Tag : demand generation

Google Performance Max Campaigns Make Revenue Attribution Critical for Life Science Marketers

Carlton Hoyt 11:19 pm , June 16, 2025

TL;DR Summary:

Performance Max campaigns are being promoted more aggressively to new advertisers.
While the setup of Performance Max campaigns may seem simple, life science marketers need to do the necessary groundwork to accurately track conversion value.
Google Ads’ AI will aggressively optimize for whatever goal it is set to.
Performance Max provide very little visibility into the audiences being targeted.
If life science marketers aren’t optimizing for actual business results, they will waste their ad budgets on ineffective campaigns.
We’ve seen Google’s attempts at self-optimization go wrong before …
… but executed correctly, Performance Max campaigns can significantly improve return on advertising spend (ROAS) compared to legacy Google Ads campaign types.

Google Ads AI is smart, but it’s your job to ensure it has the data it needs.

Google Ads AI: a Blessing and a Curse?

Performance Max (also known as PMax) a newer Google Ads campaign type which heavily leverages AI to achieve specific goals, such as sales, leads, or phone calls. By using all of Google’s advertising inventory, Performance Max campaigns often achieve a lower cost per action (CPA) than traditional search ad campaigns, and frequently even outperform retargeting campaigns in CPA. Performance Max campaigns are also wider-reaching, capable of advertising to customers through search, Google shopping, display, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, and the Discover feed on Android devices. They use the data you feed it through your conversion goals and Analytics connection, combined with Google’s own proprietary audience signals, to aggressively optimize for the stated goals. It will even mix-and-match ad assets to find the best performing combinations, create new ad assets for you, and find the best performing landing pages on your website. Sounds great, right?

It can be, but life science marketers who don’t have deep experience in Google Ads need to be careful. Performance Max campaigns are “black boxes” with limited visibility and control of keywords, placements, and audience targeting. Marketers who erroneously believe they can simply set up a Performance Max campaign, add some assets, and let Google’s AI handle the rest are going to burn money and see poor campaign performance. This is further complicated for many life science companies, which often conduct transactions partially or entirely offline (unlike e-commerce) and have complex buying cycles involving numerous stakeholders. As a result, revenue can be significantly disconnected from easily traceable online actions.

Furthermore, Google has not consistently proven that it is fluent in the language of the life sciences. We have seen this before, with product ads (for which Google chooses the keywords it believes to be relevant) for laboratory equipment showing in searches for drug paraphernalia and auto-applied recommendations jumbling search ad copy through obnoxious keyword stuffing devoid of context. I therefore do not recommend blindly trusting Google Ads without providing significant guidance – and for PMax campaigns, that guidance primarily comes from your conversion data.

Conversion Tracking vs. Revenue Tracking

Implementing comprehensive conversion tracking is much simpler than setting up revenue tracking and feeding actual data on conversion values back to Google Ads. Is conversion tracking alone sufficient for most life science organizations who want to use Performance Max campaigns? Almost never. The unusual exceptions are if you only sell through ecommerce or if all your conversions have approximately the same value. Therefore, life science marketers should do one of two things in order to property attribute sales data:

Get actual revenue data and feed it back to Google Analytics and / or Google Ads. Since almost all life science companies have offline sales, this requires having the proper technology implemented to correctly attribute sales data to leads and then send this data back to Google Ads. Many CRMs do this, for instance. If you do not have a CRM, you can achieve this yourself using the Google Ads API, but it is non-trivial to set up properly.
Estimate the average value for each type of conversion event whose value you can’t automatically track (i.e., all but ecommerce events) and add those conversion values to Google Ads / Google Analytics. This can be done in a number of ways, but using Google Tag Manager is often the simplest.

Failing to provide Google Ads with some measure conversion value will lead to your Performance Max campaigns optimizing solely for the number of conversions. This can lead Google Ads to inadvertently optimize for lower-value conversions, which frequently have a lower cost per acquisition.

