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Tag : life science marketing

Be The Expert

Carlton Hoyt 6:24 pm , April 18, 2011

Project yourself and your company as life science experts in your field to improve customers perceptions of your brand and company.The life sciences are, almost by definition in being a science, a highly technical field. Most life science products, and certainly life science services, are of a similarly highly technical nature. At the same time, experiments are precious and expensive. In this environment, scientists want to be sure that the products and services they purchase will provide high-quality results, and they are often highly skeptical customers. For many small life science companies which may not have the strong branding or widely adopted products or larger companies, such skepticism can be especially acute. Making customers comfortable enough with your company and products to shake this skepticism can pose a challenge, but there are strategies that small life science companies can leverage to help preempt it. Among the best strategies is to project an image of being an expert in the relevant scientific areas. This requires two things: actually having expert knowledge and understanding, and successfully projecting that knowledge.

Being an expert is often the easier component of the strategy. Chances are if you are creating a product for a particular purpose you already have members on your team who are experts in the the relevant scientific area. There are rare situations where this is not the case, however, and the solution is straightforward – learn. Never will a scientist run from your company faster than if your customer-facing employees don’t know what they’re talking about.

Projecting your expertise is harder. Some customers will contact your company if they have doubts, giving you an opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge and ability to them, however many customers will never contact you in the first place if they question your knowledge and skills in key areas. This requires you to be proactive in projecting your expertise. You need to actively seek out opportunities to show the scientific community that you really are a top-caliber thought leader in your field. How can you do this? There are many ways, and here are a few ideas (this list is nowhere near comprehensive):

  • Discuss new research and ideas in your field on social networks
  • Present at relevant scientific conferences
  • Author or co-author methods papers or other journal articles
  • Make compelling presentations of your technology on your website
  • Draft white papers
  • Maintain a blog where you address current topics in your field
  • Create a website with updated information relevant to your life science field


Scientists want to do business with people and companies that it has faith in, and a large part of that is faith that you have sufficient expertise. By effectively projecting the image of an expert, you will simultaneously improve your brand image earn the trust of scientists, effectively making them more willing to do business with you.

"Does your company want to improve how the scientific community views it? Would you like your company to have a stronger or renewed brand image to encourage more potential customers to choose you? If you want to design and implement successful strategies to improve the way scientists view your company, feel free to contact a BioBM Consultant. We’ll work with you to design custom solutions to assess your needs and solve your company’s problems."
Blog / Content Marketing / Demand Generation / Marketing Communications 6:24 pm , April 18, 2011

Ion Torrent’s Apple Spoof

Carlton Hoyt 2:08 pm , April 7, 2011

So I ran across Ion Torrent’s / Life Technologies’ spoof of Apple’s “I’m a Mac” commercials, where Ion Torrent rips into the Illumina MiSeq a bit … okay, more than just a bit, the Ion Torrent attempts to pretty much tear apart the MiSeq in comparing it to the PGM. If you haven’t seen it, take a look…

UPDATE: As of 4/11, Ion Torrent has made the video private and it is no longer available for viewing. It seems they didn’t appreciate the mixed feedback they were getting. … UPDATE #2: And as of 4/12 it’s back! I guess Life Technologies decided a little bit of controversy might not be such a bad thing after all.

I commend Life Technologies’ marketing team for their guts to start an advertising war. It’s something rarely seen in the conservative world of life science marketing. If they believe they can out-market Illumina, then this tactic should benefit them long-term assuming they actually succeed in doing so.

That being said, there is a problem… Life Technologies just put a whole lot of cards on the table with that ad.

Part of the reason Apple’s strategy was so successful is, beyond the obvious requirement of getting the audience’s attention, it was a rapid-fire assault of consistent marketing messages highlighting various reasons why a Mac is better than a PC. People wanted to see Apple’s ads – most were very unique, some were funny – and Apple kept them coming. They used them in fantastically creative ways, such as on the New York Times homepage. They were about 30 seconds each and mostly focused on one small aspect, such as a positive review, hardware compatibility, bundled software, security, OS stability, etc. They showed their hand slowly which allowed them to sustain the campaign.

