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Tag : customer experience

Experiences Over Awareness

Carlton Hoyt 10:56 am , March 26, 2014

Your Communications Should Create ExperiencesTake a look around – at the marketing efforts of your company, your competitors, and others in similar life science markets. I’m sure you’ll still find a lot of marketing efforts centered on building awareness. Quite frankly, efforts to simply build awareness are a waste of your audience’s attention. Awareness only imparts one very basic form of knowledge: the knowledge that something exists. You can do so much more with your audience’s attention.

Awareness campaigns are almost inherently neutral. Sure, you may be offering a solution that someone needs, but aside from the facts contained within the communication there is nothing positive or negative about it. Instead of focusing on building awareness, focus on creating experiences. Experiences can be used not only to impart knowledge, but also to build confidence. They leave a positive feeling with your prospective customers that translates into positive brand value for your company.

Experiences can be simple. Focusing on experiences does not necessitate any additional complexity in your communications. To upgrade an awareness communication to an experience, give some thought to the emotion you want to invoke within your scientist-customers and craft your communications with that emotion in mind. Don’t simply focus on what you are doing, but why you are doing it.

Ideally, customer experience will be something which is defined and shaped across all your customer touch points. Any experience is more effective when it is in harmony with the other experiences that your company provides. Considering that your brand is, in effect, the sum of all the experiences that it provides to others, those experiences need to be planned and defined to ensure that they build on each other rather than conflict with each other. In the race to win customers’ hearts and minds, the brand which consistently provides the best experiences will win. The next time you need to create awareness for your company or its products and services, think about how you could instead create an experience for your potential customers. The result will be more effective communications.

"Let’s start crafting great experiences for your customers. Contact BioBM and we’ll help you generate more demand while building positive brand value at the same time."
Blog / Branding / Customer Experience 10:56 am , March 26, 2014

New Paper on Decision Engines

biobm 7:11 pm , February 24, 2014

BioBM Consulting has published a new paper which outlines the current problems facing scientists when attempting to make a purchasing decision, the negative impacts this is having on scientists, and how decision engines can be leveraged to create transformational change within life science markets. “How Decision Engines Will Reshape the Life Science Buying Journey” explains why information has become the enemy of purchasers and suppliers alike, explains what decision engines are and how they are already creating disruptive change in other markets, and outlines a general framework for creating decision engines.

All with all BioBM papers, “How Decision Engines Will Reshape the Life Science Buying Journey” is available free of charge to all those in the life science tools & services industry. To learn more about the new report, to preview it, or to request a copy, please visit: https://biobm.com/idea-farm/reports-papers/

News 7:11 pm , February 24, 2014

Can the Shallow Content

Carlton Hoyt 11:08 am , January 14, 2014

Don't create superficial content for life science audiences.We’re big advocates of content marketing, and we’re glad to see that content marketing is rapidly being adopted by life science companies. However, as content marketing becomes more popular, we’re seeing more companies creating content simply for the sake of creating content without much regards to strategy, customer, or value. While content marketing is highly valuable when done correctly, it can actually be detrimental if done carelessly.

To understand why, we need to step back and revisit the concept of a company’s brand and understand that the brand resides in the mind of the customer. It is the result of the customers’ cumulative experiences with the company. Everything the company does influences the brand, content included. A strong, positive brand elevates all of the company’s marketing and sales efforts. It improves the level of trust that your customers extend to you. It makes your communications more likely to be not only received by your audience, but digested. It can even make closing sales far easier. The opposite is also true – having a weak or negative brand makes virtually all marketing and sales endeavors that much more difficult.

Well-written content that is educational, helpful, or otherwise valuable to the audience reflects positively upon the company. Trivial, meaningless, or irrelevant content can reflect negatively. Even if superficial or poorly written content is helping you attract more eyes, if those eyes are not part of your target audience they are worthless. Even worse, if they are part of your target audience and are not impressed with your content, they could leave with a negative impression which hurts your company. Just because your target market is exposed to your brand doesn’t mean that it’s helping you. (Side note: This is also why no marketing analytics effort should place too much value on views.)

This is also why content should not be thought of one-dimensionally, especially if you’re making it publicly accessible. When you make content public, you’re losing some element of control over who views it and for what purpose. If you’re posting content for a particular purpose, it may be consumed by others who have a different purpose. To use a simple example, if you’re posting content for SEO, which by necessity is publicly accessible, you still need to address the needs of your audience. Similarly, if you’re disproportionately posting content which is relevant only to a particular segment of your audience, you may turn off other segments of your audience.

For most life science companies, content can enhance many areas of marketing and sales and should be central to the marketing effort. Content marketing needs to be taken seriously and be approached strategically. Haphazardly creating content which is of questionable value is not only a wasted effort, but it can actually hurt you.

"Does your content add value to your brand? Is it providing measurable value? If you’re looking to improve the quality of your content, create strategies for more effective use of content, or just have questions about how you can effectively implement content marketing in your organization, contact BioBM. We’ll help you develop and implement a highly effective content marketing program which drives value across multiple facets of your marketing and sales programs and adds value to your brand."
Blog / Branding / Content Marketing 11:08 am , January 14, 2014

Your Customers Can Love You

Carlton Hoyt 10:37 am , February 13, 2013

I think the concept of emotionally appealing to scientists gets taken to extremes. There are people who think that B2B scientific sales are largely emotionless and that customers in this sector make decisions using reason; therefore, emotional appeals have little merit. On the other hand, there are those that see emotion as underused in life science marketing; a hidden opportunity ripe to exploit.

I fall somewhere in the middle. I think that life science marketers shouldn’t neglect emotion, but that emotion should be built largely through user experience and branding (in other words, through the sum of customer interactions with a company) rather than through the kind of emotionally-charged creative that we see in TV commercials for cars or pharmaceuticals, for instance.

Along these lines, I took interest in the results of a recent poll from Harris Interactive (you can find it summarized here on Wired). I wasn’t so interested by the findings that Amazon is the most respected company in the states, but rather that on a 100-point scale they ranked as having the highest emotional appeal (defined by Harris as trust, admiration and respect). They beat Disney by five points. Keep in mind that Amazon is a company which most people only experience through a website and a number of brown cardboard boxes.

These results speak to the value of user experience in establishing emotional appeal, which in turn creates value through establishing brand preferences and driving customer loyalty. To all those who think you need impassioned communications to create emotional appeal, and also to those who think that life science companies can not be effective at creating emotional appeal, look at what Amazon has done with an e-commerce site and cardboard.

"Is your brand creating the value that you want? Are you having a difficult time escaping the unproductive “branding is imagery” paradigm? Contact BioBM’s marketing team. Our experts will guide you through the process of building a more powerful, evocative brand rooted in substance and user experience. Learn more about life science branding from BioBM."
Blog / Branding 10:37 am , February 13, 2013