PMax vs. Shopping Ads vs. Search Ads vs. Display Ads?

If you are curious which campaign is correct for you, there is no universal answer. You can scour the internet for data and case studies and find a lot of conflicting reports (and even more anecdotes devoid of data). Google Ads performance is so sector-specific and even business-specific that no blanket statement can be made. In our own experience, however, this is what we’ve found:

Performance Max campaigns get far more clicks at a much lower cost per click (CPC) but have considerably lower conversion rates and conversion values than search ads. PMax traffic tends to be lower-quality, which is to be expected. It’s hard to get better traffic quality than people who are in the process of looking for what you are selling. When using Performance Max ads to replace or supplement search ads, the objective is to get decent traffic quality at a low enough cost that the higher volume of PMax traffic compensates for its lower quality. Achieving this will depend on your specific circumstances and thoroughly optimizing your campaigns.
Since Performance Max campaigns recently added search terms reports, there is little practical difference between PMax and Google Shopping ads if you are using feed-only data. However, PMax also allows additional assets to provide more cross-platform exposure.There isn’t a definitive correct choice here, as shopping ads with Smart Bidding are extremely similar to PMax.
Display ads are almost functionally irrelevant after the launch of PMax. Even for display retargeting, PMax is often able to achieve better conversion rates. PMax almost always generates more traffic, typically of comparable quality to display ads. Costs are usually similar, although PMax campaigns can be somewhat higher than most display ad campaigns depending on your display ad targeting.

Again, this is in our own experience, which is strictly in marketing to life scientists and closely adjacent sectors. The only way to definitively determine if Performance Max campaigns will work for you is to test them.

Tips to Get Your Performance Max Campaigns Performing

Properly Establish Campaign Priority

Campaign priority can be directly set for campaigns with shopping ads. For search ads, it’s less simple: there are automatically applied prioritization rules you can’t easily get around. The rules summarize to this: if there is an exact match, regardless of whether the keyword rule used is exact match, then the campaign with the exact match will be used (which for PMax would need to be a search theme since keywords aren’t directly set). If there are no exact matches, then Google’s AI takes its best guess. If AI can’t figure it out, then Ad Rank is used. For display ads, expect PMax to get priority.

Don’t Allow PMax to Cannibalize Organic Leads

Some things you just don’t need to bid on. For instance, if no one is bidding on your branded terms (and even potentially if they are), you don’t need to be bidding on them either. Ads for branded terms will perform extremely well, however, so Performance Max campaigns will aggressively pursue them, causing you to spend money on leads you would have acquired anyway. Stop this unproductive behavior by setting negative keywords for branded terms.

Closely Monitor Keywords & Make Use of Negative Keywords

This is crucial for all Google Ads campaigns, but particularly for Shopping and PMax campaigns where direct keyword control is limited. Be vigilant about your keywords and proactive about setting negative keywords to prevent wasted ad spend on traffic that is irrelevant or low-value.

Use Audience Signals

One of the biggest gripes about Performance Max campaigns is traffic quality. Force Google’s AI to optimize for higher-value audiences by feeding it audience segments, customer lists and remarketing lists. (In our experience, PMax campaigns are particularly effective for remarketing. We’ve largely stopped using standalone Google Ads remarketing campaigns in favor of PMax.)

Keep a Close Eye on Low-Volume Campaigns

Google Ads’ AI needs enough data and signals to be able to optimize itself, or else it may not perform well. The key question is: how much data is enough? Smarter Ecommerce ran an ROAS test for PMax campaigns with different monthly conversions to measure how they performed. The result? Less than 30 conversions per month leads to poor performance and the performance gets better the more conversion data that Google Ads has to work with within the Performance Max campaign. Even campaigns with over 1000 conversions per month performed slightly better than those with 500 to 1000 conversions per month. Their takeaway was that 150+ conversions / month was the sweet spot. Less than that and it might not perform. It is noteworthy however that in their experiment the number of campaigns with “below target” ROAS declined rapidly as conversions per month increased, but those performing above target stayed roughly flat. If their data is to be believed (and it is from 14,000 campaigns), then there is a roughly 30% chance that PMax campaigns will perform well no matter how many conversions you have. Either that or there is something uncontrolled in the data regarding how highly converting companies vs. low converting companies set their target ROAS.

