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.
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.
Building Online Communities
Carlton Hoyt
Perhaps inevitable given the popularity of content marketing, the long-established importance of branding in the life sciences, and the growing propensity of companies to look for novel ways to create social marketing-style engagement, online communities are becoming all the more popular. Manufacturers, services provides, and distributors in the life sciences can’t be faulted for finding them all too appealing. They can be easy to create; a savvy web designer can have a branded, albeit basic, forum up and running in a few hours. The rewards are clear, especially to companies who already perform content marketing; an online community can provide a far larger audience for your current content marketing efforts and can build brand value through topic leadership / thought leadership. They’re also potentially great for SEO – lots of content. They can also be very easy to manage; a vibrant online community will grow and monitor itself with little effort from the sponsoring company. With so many benefits, why wouldn’t a life science tools company want to start an online community?
. . . Because it’s difficult at best.
People like to rhetorically benchmark against big, successful brands. All too many people who’ve built an online community want it to be the Facebook of [whatever]. That’s a recipe for failure. There already is a Facebook, it’s pretty darned good at this whole social thing, and just because you have a community that’s branded to target a niche demographic, that doesn’t mean that people will use it. It’s also a bad idea to assume that because some megacorp did it that you can, too. Fortune 500 consumer brands have tens or hundreds of millions of customers – many times more customers than there are life scientists in the entire world. To reach the critical mass necessary to create a vibrant online community they need 0.01% of their customers to use it. As a small or mid-size life science tools company, you probably have well under 100,000 customers. Although you can try to reach out to more than just your customers, the difficulty inherent in doing so will likely render you marginally successful in that effort at best. For your community to be successful, you need a much higher participation rate, and therefore your community has to be that much more compelling.
I hate calling companies out publicly, but to give my point some gravitas I’m going to do it here. If you need any proof that an online community is difficult to build and sustain, look no further than EpiExperts. New England BioLabs, a great company with a reasonably large customer base as far as our industry goes, set it up last year as “a scientific social network for epigenetics experts” with the “hope that [scientists] will use E3 as a communication platform to aid progress in the frontier of epigenetics”. It’s been around for about 10 months now. Aside from an NEB employee and a freelance writer who have the paid job of blogging, the site is pretty much dead. They still get a trickle of new sign-ups coming in, but no one feels compelled to do anything. The forum is effectively unused. People can form groups, but there’s only one created. You can add others as “friends”, but the overwhelming majority haven’t done so. Profiles have walls that people can post to, but almost all are devoid of any posts. The worst part about all this is that when someone goes to a community site and sees that it’s unused, that’s a disincentive for them to use it, so that makes it even harder to turn around the community into a vibrant one.
It’s a shame, really. There’s no reason EpiExperts shouldn’t have been successful, except that there’s no reason that it should have been.
Asking people to join a community is asking them to devote a piece of their life to it. In other words, the community that you create needs to have enough value that scientists are willing to repeatedly spend time on your community’s site rather than doing anything else with their time. In order to do that, your community, just like your products or services, have to be differentiated. In fact, it’s even more important that your community be differentiated on value than a product because an online community can’t be differentiated on price since it’s free. Before you decide you want to build an online community, you need to many similar questions that you would in product development, and more:
- What needs do our scientist-customers have?
- How will this community address those needs?
- Will this community be sufficiently differentiated?
- How will we create continuous value for the users? (so they keep coming back)
So how do we create success when building online communities? Thoroughly answer the above questions and you’ll be pointed squarely in the right direction. This post, however, is already too long so we’ll have to take the topic up more another day. Feel free to use the contact form below if you have any questions or you feel like I left you hanging.
Contact Forms Affect Leads
Carlton Hoyt
Contact forms are increasingly being used by life science companies (and web development companies) as a lead collection tool, but despite this very important function companies often don’t think through the design of contact forms well. For example, I was looking at a life science service company’s website today, and they had an extremely long contact form. There were about 12 fields for contact information – all required. While this is an extreme example, it does highlight the point very well. Contact forms are being misused by life science companies.