Life Technology / Ion Torrent did not do that. In their minute and twelve second ad, they talk about price, run speed and the 6 month delivery time of a MiSeq. There go your three big competitive advantages, all right there in one ad. Now perhaps this was calculated. Perhaps Life Technologies expects Illumina to pull a Microsoft and have a weak, if any, response, but counting on them to do so would seem premature at this point.

If Life Technologies spoofed the ad well and captivate their audience with this ad, which I think they’ll succeed in doing, then they could have drawn a lot more value from turning a single, highly effective ad into a highly effective ad campaign. They could have continued to engage the audience in the future, releasing a series of ads every month or two for a year. While I could see this video going semi-viral in the scientific community (albeit not nearly as successfully as Bio-Rad’s PCR music video), a sustained campaign could multiply that success. As it stands, especially if they continue to play their cards this quickly, I don’t think they’ll be able to turn this ad into such a sustained marketing campaign. If I’m right, they now need to hope that Illumina doesn’t have too many cards up it’s sleeve.

Illumina, in the meanwhile, needs to not pull a Microsoft. It certainly can. The brand image, while perhaps more polished than Ion Torrent’s, certainly isn’t of an old, dated, out-of-touch behemoth. It can strike back very well with a bit of creativity…

"If you’d like to discuss Ion Torrent’s “I’m a PGM” video, other video advertising in the life sciences, or viral marketing with Carlton, feel free to contact us and we’ll be sure to pass along the message to him. More info on BioBM."
Blog / Marketing Communications 2:08 pm , April 7, 2011

Send the Right Message

Carlton Hoyt 5:44 pm , April 6, 2011

Life science marketing research will boost your marketing ROI and ensure you target the right customers with the right messages.Life science marketing can be a difficult task, especially because scientists often don’t like to be marketed to. They are particularly adept at identifying marketing and ignoring it. With the limited chances your company may get to win over life scientists, you need to make sure you send the right messages to the right people using the right mediums. If your sales aren’t where you think they should be, throwing more money at the problem in the form of more marketing or advertising may not be the answer, especially if you have a good sized marketing budget already. Poor marketing ROI can be a symptom of many things – sending the wrong or sub-optimal marketing message, sending the message to the wrong audience, using the wrong medium to convey the marketing message, etc. In order to identify what the cause is you need to take a hard look at your marketing. You need to perform marketing research.

The American Marketing Association defines marketing research as “the function that links the consumer, customer, and public to the marketer through information–information used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems; generate, refine, and evaluate marketing actions; monitor marketing performance; and improve understanding of marketing as a process.” Simplified, marketing research is the tool that is used to determine the best way for marketing to be performed.

Life science marketing research can answer many questions. Some examples include: What is the best medium to market to a target audience? What is the best message that we should use, and / or what benefits of our life science research tool should we highlight? Are we marketing to our customers enough? Are we marketing to them too much? What can we do to improve our marketing ROI?

Marketing, at its most basic, seems easy. Convey the benefits to the customers and the customers will buy the product, correct? Not necessarily. It’s very easy, and often the case, for a company to have a different viewpoint than the customer or overlook something that is important to the customer. (Some of the most hilarious marketing message gaffes come from mistranslations and would have been readily and easily avoided if the companies spent anything on marketing research. If you’d like some hilarious examples you can read about some here.) Marketing research helps you be on the same page as your customers.

You probably wouldn’t make product development decisions based on a gut feeling, so why make marketing decisions based solely on instinct? If your company is concerned with making sure your marketing is optimized and you’re getting the most from your marketing dollars, then spending a few of those dollars on marketing research can go a long way for you and supercharge your marketing ROI.