Chart from Smarter Ecommerce

Use PMax as a Supplement for Search and Shopping Campaigns

It’s easy for PMax campaigns to be wasteful and burn through ad budgets. Run PMax concurrently with search and shopping campaigns until it consistently demonstrates superior ROAS

Optimize, Optimize, Optimize

This is not a recommendation which is specific to Performance Max campaigns, but it is especially important for Performance Max campaigns. Your manual optimization efforts are what will keep the guardrails on and help Google Ads’ AI better learn what works. Create diverse creative assets, replace periodically underperforming ones, A/B test, and run experiments.

Segment Your Campaigns … But Not Too Much

PMax campaigns perform best when segmentation is used intelligently to guide Google Ads into doing what you want. For campaigns without product feeds this could mean segmenting by geography, audience signals, “similar to” segments, lists, etc. For campaigns with product feeds, you may want to segregate your best performing products, segment by overarching product types, new vs. returning customers, etc. It is also recommended to have a “catch-all” segment to include offerings that fall outside of your defined segments. The best segmentation to use will depend on the nature of your business.

You’ll need to segment your asset groups as well and ensure you have appropriate ad assets for each segment. PMax is decent at figuring out what assets make sense with what products or landing pages, but ultimately you should take responsibility to ensure that you have sensible, coherent ads.

However you segment, be sure not to over segment. Remember that PMax needs enough data to optimize, and if you are hyper-segmenting to the point where many segments have relatively few conversions, Google Ads’ AI won’t be able to optimize your campaigns well.

The #1 Thing To Remember for PMax Campaigns

PMax can be a powerful addition to almost any life science Google Ads account – if done properly. The #1 thing to remember is that Google Ads’ AI can only optimize for what it has data on. Without accurate tracking of conversion values, Google may make assumptions or optimize for suboptimal actions, negatively impacting your campaigns. With proper tracking of conversion values, however, Performance Max campaigns can help unearth leads and customers that might be untargetable through other Google Ads campaign types while delivering low CPAs and high ROAS.

Don’t Optimize for Quality Score in Google Ads

Carlton Hoyt 9:51 am , March 27, 2024

Sometimes you just have to let Google be Google.

Large, complex algorithms which pump out high volumes of decisions based in part on non-quantifiable inputs are almost inherently going to get things wrong sometimes. We see this as users of Google Search all the time: even when you provide detailed search queries, the top result might not be the best and not all of the top results might be highly relevant. It happens. We move on. That doesn’t mean the system is bad; it’s just imperfect.

Quality score in Google Ads has similar problems. It’s constantly making an incredibly high volume of decisions, and somewhere in the secret sauce of its algos it makes some questionable decisions.

Yes, Google Ads decided that a CTR of almost 50% was “below average”. This is not surprising.

If your quality score is low, there may be things you can do about it. Perhaps your ads aren’t as relevant to the search terms as they could be. Check the search terms that your ads are showing for. Does you ad copy closely align with those terms? Perhaps your landing page isn’t providing the experience Google wants. Is it quick to load? Mobile friendly? Relevant? Check PageSpeed Insights to see if there are things you can do to improve your landing page. Maybe your CTR actually isn’t all that high. Are you making good use of all the ad extensions?

But sometimes, as we see above, Google just thinks something is wrong when to our subjective, albeit professional, human experience everything seems just fine. That’s okay. Don’t worry about it. Ultimately, you shouldn’t be optimizing for quality score. It is a metric, not a KPI. You should be optimizing for things like conversions, cost per action (CPA), and return on ad spend (ROAS), all of which you should be able to optimize effectively even if your quality score seems sub-optimal.

