I’m Kenneth Vogt, Commerial Director of Bitesize Bio and founder of Vera Claritas Inc. I play the role of Richard Roeper, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert all rolled into one, reviewing and highlighting the webinars and video presentations found at the Life Science Marketing Society.
Today I’m commenting on the presentation entitled:
Life Science Marketing Beyond Web, SEO and Newsletters
It is described this way:
Marketeers in the online world are faced with an overwhelming abundance of channels, platforms, and services to reach their audiences and generate new leads. In this webinar we examine some best-practice examples of how companies in the life science market get the most out of their content marketing efforts.
- How to get new ideas that engage your customers and empower them as brand ambassadors
- How to generate new leads by spreading your message in your customer’s online networks
- How to determine which online services and platforms are most suitable
- How to best implement your sales funnel through messaging and content
This presentation is brought to you by Dr. Johannes Amon. He is a specialist in Marketing & Communications (Marcom) with 6+ years experience in the life science business. Before starting his Marcom career at ZEISS, he finished his Ph.D. in microbial genomics and worked as an analyst and online specialist for a startup company specializing in semantic data mining and analysis for pharmaceutical market research. His special competence lies within the evaluation, strategic build-up, administration, and continuous support of various online Marcom platforms, including but not limited to: social media channels, content channels, business networks, customer newsletters, blogs, user communities, and mobile apps.
What I learned from Dr. Amon is most life science companies are skipping the marketing best practices that have been proven to work in industry after industry, to their own detriment.
That does not include having an SEO-tuned website and a newsletter. There are no life science companies attempting to survive without them. If there is no website for your prospects to visit for information about you, you can’t even get started. If no one can find your website, you worked hard to create it for nothing. And if you don’t capture email addresses and mail to them, you won’t know who your interested prospects are. Unfortunately for many life science companies, they declare victory at this point and quit.
But all that was just the price of entry. The companies that are making waves commercially speaking do more, much more. So what do you have to do be among the movers and shakers? Read on.
1) A website and newsletter are so 1999
Multi-channel is where it’s at. A website is just a single channel and while necessary, it is perhaps far less compelling to your audience than other channels. There is an arrogance out there about websites. “Our website is special. Our main objective is to get traffic to our website.” But it is mere vanity if your prospects prefer to consume information about you on other channels. Give the people what they want, not what you want (and for wrongheaded reasons at that).
The channels external to your website are where the market lives. That’s where the people you don’t yet know are. So you have to be there unless you just want to keep talking in an echo chamber. In fact you have to do more than just be there, you have to stand out there if you are to succeed with the best.
That means you need a meaningful presence on multiple platforms outside of your website, places like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Flickr, Bitesize Bio, ResearchGate JoVE, and WeChat, to name more than a few.
2) You need a content hub
Having content scattered hither and yon leaves you at a disadvantage. Content comes in many forms too: text, spreadsheets, databases, graphics, audio, video, etc. You need a place to gather it all together, and from a variety of sources.
Your website itself can be this place if you use a robust platform like WordPress. Another approach is to create a wiki or knowledgebase. There are other Web Content Management Systems that can be very effectively used as a content hub. You have to pick the right one and then you have to work it.
An advantage to setting all this up in advance is it helps content creators automatically provide you with rich content in immediately useable form for your marcom efforts.
3) Take advantage of what is already happening
Nothing is happening in a vacuum. You company is already engaged in events, product development and launches, and other ongoing activities. Lots of great content can be drawn from these activities, or created for them and then repurposed for beneficial use on additional platforms.
Make it a part of your regular plan to capture this content in your content hub for future (likely near future) repurposing. This allows you to leverage the work of other specialists in your organization beyond your own marcom team, and even include content created by your customers and other outside experts.
4) Content needs to be worth spreading
You don’t get to decide if your content is good — your prospects do. And you will know when they do, because they will share it with others. You objective is to provide content that solves their problems and engages their imagination. That is what makes for viral content, the kind that spreads without you having to lift a finger. Of course, it is all your prior “finger lifting” that makes such propagation of your content by outside parties possible.
5) What is your global communications strategy?
Now that you have your content honed and at the ready, you need a strategy to spread that content across as many channels as possible. Some content lends itself to one platform, some to another. Some content may need to be tweaked up to take the greatest advantage of a particular channel. All this needs to be built into your plan.
In the end, I have a dirty little secret to tell you: if you implement these best practices, they all feed back to those vanity results we poo-pooed earlier, that is more website visits, more newsletter sign ups, and more leads. So going beyond gets you right back to where you wanted to be in the first place.
Dr. Amon has a lot more to say than we covered here. You are going to want to see his whole webinar presentation with its examples of content that works and case studies of effective implementations. Find it here:
Life Science Marketing Beyond Web, SEO and Newsletters
For more analysis, observation and witty repartee, be sure to check out our podcast featuring myself and Harrison Wright, plus interesting and exciting guests. Here is the specific episode examining the presentation above.
But you know you want more. Subscribe to the Life Science Marketing Society podcast here: iTunes | SoundCloud
Photo credit: Gerard Eviston