"Does your company want to improve the return on your marketing investment? Want to make sure that you are reaching the correct customers in the right way and with the message that they will be most responsive to? <Life science marketing research solutions from BioBM consulting can help you do all that and more. We provide custom marketing research solutions that are right for your company, your needs, and your budget. Don’t waste time and money guessing if your marketing will be effective. Contact us today and start getting more from your marketing campaigns."
Blog / Market Research / Marketing Communications 5:44 pm , April 6, 2011

Lowering Barriers

Carlton Hoyt 6:28 pm , March 30, 2011

Lower the barriers to purchasing your products and services to increase your life science sales.Life scientists are busy people. Between bench work, meetings, writing, presentations, seminars, and everything else they may have to do in their day, their time is limited. As such, they appreciate (knowingly or not) situations where the purchasing of products that they need is easy, fast, and simple. While the ease of the purchasing process is usually not so important as to change the mind of someone who has decided on purchasing a given piece of lab equipment, antibody, reagent, or other bioscience product, it can easily sway the undecided buyer one way or the other. By identifying and lowering or removing the barriers to purchasing your laboratory products or services, you can sway those undecided minds in your life science company’s favor.

This is a bit of an oversimplification, but for brevity’s sake we can break down the sales process, from the eyes of the customer, into three steps:

  1. Finding your product / service
  2. Obtaining the desired information
  3. Acting on the desire to purchase


The first step is arguably the most important. It should go without saying that unless scientists can find your product, they are not going to buy it. Getting found is a multi-faceted issue that has no single solution, but rather many different potential solutions that can be used in combination based on your company’s situation. Having distributors list your products in catalogs, traditional marketing campaigns via print advertising in scientific journals, banner advertising on relevant websites, e-mail campaigns, search engine marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, word of mouth marketing, and utilizing in-house sales teams are all options with different benefits and drawbacks and a unique mix of any of these may be appropriate for your company and product (note that this list is not meant to be exhaustive). Identify how you can maximize your exposure in a cost-effective manner and implement those solutions so your life science products are easily found.

No matter how a customer finds your product or service, you always need to make sure you provide them with the desired information to get them interested in buying. As a general rule, more information is better so long as it is well-organized, relevant, and positive. Use this information to keep them engaged the entire time they browse it. Any time a researcher wants more information about your product but doesn’t find it is an opportunity for them to walk away or look for different products, so even if in formats not well suited to containing large amounts of information, the location of additional information should be given and this information should be as easily accessed as possible. A key component to this, since it will almost inevitably contain the most information about your products or services, is having a website with all the necessary product information laid out in an easily navigable way. (you can learn more about streamlining your website for additional sales here)

Lastly, the ability to act on the desire to purchase should be a fast, simple, and easy process (or at least as much is plausible given the nature of the product or service). For example, if your product does not require a quote-driven sales process, e-commerce allows your customers to order quickly and easily. Online forms for quote requests or demonstration requests are similarly low barriers to action. Where possible, free samples are a great way to get your products in front of the customer. If the customer needs to contact your company, let them do it in the manner that they prefer to, be it e-mail, phone, a simple contact form, etc. to ensure that they are comfortable establishing the necessary communication to further the sales process.

Scientists, lab managers, purchasers, and procurement agents all prefer simple and streamlined sales processes, and reducing the barriers to purchasing your bioscience product can be an easy way to increase your conversion. While the ease of the purchasing process is most often not important enough to the customer to change a purchasing decision altogether, it can easily sway the undecided buyer one way or the other. By streamlining your sales process, you can tilt those undecided buyers in your favor and increase your life science sales.

"Would you like to make it easier for life scientists across pharma, biotech, and academia to buy your products and / or services? Want to use a streamlined sales process to tilt undecided buyers towards purchasing your products? BioBM Consulting’s marketing and internet consultants can help you streamline your marketing and sales process. Talk to us and we’ll help you boost your conversion by identifying and lowering barriers to purchase."
Blog / Demand Generation 6:28 pm , March 30, 2011

Creating Brand Champions

Carlton Hoyt 4:50 pm , March 17, 2011

Branding is a powerful tool for small life science companies. Learn to wield it and you can reap huge benefits.Branding is an important part of marketing in the life sciences, as we’ve previously discussed in this blog. The ability to shape and manage the perceptions of your company in the minds of customers is a powerful thing. Simply having strong branding will certainly help your company in a multitude of ways, but you can do even more and leverage your brand to derive even more value from it. One such way is the cultivation of brand champions.

What is a brand champion?