"Want to boost your ROAS? Talk to BioBM. We’ll implement optimized Google Ads campaigns (and other campaigns!) that help meet your revenue and ROI goals, all without the inflated monthly fees charged by most agencies. In other words, we’ll deliver metrics that matter. Let’s get started."

Blog / Demand Generation / Digital Marketing / Search Marketing 9:51 am , March 27, 2024

Transform Your Next Launch

Carlton Hoyt 10:29 am , August 28, 2014

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 “success” 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?

"Is it time to start your movement? If so, contact BioBM. Move beyond the firework shows and vanity metrics. We’re not here to create splashes. We’re here to start movements."

Blog / Marketing Communications / Marketing Strategy 10:29 am , August 28, 2014

Demand Problem? Brand Problem?

Carlton Hoyt 11:06 am , July 11, 2014

“But our product performs better than the competitors! And it performs better for almost all applications!”

This is the cry of one too many life science companies (especially smaller companies) who thought that an incremental improvement – and a bit of advertising money – would be all that’s required to outcompete their competitors. This company probably has a few loyal customers, but they’re just not seeing the market penetration that they thought they should. After all, with a superior product you should be able to capture a leading share of the market so long as the market is aware of it, right? In theory, yes. The problem is that it’s not so simple, and the real world doesn’t work like it should in theory.

Every one of us demonstrates this on a regular basis. Think about the last time you went to the grocery store. Are you absolutely certain that each brand which you’re buying is the best one? Maybe for a few kinds of items, but almost certainly not for all. The brands all claim to be the best, but not many people have sampled every brand of food which they eat, or compared them all for nutritional value and other important product attributes. Chances are you don’t even look at all the brands – you just get what you’re used to getting for many things. While it’s true that decisions for scientific purchases are more deliberate than picking up a gallon of milk, there’s still an emotional component to any purchase. Whether you know it or not, your customers are ascribing value to each brand they come in contact with (often subconsciously).

For the company in the scenario outlined at the beginning of this article, the unrecognized problem is that unrecognized, confounding brand effects may be holding them back. In other words, the company is getting “out-branded”. Even though their product is an improvement to competitors or alternatives, and from a strictly rational decision standpoint customers should be driven to their product, the benefits are not enough to overcome emotionally-based perceptions. This problem is especially prevalent for small companies and for products early in their life cycle when there may not be independent validation of the products’ value.

Causes of Brand Problems & Potential Solutions

As we’ve discussed previously, brand value is effectively the sum of all the experiences that stakeholders have had with your brand. For any given customer, it’s the sum of all of that person’s experiences. (Note that these experiences can be second hand as well; a discussion about a brand with a colleague is still a brand experience.) This value manifests itself as an emotional attachment and resulting brand preference, which may be conscious or subconscious. If the sum of the customers’ experiences with the competitors’ brands have been more positive than their experiences with your brand, they will show a preference (perhaps even an irrational preference!) for the other brand which will hurt your demand. If you’re a small company or working with a new brand, it may be that they simply don’t have enough experience with your brand. For larger companies, it is more likely to be that the customer experiences which you have provided have been poor. Each of these issues call for a slightly different approach…

For small companies / new brands, you need to give your market a reason to engage with you in the first place, and unless your product / service is truly revolutionary, the product alone won’t be a compelling enough reason due to the aforementioned brand effects. This is not a conundrum, however. Consider ways to deliver value that is not intrinsically linked to your product but still relevant to it; in other words, ways in which you can provide value to your target market that do not require buying anything from your company or using your product. Creating valuable content has become the default method of doing so, however many markets are suffering from content overload; there is simply too much content being produced considering the audience’s limited time. If that is the case, consider developing resources rather than content.

For more established companies with a larger existing reach and customer base, work on improving existing experiences. Note that “experiences” could mean anything from support to digital user experience to the actual quality of your products. Diagnosing poor customer experience within a large enterprise is well beyond the scope of this discussion, but improving customer experiences is critical for any life science company which is underperforming. While fixing the root cause of your poor experiences is critical, creating customer resources can be a helpful way of getting customers to re-engage with your company and create positive brand value.