You may be thinking “Isn’t this focusing on minutiae? Contact forms aren’t that important.” If so, most people think like you. When designing a contact form they ask what information they would like to collect and that’s about it. That thinking, however, is completely backwards. Why? Contact form submissions, which essentially equate to leads, decrease dramatically the more fields you have. Evidence in a minute.
I’ve heard anecdotally that form submissions decrease between 20% and 50% for each field. That seems a bit exaggerated to me (anecdotes often are), so I looked into it. Thankfully, with creative Googling you can find a study on just about anything. A Chicago-based web dev outfit called Imaginary Landscape did our homework for us. They ran a pilot contact form on their website with 11 fields, then the next month decreased it to 4 fields. The results? They saw a 120% increase in their form submission rate. Conversely, this would mean a 62% decrease in submission rate when increasing from 4 fields to 11, or roughly a 12.5% decrease in submissions per additional field if we actually can apply an exponential mathematical model as the anecdotes would tell us we can.
It stands to reason, however, that as we make it easier to fill out the contact form, that we will lower the quality of the leads. There is almost always a trade-off between lead quality and lead quantity in any given situation in which leads are collected. However, scientists aren’t going to fill out a form and give out their contact info for no reason. We’ll simply get more people contacting us who are “on the fence” – and those are exactly the people that you want your salespeople to get in touch with so that they can sell them on your life science products and / or services.
Because of all these factors, life science companies and life science web designers must be minimalistic in their implementation of contact forms. Do not ask yourself what information you want from your customers, but rather what is the minimum amount of information you need to collect. Let your sales staff get on the phone and collect the rest after you have the lead in hand.
Using a Website to Engage
Douglas E. Rogers
A website can be an exceptionally powerful tool. It is, in essence, a block of clay – massively flexible and limited only by your creativity. For life science companies this flexibility can and should be leveraged as a key component of your internet marketing. When a scientist or other potential customer is on your website you have their attention, at least when they first arrive. Don’t squander that opportunity. Engage the customer, impress them, and you’ll be far more likely to generate a lead or create a sale. But how can a life science company go about doing that? Well, there are a few things we have to do before you get there…
Step 1: Know why people are going to your website. I’ve said it before and it’s worth repeating: Make friends with Google Analytics. Knowing where people are entering from, what search terms they are using, and how they are navigating your website can greatly help figure out why people are going to your site.
Step 2: Lead them to the information they want. We talked about this in a similar context before, so feel free to read our post “From Site to Sale” for more info on that.
Step 3: Make that information engaging! Is your technology complex? Use some interactive flash or a well-illustrated animation to show consumers why your technology is superior. Would customers want to know how to use your product? Make a demonstration video. Don’t just state your advantages – show them. Nothing is worse than a run-on page of text or a lack of information. Remember: showing is always more powerful than telling.
By escaping the paradigm of only having text and images on your website and using engaging media in meaningful and appropriate ways, you can not only improve customer engagement but also present information in ways that make it easier to understand for customers. Combine that with navigation that directs customers to relevant information and leads them into the sales process, and you’ll have a website that is a genuine sales machine.
Biocompare Survey Results
Carlton Hoyt
A little under two weeks ago, we held a survey to gather life science manufacturer’s opinions of Biocompare as an advertising platform. We didn’t get a ton of feedback, but we certainly provoked some good discussion on LinkedIn. As promised, here are the results of the survey:
The sentiment expressed in comments was fairly split. The most common sentiments indicated a general appreciation of the exposure that Biocompare offers but dissatisfaction with the difficulty in determining the ROI of their advertising dollars spent on Biocompare. Sentiments such as “by advertising on Biocompare we have a lot of exposure [but] the direct relation to ROI is low or difficult to measure in the long term.” were common. Others spoke favorably of Biocompare, saying “I think they do a really good job overall for brand development (like advertising)” or “My company has advertised on Biocompare and I believe the MarCom group felt the exposure was good.” Others suggested other areas for improvement such as “the banners are dominated by couple of vendors which makes my eyes tired of looking at the same ad” and “more country-specific advertising options would be great such as country-specific promotions, languages, etc.” There were no highly negative comments.
