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Tag : internet marketing

Building Online Communities

Carlton Hoyt 9:54 am , January 26, 2012

Building online communities can be exceptionally rewarding for your business, but the difficulty in successfully doing so should not be underestimated.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.

"Looking for new ways to engage your customers? Want to find ways to make your brand more respected and recognized? No matter what your marketing needs, BioBM’s expert life science marketers are here to help. Just send us an e-mail or give us a call and we’ll see what we can do to improve your situation and grow your revenues. Contact us today."
Blog / Branding / Digital Marketing / Social Media 9:54 am , January 26, 2012

Google Wants You To Plus

Douglas E. Rogers 10:04 am , January 24, 2012

In what’s probably half designed to make search results more personalized and half an encouragement for people to use Google+, Google implemented changes to its search algorithms recently. Google+ users who are frequently signed in while performing searches have likely already noticed, but Google+ results and pages that have been +1’d or shared by a connection are now given a massive boost in the search, usually to the front page.

Click the image blow for an example. Note the areas that I’ve highlighted in red, green, and blue, which each indicate different Google+ results.
Google's new search algorithm strongly favors Google+ content.

Say your company sells PCR primers. If you mention PCR primers in your Google+ profile or in a post or other content on Google+, and a scientist that you’re connected to on Google+ searches for PCR primers, your post will almost guaranteedly display near the top of the results (assuming the person doesn’t have lots of other connections also talking about PCR primers). Likewise, based on information that Google compiles about a user, it will have “recommended” connections and content from recommended connections get a similarly high-profile

Of course, this type of simplification ignores the difficulty of growing a following on Google+. Unlike Twitter and more similarly to Facebook, Google+ doesn’t let companies follow people who aren’t following them back. Facebook at least partially makes up for it by allowing you to have high customized pages which you can use to incentivize engagement. Google+ has no such capabilities, so building engagement can be somewhat more difficult.

Another thing about the change is that it places a huge premium on social content – posts, links, videos, images, everything. Have pictures of the team from the last conference? Put it on Google+. Was there a news article about your company or products? Put it on Google+. While you’re at it, write search engine optimized descriptions; just keep in mind that people will read them so don’t go overboard.

With that one change, social media marketing for companies with Google+ went from kind of pointless to extremely worthwhile. Just know that like any social media marketing it’s a slow process with long-term rewards, so be patient, provide good content, and do your best to build your network.

Also, expect that Google will continue to try to integrate Google+ into search, so long as they don’t do anything that creates a massivle backlash. The past few days there have been reports of google asking searchers if they’d like to ask their Google+ connections about their search. Not sure if that particular feature will stick, but it’s certainly an indication of the direction Google’s trying to go…

UPDATE: Between the writing of this and its posting, we noticed another change. Google now integrates social results from your Google contacts. This means that if someone in your gmail contacts or from a synced android phone shared something, it will also show up in the new “personal results” section and receive greater visibility, even if you’re not signed up with Google+. Furthermore, if you have a website listed in your Google or Google+ profile, Google’s search well respond as if you’e shared all pages on the site, even if you haven’t actively done so. The screenshot below is taken from a search where I was signed into Google on an account that does not have a Google+ account.
Google's new search results show results from Google contacts as well.

"If you’re looking for a company with practical experience in life science social media marketing without the “pie-in-the-sky” promises and without the unjustifiable costs, you’ve come to the right place. We can build a social media solution for just about any budget and need. Want to learn more? Just ask us."
Blog / Search Marketing / Social Media 10:04 am , January 24, 2012

Contact Forms Affect Leads

Carlton Hoyt 6:52 pm , November 1, 2011

About half of all scientists use search engines to find product info before looking anywhere else.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.

"Is your website getting as many leads or driving as many sales as it could be? Too few companies ask themselves that question, despite the fact that almost 50% of life scientists look to the internet first for product information. BioBM always asks that question, and our analytics services can optimize your website for sales and lead generation. Remember: the best website isn’t the one that’s easiest to navigate or the most visually engaging, but rather it is the one that produces the greatest value for the company. Contact us."
Blog / Demand Generation / Digital Marketing 6:52 pm , November 1, 2011

Search Engine Optimization Tips

Douglas E. Rogers 6:56 pm , September 26, 2011

A 2011 survey performed by BioBM found that when looking for a new laboratory product, 90% of life scientists will first turn to one of two places. Half of that 90% will first turn to colleagues for recommendations, and the other half will turn to search engines (and the search engine of choice for scientists is overwhelmingly Google). Ensuring that your products are held in high esteem by a large enough number of life scientists to influence the 45% that turn to colleagues first for product recommendations is a complex, difficult problem, as well as one that takes a significant amount of tiime and money to tackle. Being seen by those 45% that will turn to Google or other search engines, however, is much easier and cheaper. Consider this: an Enquiro / Eyetools eye-tracking study (Enquiro, “Enquiro Eye Tracking Report I: Google”, March 2005) found that 100% of people performing Google searches will see the top three search results. Not to understate the competitiveness of organic search, but if your search engine optimization efforts are sufficient to get you into the top three search results for the relevant terms, you can more or less guarantee yourself that your products will be seen by 45% of scientists who are looking for your kinds of products. That is huge.