You don’t have to do something wrong for your market to be biased against you and hurt the demand for your products. Brand value is not an absolute. It is an relative, emotional thing, and the most important aspect for your company’s performance is how well your brand value stacks up against your competitors’. By focusing on customer experience, you’ll help to grow that brand value over time and shift market preferences in your direction. Along with those preferences will come more sales.

"Is your life science company losing the brand battle to your competition? Looking to move customer preferences towards your brand? Contact BioBM. We can design superior customer experiences for your company that tilt the scales in your favor to provide lasting strategic advantage."

Blog / Branding / Demand Generation 11:06 am , July 11, 2014

Branding vs. Demand Gen

Carlton Hoyt 11:33 am , April 14, 2014

When considering where to advertise, marketers frequently – and rightfully – consider how targeted / relevant the audience is. However, marketers often fail to consider the commercial intent (or “intent to purchase“) of the target audience within that channel. Because of this, you end up with a lot of advertising campaigns that are ineffective, deliver a poor or negative ROI, and are often not tied to results.

A subjective, qualitative measure of commercial intent (which is usually all that is required) can be easily determined by considering the likelihood that a viewer will be considering a purchase at the time of viewing the ad. For instance, someone who has just searched for a product is far more likely to intend to make a purchase than is the average person reading an article on a news website, even if it is a highly relevant, sector-specific one.

We see this mis-targeting most frequently in demand generation campaigns, particularly “awareness” campaigns. Awareness campaigns seek to target as much of the target market as possible in order to, for all effective purposes, tell them your product or service exists. These campaigns are highly ineffective because they neglect the commercial intent of the target audience. (Side note: They also tend to be uncompelling, unoriginal, and unmemorable.) The implied message is: “We have this product / service. Please go buy it.” However, the channels used for awareness campaigns, which are typically print and / or digital display ads through relevant publishers, have a low commercial intent. People who are not in the market for your product / service will forget about your advertisement long before any future recognition of needs develops.

These described channels, which are highly targeted but have low commercial intent, are far better suited for brand-building campaigns. For audiences who may have a need in the future, you want to make a positive, lasting impression such that your brand will be viewed favorably when a need does arise for the customer, therefore making the customer more receptive to your messages and more likely to favor your solutions. (Focusing on creating experiences is one such way to do this.) In other words, with channels having low commercial intent, you need to play the “long game.”

Conversely, for channels with high commercial intent, you want to play the short game. If a customers are imminently considering a purchase, they are actively filtering information for relevance in search of information to guide them through their buying journey. Campaigns designed to build brand value are likely to be filtered out and, even if they are not, may not have time to make enough of a collective impression on the customers to influence their purchasing decisions (the latter point is more true for products with a short sales cycle than those with long ones). For those customers, you want to present a message about their need and / or your solution in order to demonstrate relevance to their buying journey.

The next time you’re developing an advertising campaign, in addition to the relevance of the audience consider commercial intent. Remember the following:
• Channels where the audience has a high intent to purchase are good for demand-generation campaigns.
• Channels where the audience has a low intent to purchase are good for brand-building campaigns.
You’ll end up with more effective campaigns.

"Is your life science company looking to get more from your advertising campaigns? Contact BioBM. Whether you need a solid campaign strategy, great creative, or the tools and experience to execute, BioBM consulting will make your marketing more effective."

Blog / Branding / Demand Generation / Marketing Communications 11:33 am , April 14, 2014

Case: Content at a Small CRO

Carlton Hoyt 11:26 am , January 6, 2014

It feels like every week I see or learn something that reinforces just how valuable content is to life science companies. For instance, I was recently discussing some sales dilemmas with the founder of a young, small CRO. Let’s call him Greg. Greg’s CRO performs a well-differentiated and valuable research service. However, Greg was lamenting about the “commoditization” of contract research – how his firm can’t seem to compete on quality and all anyone cares about is price.