A brand champion is someone who feel strongly about your brand, understands its message, and promotes it to others. You could say that brand champions are the “stewards” of your brand. While brand champions can be any stakeholder, we’re going to focus on customers as brand champions. Having customers as brand champions is of particular value.

How to Cultivate Brand Champions

Every brand champion starts as an enthusiast. Find customers who like your products and / or brand and have given you good feedback or maybe who your support or sales staff have a good relationship with. Pick customers who can identify with and support your brand values and goals. Once these customers are identified, define and execute strategies that improve engagement with those customers on a personal level. Give them that little bit of special treatment. Once your enthusiasts are engaged, be sure you have communicated the brand values to them. While there are many strategies to perform any one of these steps, so long as they are performed you’ll start creating brand champions out of your customer enthusiasts.

Leveraging Brand Champions

Once you’ve cultivated your brand champions you can leverage the value that you have created in doing so. One common way to extract value from your brand champions is by encouraging word-of-mouth marketing. Word-of-mouth marketing is both free and highly effective – your marketing message will be much more readily accepted by scientists when it comes from a colleague. (Curious how you can encourage word-of-mouth marketing among your customers or brand champions? Ask us.)

Brand champions are also great beta-testers. Have a product you’d like user feedback on before a full release? Ask your brand champions if they’d be interested in trying it out. Brand champions can be trusted to provide quality feedback and not be overly negative to colleagues about any flaws or unfinished aspects of your new product.

Testimonials and referrals are also great ways to derive value from brand champions. Scientists are more accepting of other products when they hear positive things from other researchers / customers regarding the quality of the product, the services of the company, etc, and brand champions will much more readily be the customers that flout your benefits to others.

Brand champions will also help you crowdsource. When you need the opinions of your customers, your enthusiastic brand champions will be right there to help you and provide the feedback or perspective you need.

There are more ways to leverage brand champions as well. No matter how you do so, be sure that your brand champions feel good about the interaction with your company and brand. If they begin to feel like they are simply being used or taken advantage of they’ll turn their cheek to your brand and you’ll lose a loyal champion. Don’t let that happen. Be sure your brand champions feel properly rewarded.

Cultivating customers into brand champions requires effort but is highly rewarding. Brand champions can be a strategic advantage to your business and provide unique value to your company that cannot be derived in other ways.

"Looking to build a lasting reputation with life scientists? Want to turn enthusiastic customers into couriers of your brand? Do you rely in part on word-of-mouth and want to get more out of it? Would you to reap the benefits of a loyal group of customers to help provide feedback, ideas, referrals, and more? The expert marketing consultants at BioBM are here to help you design and execute strategies to cultivate, leverage, and maintain brand champions. Contact us and we’ll put you on the right track to establishing ultra high-value customer relationships today."
Blog / Branding 4:50 pm , March 17, 2011

Building a Brand

Carlton Hoyt 6:41 pm , February 8, 2011

Branding is a powerful tool for small life science companies. Learn to wield it and you can reap huge benefits.Life science companies frequently underestimate the value of building a strong brand. This is perfectly understandable – very often these companies are started by scientists or engineers and simply don’t think in terms of abstract marketing principles. Branding, however, is extremely valuable almost regardless of the product or service your company offers. The benefits and value created can be truly transformational, but care must be taken to establish a brand that facilitates such value creation. In this post, I’ll briefly go over why strong branding is valuable, provide some tips and thinking points on how to build a brand, and give you a ideas to actively leverage your brand once you’ve built it.

Why Branding is Valuable

As they are in their scientific endeavors, life scientists are notoriously cautious in their purchasing. They appreciate and value methods and materials that have been tried and tested. They want tools that have been published. They appreciate antibodies that have worked for the lab next door. Not everything relies solely on prior use, however. Scientists also give a degree of trust to certain companies and product lines, and this trust can be built and retained through the creation of a strong brand. Branding is the carrier of who you are or what your product is. Having no reputation at all is almost as bad as having a bad reputation, and having an indistinguishable brand is effectively the same as having no reputation. Without reputation, you cannot have that trust and confidence that is vital to life scientists in their purchasing decisions. In order for the “I’ve [seen / heard about / used] that before” factor to kick in, life scientists need to recognize your product or company (or, preferably, both). Along the same lines, strong branding helps you attract repeat business and creates a memorable impression among your customers. Once you’ve built a reputation and captured the customer’s loyalties, you’ll be able to spend comparatively less on marketing in order to maintain your market share.

