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.
Life science marketing is an interesting thing. It is most often supported by a wide breadth of technical information, and scientists often want a lot of information, but at the same time most of the “standard” rules of marketing still apply. This dichotomy is often at odds with itself, and scientific marketers will frequently end up with marketing messages that are unorganized, contain too little information, contain too much information, or fail to effectively lead customers into the sales process. While it is true that this failure is often at least partially due to marketing functions being performed by marketers who do not sufficiently understand scientists or scientists who are not sufficiently well trained in marketing, it can even more frequently be ascribed to another failure. Life science marketers have an inexplicable tendency to present their marketing messages in the way they think it should be provided as opposed to how their customers are likely to want it.
While less common in highly technical industries such as life science tools and services, it’s not wholly uncommon for entrepreneurs to “boot-strap” their start-up companies (try to start without external funding and race to become profitable before they run out of cash). Yet more common, even with outside investment, is under-capitalization. In either case, when small companies start to become low on cash, one of the first corners that often gets cut is marketing. Entrepreneurs sometimes think that word-of-mouth or referrals will be a sufficient marketing tactic to grow their business, but that is very rarely the case for life science products and services. Why is this the case? Customer interaction patterns. To illustrate my point, let me give an example of when referral-based marketing can be effective.