Knowing what his CRO does, I was a bit disturbed by this. There are such things as commodities, sure, but the whole reason commodities become commoditized is because there is no difference in quality. Even coal fetches different prices based on, among other things, how clean it burns. If someone can mine better coal and get a better price for it, surely his CRO should be able to get a better price for their superior service. … I dug deeper.

Greg used a current problem he was having to illustrate his larger problem. He had drafted a proposal for his contact at a pharma company. That person reviewed his proposal, along with a number of others, then handed it to his boss to make a decision. According to Greg, the boss would then just choose one of the cheap ones.

Now there are times when budgets are tight and price is simply the most important factor, but this was a recurring problem. So what was really the big problem?

Greg’s CRO is young and small. He has built a rapport with his contact. He has not, however, built a rapport with the decision maker, which he does not have access to. So the person making the decision only knows Greg’s CRO from the information that is available about them on their website and with a quick internet search. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, but Greg’s CRO has no educational content. Unless the decision maker happens to know Greg or someone on his team, there is no reason for him to believe that they are capable of producing the higher-quality output they claim to be able to. Compared to the more established and lower cost CROs, selecting Greg’s CRO would be a high-risk endeavor!

To lower the perceived risk, and therefore increase the likelihood that their proposal is selected, Greg’s CRO needs to demonstrate their knowledge through content. Content can, at least to some extent, mitigate the inability to demonstrate knowledge through person-to-person content. It could help provide the confidence that may lack if Greg’s CRO cannot provide many reputable customer references. Instead of only knowing Greg’s CRO as a proposal, at least they would be able to build some degree of positive brand image.

Content is an extremely multifunctional marketing tool that can assist organizations in numerous ways. Content can aid in sales support, as with the case of this CRO, it can generate leads, it can help drive inbound search traffic, it can improve your brand. There’s so much that content can do, and it contributes to so many aspects of marketing, that content marketing should really be a default. Especially in knowledge-intensive sectors like contract research and life science tools, content should be a centerpiece of the marketing effort for most companies. Content marketing is simply too valuable, and valuable in too many situations, to ignore.

What do you think?

What would you do if you were Greg? Would you invest in content marketing? Would you take another approach? Join the discussion on LinkedIn and share your thoughts.

"Is content the centerpiece of your marketing effort? If it’s not, or if you’re not sure what you need to do to craft high-value, multifunctional content, contact us. We’ll put you on the path to more leads, improved conversion, and more effective overall marketing – with content at the center."

Case Study / Content Marketing / Demand Generation 11:26 am , January 6, 2014

Intent to Purchase

Carlton Hoyt 8:04 am , June 28, 2013

We’re avid fans of search marketing for demand generation-focused campaigns (both search engine marketing and search engine optimization). Even as other platforms begin to offer enhanced levels of targeting to match the capabilities of search engine marketing, and even in situations where one can identify specific customers (through data mining, for instance), we believe that for most life science companies SEM & SEO offers superior value for demand generation. Why? When properly targeted, searchers have the greatest amount of commercial intent. In other words, they are more likely to be looking for information to help them make a purchase than are scientists targeted via other channels.

As a bit of a case study, I’ll use a recent scenario. I was discussing marketing with the owner of a small life science company who does a reasonable amount of sales through e-commerce. He was complaining about the cost of CPC advertising on Google AdWords. The company does a lot of blogging, and the blogs were disseminated quite broadly to many large life science-focused groups on LinkedIn. He bragged that the traffic resulting from blogging was extremely inexpensive (the effective CPC was probably 5% – 10% of the CPC through AdWords), the unique viewers per month was very high for a company of its size and traffic was still increasing at a good clip (most traffic was a result of the blog). Sales, however, weren’t where he felt they should be.