To view all of the comments from the survey, as well as some anonymized comments from LinkedIn, click here.
Opinions of Biocompare
Carlton Hoyt
There was a bit of a heated discussion going on in one of the LinkedIn groups that I’m a part of where people, including a Biocompare founder, were debating the value of Biocompare as a life science marketing platform. For the moment, I’ll hold back the opinions that were expressed in those posts as well as my own and those I’ve heard from others. What I think is valuable to know is what the life science products community as a whole thinks about Biocompare. To that end, I’ve created this quick, 3-question survey. I encourage you to share your thoughts anonymously, and the results will be shared on BioBM.com.
I have also enabled comments below, so feel free to add your thoughts if you would like to air them out publicly!
Take the Biocompare survey
Use Google Alerts
Carlton Hoyt
I’m guessing most companies do, but I’ve ran into a few that aren’t so I feel the need to say it here: use Google Alerts. For any small company, life science companies included, Google Alerts is an easy and free way of monitoring what is said about your company online. You can set up alerts for mentions of your company, your products, anything. Also, it’s an easy way to keep track of your competition – you can set up Google Alerts for mentions of their company, brands, and products as well.
If you’re involved in marketing or PR for your life science company you definitely be receiving Google Alerts. For small life science companies, executives probably should as well. For people in sales or business development it’s good to keep track of what is being said about your product and the product positioning of competitors. For support or applications scientists, it could be a good way to keep up with people posting methods or problems with your products on forums or anywhere on the internet.
Google Alerts takes almost no time to set up, alerts can be received “as-it-happens”, daily, or weekly and via e-mail or RSS. And did I mention that it’s free?
Site Metrics: Where to Focus?
Douglas E. Rogers
Website analytics can provide very useful information to bioscience companies. It can be used to assess the effectiveness of your marketing messages, optimize your site navigation, and track external marketing campaigns. At it’s most basic, and without spending too much time on the matter, most companies want to know one thing: how much traffic are we getting? For most purposes, however, this isn’t the question they should be asking.
By “traffic”, most people are referring to visits – how many people viewed their website over a given period of time. Alone, that doesn’t really tell us much. Another measure of traffic is pageviews – how many pages on a website were viewed over a given period of time. Again, that doesn’t really tell us much on its own. Where you get to some rich metrics is in the pages per visit and the bounce rate. Pages per visit is exactly what it sounds like – how many pages the average visitor is viewing. A “bounce” is when a visitor views a page and then leaves the site without viewing any other pages. Having high pages per visit and a low bounce rate is indicative of quality visits. It is an indication that your content is relevant to the people that are finding your site, and you are successfully engaging those people with your content.
Another good thing to focus on is your search engine optimization as measured via search rankings for relevant search terms. While you can’t get your search rankings via Google Analytics or similar free analytics tools, there are tools on the internet for determining your search rankings. Our favorite is Rank Checker from SEO Book. It’s a plugin that operates in the Firefox web browser and can tell you your rank for up to 100 different terms at a time in Google, Yahoo, and Bing search engines, save searches and output results into .csv files which can be opened in Excel. Knowing where you stand in search rankings, and keeping track to see if you’re moving up or down in key search terms, is key for driving relevant (and free!) search traffic. This information can be analysed in conjunction with search traffic data from Google Analytics to determine if you’re optimizing for the right terms. If you’re very high in the search rankings for a particular term, but you’re not getting much traffic from searches for that term, then it’s likely that few people are searching for that term in the first place and you should consider how you can re-optimize for a more popular but still relevant term.
If you dig just a little deeper into your analytics instead of just looking at raw traffic, you can learn a lot more useful information.