rather than one.
- Encourage exploration. You know you have a good repository if users are organically immersing themselves in it to find multiple pieces of content which interest them.
- Bring together disparate forms of content around similar topics. If a customer is interested in single-cell RNA-seq and you have a video, two blog posts, and a white paper about it, that customer should be able to find all of those pieces of content as easily as finding any one of them.
So much good content fails to meet its potential due to the simple fact that it effectively disappears over time. You spent valuable time, effort, and money creating great content, so organize your content to ensure that it can continue to provide value, to both your company and your customers, over a long time horizon. In doing so, you may just be creating a genuine resource for your customers as well.
Shift From a Product Focus
Carlton Hoyt
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. Those things are undeniably important, but in many circumstances they’re not sufficient for winning markets anymore. There are plenty of products which were incremental improvements, or even significant improvements, and were offered at equal or lower products than their mainstream competitors but still failed. While there are many ways to fail in marketing a product, one of the largest is marketing a product. (Yes, you read that correctly.)
If You’re Only Marketing Products, You’re Doing It Wrong
Lets think about scientists for a minute. What are their goals? Maybe they’re trying to discover the next big drug. Maybe they’re trying to understand some burning scientific question. Whatever their goals are we can be reasonably certain that they are not to purchase “X” type of product. The need for a product is a low-order need. The experiment that the product will be used in is even a subordinate need to the ultimate goal. The point is that your product is relatively far from the thing that the scientist really cares about. Yet life science companies are trying to create competitive advantage in a manner which is almost entirely product-centric. That doesn’t make any sense.
We’ve seen symptoms of this shift from product to customer for a while. Personalization, for instance, tries to provide value by making the customer’s decision easier. Content marketing, when done well, tries to arm customers with knowledge. Companies are, whether conscious of it or not, being pulled into a more customer-centric viewpoint. But being pulled behind your competitors doesn’t create sustainable competitive advantage.
For a long time, companies looking to innovate would ask themselves “What else can we make and sell?” The question that you need to shift yourself to asking is “How can we provide value to our customers?”
Making the Shift
The most central facet of a customer-centric shift, especially since we are still talking about marketing products, is framing the product according to the needs of the customer. By that, I don’t just mean focusing broadly on customer needs, but rather focusing on specific customer segments’ purchase criteria and your products’ position relative to them. You don’t need to have a better, faster, or smarter product than your competitors. You need to have a product which more closely aligns with the needs of a specific customer. A Tesla is not claiming to be better than a Cadillac. They are simply meant for different audiences, and each segment is loyal to their brand in part because the brand focuses on their particular needs and desires (even if these desires are situational and therefore subject to change).
Think about how you can leverage network effects to your advantage. Most people think about customer data in the light of providing personalized promotions, knowing what company-created content to send to whom, or understanding a users’ purchase history. Get past that. Think about what information your customers have to share with each other and how you can help spread that information. This can be as complex as community-building or as simple as curating customers’ questions. Whatever the implementation, this information creates advantage over those who cannot provide such value. Network effects build on themselves and can be difficult to replicate.
On a non-product level, don’t forget to consider the brand advantages which drive scientists to your products in the long-term. Creating superior experiences for your customers imparts brand advantage for your company that manifest in improved customer acquisition and loyalty.
Innovation doesn’t necessarily mean product innovation, and customers are no longer making purchasing decisions solely based on the features of the product. Product-based advantages are becoming ever more tenuous, and competing effectively and creating sustainable advantage requires shifting focus to the customers. Provide superior value to them based on an understanding of their needs, and you’ll win their business.
SEO Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Changed
Carlton Hoyt
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. Because of the ever-decreasing ways in which a marketer can manipulate search engine ranks, there has been an increasing chorus of people proclaiming the “death” of SEO.
Some Self-Serving Claims
It’s been a long-running trend to proclaim the death of SEO. Here’s a nice little article from 2007 which lists other, older articles proclaiming the death of SEO. The claim that SEO is dead is not a new one.
These claims tend to come from two kinds of people: SEO-ers who’ve jumped ship and are trying to get people to follow them, or from people who work on elements of marketing that could be considered strategic alternatives to SEO. Once upon a time, a lot of these voices were from people doing search advertising. Now they’re mostly from content marketers.
Is content marketing important for SEO? Sure it is. Is it more important for SEO than it used to be? In most cases, yes. Is it a replacement for SEO? Not a chance.