This case illustrates two points. 1) unique visitors is a vanity metric – it doesn’t mean anything unless you can convert those visitors to sales at a satisfactory rate. 2) Not all marketing channels will produce viewers with the same commercial intent. In fact, the intent to make a purchase can vary wildly across channels. Simply reaching your target market with just about any message is usually good for the purpose of awareness (although awareness is useless if the audience doesn’t have a reason to remember you and you don’t regularly re-engage them) but for demand generation you need to reach the audiences that have the intent to purchase a product, and specifically a product such as yours. Targeting anyone in your target market often doesn’t do the trick, especially if your target market isn’t extremely well defined.

If you think about what customers do when they are considering a purchase, it makes sense that search is the medium of choice for demand generation campaigns. They either a) have a brand in mind already and go directly to that brand, eschewing shopping around, b) ask a colleague for a recommendation or c) look for information through search engines. These three behaviors encompass almost every scientist when considering a purchase. There is only one of those things that you can have a significant effect on in the short-term and that is making sure you show up where they search. You can try to create a positive and memorable overall brand experience to influence the brand preferences of the scientist and his / her colleagues, but that isn’t something that can be done over the short term and often requires that customers have a significant degree of experience with your company in the first place (hence why attempts to generate demand via brand-building alone are something of a catch-22).

Small life science companies often don’t have the finances or time to wait around for campaigns to pay off in the long-term. Most need to see an ROI in the short-term to stay afloat. To generate those shorter-term revenues your campaigns need to focus on the places where you can target not just your target market, but the members of your target market with commercial intent.

"Looking to increase your advertising ROI? Do you want to know the messages and channels that will allow you to most efficiently drive demand? Contact BioBM. Our experienced life science marketing managers will help your company create and deploy campaigns to build demand for your products and grow your revenues."

Blog / Demand Generation 8:04 am , June 28, 2013

Succeeding at Conferences

Carlton Hoyt 10:36 am , June 6, 2013

We’re no stranger to scientific conferences, myself especially. I’ve attended scientific conferences on all sides – as a scientist, as an exhibitor, and as a business developer targeting the exhibitors. From all this experience, I am certain that one thing, above all else, will determine your level of success if you are at a conference for sales or marketing purposes. This one thing will sound simple. It will sound obvious. But look around at the next conference you attend and see how many people aren’t doing this one thing. So… What is the “magic bullet” for conference success?

Speak with everyone you can.

A conference is a numbers game. There are a fixed amount of scientists at any given conference who will be within your target market. The more people you speak with, the more of those scientists that you’ll identify, and the more leads you’ll generate.

It doesn’t matter how pretty your booth is. You could have a massive, open, wildly elaborate booth or just a table in front of a curtain. Those elaborate, expensive booths don’t do much more to reel scientists in than a large bag of candy dumped into a bowl. All you need is to capture enough of their attention to be able to gracefully say hello and ask them what they work on.

Being successful at a scientific conference really is that simple, yet at least three quarters of the company representatives at the average conference fail to come close to being as successful as they could be because they neglect to be outgoing. If you, or someone in your company, is going to be exhibiting at a conference, be sure to take to heart that one key element for a successful conference: speak with everyone you can.

"Marketing and sales should work together. To build or optimize your demand generation efforts in a way that deliver high-quality leads which your sales team can effectively convert into sales, contact BioBM. We’ll work with you to create the strategies and campaigns which deliver results and grow your company’s revenues."

Blog / Demand Generation / Marketing Communications 10:36 am , June 6, 2013

Reduce the Risk in Buying

Carlton Hoyt 11:22 am , November 21, 2012

Life science marketers often hold many simultaneous viewpoints on why customers purchase products. Frequently, the attributed reasons include a hodgepodge of quality, price, ease of use, suitability for their application, adoption by others, various performance metrics and many other reasons that may be general or product-specific. All that gets a bit confusing, and is a bit over-defined if you ask me. I prefer to start from one attribute and then elucidate from there: life scientists make purchasing decisions based on risk.