Now while much of the life sciences is competitive enough that getting into the top three positions in a search term is not a trivial task, you can still make a significant difference in your web traffic (and subsequently your leads and sales) by, for example, going from the fourth page of a major search term to the second page. Various research has shown that 70-90% of searchers do not go past the first page, and 90-99% do not go past the third page. Also, the aforementioned Enquiro / Eyetools study found that the position on the page makes a huge difference as well. While 100% of study participants saw the first three results on a search page, only 10% saw the 10th result. Moving from 9th or 10th to even 5th or 6th can make a big difference.

So… What do you need to know to help prop up your search rankings? Instead of writing a book on the topic, we’ll just list some tips below. If you have any questions or would like some elaboration, feel free to contact us.

  • Title & meta description example.The page title is very important to SEO. The meta description is important to the searcher, but is irrelevant to SEO. Using the wrong title HTML (meta_title= instead of title=) can significantly hurt your SEO.
  • Content is king. Nothing will improve your SEO better than more content, especially if you don’t have a lot of content to begin with. What is “not a lot of content”? Under 100 pages is certainly little enough content that more content can yield an easily noticeable improvement. If you are looking for ways to increase content while staying relevant, look into content marketing methods, such as blogging.
  • If you have content on external websites, try to bring it onto your site. For example, some companies have a primary website and then an online store at a different URL (either because of the restrictions of the e-commerce platform they are using, or just due to poor planning). Many companies have off-site blogs. These things should be brought onto your primary site so your SEO is not diluted across multiple sites.
  • Links back to your site are also very important for SEO. Google also determines contextual relevance, so links back from more relevant sites are more important, as are links from more popular (read: high traffic) sites. Just as an example, we recently did a very fast back-link campaign where we deployed about a dozen relevant links via product news releases and the client saw an average 13 place jump in search rankings for relevant terms.
  • Don’t try to fool Google. They know most of the tricks, and trying to trick them will likely either hurt your SEO or get your site completely de-listed. (see the Wikipedia article on “spamdexing” for a good list of what not to do)
  • Site traffic is highly important and creates a bit of a chicken-or-egg problem. Traffic is a very important factor in determining search engine rankings, but in order to get a lot more traffic you need better search engine rankings. Honestly, it’s not as much of a conundrum as it sounds. The key is trying to maintain the upward spiral (better SEO → more hits → better SEO → more hits, etc…).
  • Checking your search rankings manually is a pain. Seobook.com used to have a Rank Checker plugin for Firefox that allowed you to save up to 100 desired search terms and then to see if you are in the top 200 results on Google, Yahoo, and Bing and output the results as a csv file, which you can open in Excel. Unfortunately, last I checked it was no longer working. Until it’s up and running again, the rankchecker.net SEO tool should hold you over.
  • Trial-and-error is okay. Play with your content and see what works.


Another strategy worth noting is to become the first result for an ancillary search term. Regarding ancillary results, allow me to give an example using a company that I’m familiar with. Next Advance manufactures a high-throughput bead-mill homogenizer for disruption and lysis of tissue and cells. There are a lot of companies that sell homogenizers, many of which are larger than Next Advance and have been around for a long time. This crowding makes it relatively difficult to get to the top of search results. For the search term “homogenizer”, Next Advance first shows up on the fourth page of the results, as result #34. However, they know that “homogenizer” is not the only thing their potential customers are searching for, so they also optimized for less competitive terms. If you search for “tissue homognizer” they are 5th. For “liver homogenization” they are first. By enacting SEO strategies that allow them to leverage these alternate terms, they can drive a lot of traffic from search without having to compete for the highly competitive terms.

SEO is a great marketing tactic, especially for small companies on a limited marketing budget. It’s a low-cost, high-ROI form of internet marketing that can put your life science company directly in the sights of your potential customers by being where they are looking: search engines. It’s not rare at all for SEO to be a company’s highest-ROI form of marketing, and given the massive amount of scientists that are turning to search engines for product information, that shouldn’t be a surprise. With a meager budget and some sustained effort, you can help your company drive web-derived leads and sales through SEO.

"Are you far down the search rankings for some or all of the relevant search terms? If so, you’re costing yourself a lot of business, but that’s a problem that can be fixed. BioBM Consulting’s SEO experts can get your company higher up in the search rankings by implementing best practices in the short-term, and developing strategies so your rankings continue to climb in the long-term. Make sure scientists see your products when they search. Call BioBM Consulting today and we’ll help your life science company get started deriving more value, more traffic, more leads, and more sales from your website."
Blog / Search Marketing 6:56 pm , September 26, 2011

Using a Website to Engage

Douglas E. Rogers 1:21 pm , June 29, 2011

Life science internet marketing solutions from BioBM ConsultingA 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.