The New Age of SEO
Let’s be clear on something: SEO is not dead. SEO will quite possibly never be dead so long as search engines as we know them remain widely used tools.
SEO has been an ever-changing field since the beginning. Remember “keyword jamming”? Remember those websites that were padded with “invisible” text at the bottom of the pages back in the 90s? Remember the link farms of the 2000s? … The most effective tactics have always changed as Google and other search engines have evolved, and I would be very surprised if that fact doesn’t remain true for a long time to come. The only thing about SEO that is infallibly true is the value of those highly coveted top organic search ranks.
The job of the SEOer has not changed. The SEOer is not suddenly a content marketer. The SEOer’s toolbox, however, has changed.
Many technical factors surrounding SEO are still important. Site performance is still very important and something that can be directly controlled. Clickthrough is still very important and is something which is readily influenced. Ensure that any page that you would want to use as a landing page has the appropriate metadata such that your site’s appearance in search results attracts searchers. Making use of Google Authorship and tagging content accordingly can have a profound effect, especially for companies which generate a lot of high-quality content. Additionally, SEOers need to ensure the website’s entry points should be controlled.
Keyword research is still important. The results of this keyword research are then fed to content development teams to help guide the content focus towards things that people are looking for. SEOers then need to ensure that the content is appropriately optimized, or that the content development teams know enough about SEO to create well-optimized content themselves.
Content marketing is very important for most organizations, but it’s still just one piece of SEO. Having an SEO strategy which focuses solely on content will put you at a strategic disadvantage versus those companies with a more holistic approach.
Content is for Your Customers
Carlton Hoyt
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. Many content creators focus too heavily on what they want their customers to hear rather than sincerely addressing customers’ needs through content and, in doing so, providing customer value.
To illustrate the point, here are some types of content which I frequently see and which have the wrong focus:
- Generic event-promoting blog posts (“We’ll be at the XYZ meeting in booth 2000!”)
- “White papers” which don’t do anything but restate the value claims for a product or service.
- Frequent social media posts about ongoing promotions.
- Blog posts which are little more than product overviews.
- Posting just about any overt promotional message to a LinkedIn group.
All of the above are company-centric or product-centric promotions. They do not properly address the customers’ needs. Even if a prospect has a potential but unrealized need for the product, these kinds of “content spam” will simply drive them away by trying to create an opportunity to purchase when most of your audience is likely not actively in a relevant buying journey. It’s the wrong message at the wrong time, and they’ll filter it out along with the mountains of other promotional content which they get bombarded with.
Instead of company-centric and product-centric messages, use your content channels to provide value-added, customer-centric content. Creating valuable customer-centric content, as well as matching each piece of content to the appropriate channels, requires three things:
- Understanding what information your customers are looking for.
- Understanding your customers’ preferences for consuming content.
- Ensuring that your content distribution is properly targeted such that any given piece of content is provided to the most relevant audiences
To do these things effectively, you need to remove your own mindset from the equation. You need to stop thinking about your customers and start thinking like your customers. If you can effectively do that when you’re planning content, you’ll end up with content which is more valuable to your customers.
Personalized Experiences
Carlton Hoyt
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. Regardless of our very different reasons for being there, however, we’re presented with the same initial experience. That’s not helpful.
Now Target is a little bit limited by the fact that they have physical stores. Itâs not particularly easy – in fact itâs downright impractical if not impossible – to personalize a physical experience for every customer who walks into your store. You canât exactly modify the physical store for every customer. However, you can readily personalize the experience in the digital realm. Despite this, even the largest life science tools and services companies fail to do so.
The world’s best e-commerce sites, such as Amazon or eBay, don’t have that problem. They use what they know about you, and also what they know about the products theyâre selling, to try to get you from where you are to where youâre going as fast as possible. (Note this doesn’t only apply to personalization, although personalization is an important part.) However, you don’t need to be a billion-dollar company to personalize digital experiences. There are many tools that make website personalization accessible to mid-sized companies and even which make financial sense for small companies with a strong e-commerce focus.
As we’ve discussed in a previous report, research from the Corporate Executive Board has shown that increasing the simplicity of the buying journey can lead to an 86% increase in initial purchases of a product and a greater than 100% increase in the likelihood that a product or brand will be recommended. Helping customers solve their problems has been shown to elicit a more positive reaction than any other brand experience. Help your customers solve their problems in a simple, streamlined manner, and they’ll reward you with their business. Personalization is an important part of doing so.