Considering the scientist as a purchasing decision-maker, risk has two main components: financial and utility. Financial risk can be represented as price, although a more accurate representation is total cost of ownership (TCOO). If a product is very expensive, that makes the purchase more risky since there will be less resources to devote to other important endeavors and also since there are more sunk costs if the product doesn’t perform to the customer’s expectations. Utility risk pertains to the product ability to perform the functions that it is expected to by the customer. In other words, from a customer-centric standpoint: “In my particular application(s), how likely is this product to meet my expectations?”

The risk-based view can answer a question that leaves a lot of companies scratching their heads: why free samples are used so infrequently. It’s common for life science consumables companies, especially smaller companies, to give out free samples when a product is first launched in order to get people to try it. Most often, unless the brand is highly trusted, free samples fail their purpose and are left unused on the shelf. This is because giving away the product only serves to reduce one of the two main components of risk: financial risk. It does nothing to mitigate utility risk.

What life science tools and services companies should aim to do is reduce overall risk by lowering utility risk as much as possible such that financial risk does not need to be reduced and they therefore do not need to discount their product (or perhaps can raise the price on their product!) This gets to the heart of conveying value to the customer – that value should, as much as possible, be something that is experienced rather than something that is simply told. This becomes clear if you ask yourself: “What can we do to minimize utility risk?” Simply claiming that your product works would be pretty far down the list.

If you’re still not convinced, go out and ask a few scientists which of the following they would be more likely to purchase: 1) a product that claims to have better performance but you are unsure if it will work for you, or 2) a product that has lesser performance but you are certain it will work.

Performance metrics are undeniably important, and scientists have different reasons for purchasing different products. At the end of the day, the product with the lowest risk will be able to capture a greater market share than its competition.

"Looking for more insights on how your life science company can capture market share and accelerate revenue growth through improved marketing? Talk to BioBM. Our life science marketing experts can help your company identify opportunities, develop strategies to capitalize on them, and execute activities to capture value from them."

Blog / Demand Generation 11:22 am , November 21, 2012

Product-Unrelated Value

Carlton Hoyt 11:35 am , October 9, 2012

At BioBM, we often advocate that companies find ways to create what we call “product-unrelated value” (we first discussed it publicly in a blog post last month). Note that when we say product-unrelated, we don’t mean “has nothing to do with your product” but rather “is not intrinsically linked to your product”. Product-unrelated value should still be something that is relevant to your products, services, or market, but the delivery of value to the customer, as well as the realization of value by the customer, should be completely independent of purchase or use of your products. Product-unrelated value can build trust and strengthen your brand without requiring the user to have participated in the purchasing cycle. Still, many companies scoff at the notion of spending resources to develop value that isn’t intrinsically linked to a product.

It’s good to know that some of the top thinkers agree with our philosophy, though.

Bill Lee, the president of the Customer Reference Forum, Executive Director of the Summit on Customer Engagement, and frequent contributor to the HBR blog network, recently wrote: “It’s always a good idea to look for new ways to create value for customers. But focusing only on doing so through your product or service is entirely one-dimensional. The hard reality is that your product or service, however great it is — however much it helps your customers get a job done or provide an enjoyable experience — is likely just not that important to their lives in the grand scheme of things.”

Companies exist because they are able to provide value to their customers. Companies that cannot do so cease to exist. Life science tools companies, and indeed companies across all industries and sectors, need to realize that they need to focus on creating value for customers in more ways than just through their products. Those that argue that product-unrelated value doesn’t help their bottom line are being shortsighted. Product-unrelated value builds the critical trust and brand value that allows a company and a brand to succeed in the long-term. This is especially true with a highly skeptical audience such as scientists.

"Is the value that your company provides effectively building your brand and growing your market share? If not, it’s time to contact BioBM. We’ll help you determine what can be done to improve your brand and fuel demand for your products."

Blog / Branding / Content Marketing / Demand Generation 11:35 am , October 9, 2012