"Who wouldn’t want to drive more sales or inquiries from their website? The issue is always “how”? BioBM has the answers. If you want to send your conversions through the roof, contact us and we’ll show you how we can design a website that will drive revenues and provide a great, measurable ROI, or simply improve your current website to the same result. If you’re not sure where and how you can improve, feel free to request a free site review and we’ll help you identify areas for improvement and discuss potential remedies."
Blog / Digital Marketing 1:21 pm , June 29, 2011

Biocompare Survey Results

Carlton Hoyt 4:44 pm , June 28, 2011

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:

Biocompare survey question 1: Does your company advertise with Biocompare?

Biocompare survey question 2: What do you think about Biocompare?

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.

Blog / Digital Marketing 4:44 pm , June 28, 2011

Opinions of Biocompare

Carlton Hoyt 12:38 pm , June 16, 2011

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

Blog / Digital Marketing 12:38 pm , June 16, 2011

Online Leads: It’s All About Speed

Carlton Hoyt 5:09 pm , May 18, 2011

With online leads, speed is a key factor in conversion.Almost all life science companies market via the internet these days. Of those, a vast majority have a method of capturing leads online – be it a contact form, an e-mail address, or even a post on the wall your company’s facebook page. Everyone always tried to have a fast response time to display their superior customer service to prospective customers, but it wasn’t until recently that we realized how important it is to have excellent response time to online leads.

A recent Harvard Business Review study found that online leads go cold incredibly quickly. Quoting the article: “Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead (which we defined as having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker) as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later—and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.” Wow. This data implies that companies that responded in 24 hours or more are potentially losing 98% of their sales from online leads.

Not to say we shouldn’t take that information with at least a little independent thought of our own. This information was compiled by tracking leads across 42 different companies in no particular sector, and includes both B2B and B2C sales leads. I can personally speak from my own experience both as a former scientist and as one who sold to them that scientists act more deliberately than the average consumer and therefore leads likely don’t go cold quite as fast. Still, even if you apply such an assumption, the data is still overwhelmingly supportive of cutting your lead response time down to a few hours at most.

The researchers go on to offer some reasons as to why companies aren’t responding faster to online leads: “Reasons include the practice of retrieving leads from CRM systems’ databases daily rather than continuously; sales forces focused on generating their own leads rather than reacting quickly to customer-driven signs of interest; and rules for distributing sales leads among agents and partners based on geography and “fairness.” ”

What is your company’s average or median response time? Do you keep track of it? If not, this data certainly encourages you to do so. After all, you wouldn’t want to be the company losing 98% of its leads.

"Is your customer service up to speed? If you’re not sure, call BioBM Consulting. We’ll help you implement solutions to improve your lead retention and increase sales."
Blog / Demand Generation 5:09 pm , May 18, 2011

Site Metrics: Where to Focus?

Douglas E. Rogers 5:04 pm , May 15, 2011

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.

"If you would like help learning how you can use free analytics tools to drive more traffic and more relevant traffic to your website, and thereby increase customer awareness and sales, contact us. Our experienced internet consultants are here to help you empower your web presence and profit from it."
Blog / Digital Marketing / Search Marketing 5:04 pm , May 15, 2011

A Note on Off-Site Blogs

Carlton Hoyt 2:53 pm , April 19, 2011

Going somewhat in step with our previous post on projecting expertise, I’ve noticed a recent trend of life science companies starting or sponsoring unbranded, off-site blogs. I have no problem with using such blogs as a marketing tool so long as the strategy for doing so is properly addressed. There are a lot of potential things that can be done wrong, strategically, and some key issues need to be considered before launching an unbranded off-site blog. Here are a handful:

    1. Scientists don’t like underhanded marketing. If you’re promoting your company or products and you aren’t forthcoming about self-promotion (for example, neglecting to mention that the blog is written by a company employee or that the blog is funded by your company), scientists will think you are trying to trick them and that will hurt your reputation.
    2. How will you target the desired audience? I’ve witnessed many of these blogs post information that doesn’t seem to have a well thought-out theme and end up being more general and less focused than the target audience. Remember the ultimate purpose: marketing.
    3. Set goals, and make sure they’re well-defined. What do you want to achieve? How will you measure success? If the blog isn’t meeting the required metrics, take it down and focus your resources somewhere more worthwhile.
    4. Have a valid reason for neither incorporating a blog on your main site, nor using your branding in a more prominent manner.


Off-site / unbranded life science blogs can be good marketing tools when used correctly, but all the rules of marketing still apply. Think strategically to make sure that you’re achieving your goals with such a blog.

"Have questions? We have answers. Contact us anytime if you’d like to discuss blogs or any other topic covering life science business or marketing."
Blog / Digital Marketing 2:53 pm , April 19, 2011