Branding also gives your company a way to stand above competition is a crowded or commoditized marketplace. I won’t get into this because we discussed this in greater depth in a post about how branding can help companies avoid commoditization of their products a few months ago.

Establishing your brand as high-value also allows you to fetch a higher price for your products. By building your reputation through consistently high quality, value-added support and customer service, knowledgeable and helpful sales staff, etc., the overall higher value to customers that your brand conveys can be captured through higher pricing. Similarly, the higher perceived value will effectively entrench you against competition with weaker branding.

Branding also is used to establish market leadership. By “market leadership” I do not mean the company with the greatest market share, but the one with the greatest influence and respect within the marketplace. Being a respected leader offers you many strategies that may not be available otherwise and improves the effectiveness of many customer and business-to-business interactions.

Building Your Brand

When building a brand, you want to do two things: 1) make sure that your brand leaves an impression, and 2) control what that impression is. Obviously you want a positive impression, but your brand can be so much more than that. Think about how can your brand stand out from the rest. Let it express who you are, what you do, what your values are, or any combination of those. Use your brand to help captivate your audience. Does Thermo, for example, have a strong brand? Of course, but don’t think that putting your name in bold red letters on your products will be captivating. Thermo has the advantage of having those bold red letters in many places in labs across the globe and being a household (or perhaps I should say “lab-hold”?) name. Small life science companies will almost never have that benefit. Stop and think about what you really want your brand to say about you and creative and interesting ways to express that.

Once you have an idea of how your branding should take form and be expressed, be sure to express it across platforms. Your logo, advertising, website, product design, packaging design – incorporate your brand wherever you can to build and carry your reputation. Just be sure to express it consistently – you don’t want to send mixed messages to your target market.

Leveraging Your Brand

So you’ve built a strong brand, or are at least on your way. Researchers in your market know who you are and you’ve gained some trust and repute. Now what? As previously mentioned, a benefit of strong branding is being able to comparatively spend less on marketing to maintain your market share, but my suggestion would rarely be to simply benefit from the cost savings (unless you really need the cash). Instead, look at ways you can utilize your brand to continue to build your market share. I have mentioned just a few potential ways below.

One such way is to cultivate brand champions. Find who your best and most loyal customers are, those who hold your company and products in very high regard, and build personal relationships with them. You can get testimonials from them, use them as referrals, ask them to beta test new products, etc., etc. Be nice to them and they’ll spread the word of your company and products to those around them as well.

Having strong branding allows you to be far more effective at crowdsourcing. Be being a trusted, reputable brand, more customers will be willing to actively engage with you. Want to know what features you should add to your next product? Ask your customers. People want to be part of something important, and a strong brand makes you look more important to the crowd.

Perhaps one of the most powerful ways of leveraging strong branding is to put your weight into determining the future of your market. If you are becoming one of the most trusted brands in your space, you get to be the pioneer. If you’re developing innovative new products or technologies, put the weight of your brand behind it. You can even attempt to define future standards (for a familiar example outside of the life sciences, you can look at how Sony almost single-handedly killed the HD-DVD when it released the PS3 with a Blu-ray player).

Building a brand is not a simple task nor one to be taken lightly. Your brand will effect how customers everywhere perceive your products and your company, and the perceptions you build in the eyes of scientists will not easily be changed. Take care to purposefully build your brand and you’ll be able to grow your market share and realize a value that is difficult for your competitors to shake.

"Want to be more recognizable in your market? Looking to build a lasting reputation with life scientists? Being held down by larger competitors with stronger brands? The expert marketing consultants at BioBM are here to help you build the strong brand you need to grow and retain market share. Contact us and talk to us about the challenges your company is facing and we’ll inform you how we can help your company brave the marketplace and build a powerhouse brand."
Blog / Branding 6:41 pm , February 8, 2011