An Introduction to Biotech and Life Sciences Marketing

Life science professionals know everything about their product but may know less about bringing that product to market. When life science firms fail, it’s often because they ineffectively launched their product, or lost market share due to poor marketing strategy. To avoid this, review the basics and then determine if an internal marketing team or a dedicated agency will better serve your organization long-term. Don’t spend thousands on developing a product you’re unwilling to spend thousands placing in front of your desired audience.

In this article, we will take you through all the essential aspects of digital marketing for biotech and life science companies. You will learn the basic concepts of digital life science marketing and how to connect them with your company’s marketing strategy. 

First, let’s describe B2B and B2C.

Many biotech and life science companies are driven by B2B models, which stands for “business-to-business.” This is the process of selling products or services to other businesses. By contrast, B2C stands for business-to-consumer, meaning your product or service is sold directly to individual consumers. Life sciences can, and often do, market directly to consumers. Splints, braces, OTC medications are all examples of B2C products. However, post-surgical equipment and prescription medications are more often marketed to health care professionals in a B2B model. 

These two business models have two distinct audiences, which differ in scale, cost, communication, sales, and logistics. Therefore, the way you develop a marketing strategy for your product or service tailored to these targets varies.

Understand your target market.

If we are analyzing a B2B case, the marketing strategy is dedicated to the needs, interests, and challenges of customers who are making purchases on behalf of their organization. In B2C cases, we are talking about people in their everyday lives. 

In order to understand your customer’s behavior, look for the common characteristics, needs, and demographics of your target group. Organizations early in the marketing journey often create audiences that are too broad. Your target can’t be everyone; a product will always have a specific niche, and you must understand that niche if you want to dominate it. 

The better you understand your product’s niche, the more customized your communication in the form of relevant content, ads, and messaging can be. Consequently, with more audience insights, you will also see your conversion rates growing, and you will get a better return of investments — metrics that matter to all marketers!

Here are a few steps to develop your audience research:

1. List all the benefits your product or service is offering.

Who is in need of these benefits? Who is interested in them? How can your product benefit the customer?

2. Check your current customer base (if you have one)

Get started with the basic information. Check all the information possible about your current customers, such as age, location, language, spending power, patterns, interests, stage of life. 

If you are analyzing a B2B model, you might want to collect information focused on the companies you are selling to, like company size, the title of the people making the buying decisions — be it the CEO, the CTO, or the production manager — revenue, and pain points.

3. Watch your competitors

Now that you know who your main customers are, look at your competitors. Who are they targeting? What kind of communication are they using and how are they positioning themselves? 

Analyzing your competitors offers insight into audience similarities or differences so you can better craft language and value proposition. 

4. Create your detailed persona

After collecting information about your audience, it’s time to create a persona, or a fictional character representing the attributes of a real-life, typical customer.

As an example, consider a company who recently launched a new product for acne-prone skin. In order to draw the ideal buyer persona for this product, you would consider:

• Persona age: teenagers, parents of teenagers, or adults with acne issues
• Persona location: This can be broad, such as “United States” or narrow, for example by zip codes collected from dermatologist payer data
• Persona interests: consider age and location to develop interests; teenagers are tech savvy and focused on the use of mobile tech for connecting with brands. This will influence media placement.

Ask yourself, what’s your buyer persona’s daily routine? Their aspirations? Their reading and social media habits? Their purchase behavior? Do they buy online? The list of questions is long, and as we mentioned before, the more you know, the better.

Social media for Life Science Marketing

As a life science or biotech firm you might find it pedestrian to use social media platforms, but these platforms have billions of users. These users include healthcare professionals and consumers interested in using life sciences products.

Advertising through traditional channels, such as TV or print media, is not enough to reach your consumers and gain the attention of potential customers anymore. Social media is much more effective at generating brand awareness, driving traffic to your website or blog, and gaining market insights. Additionally, it creates a ready-made support platform for customer interactions should an account representative be unavailable by phone or email. 

In the field of life sciences, the favorite channels are LinkedIn and Twitter, and getting deep knowledge of how these and the other channels work, can boost your interaction with customers, and bring your business to another level. At the end of the day, even scientists are interested in spending time on social media, so it’s worth incorporating these channels into your brand’s marketing strategy.

Content Marketing 

Creating and providing meaningful content allows you to connect with your targeted audience. It showcases credentials, demonstrates brand expertise, and answers common questions without requiring the services of customer support staff. 

The life science sector is full of professionals who are overwhelmingly busy, but voracious learners. With the help of business-based language, content marketing is a strategy to expand and retain your audience by offering truly relevant content, which will ultimately drive sales.

When we talk about B2B models, content is the key to achieve your life science marketing goals. Instead of pitching your products or services to life science professionals, you get their attention by offering easy-to-digest content that can be useful to them and will help solve their problems. This content can be placed in organic channels, like social media accounts, or in paid channels like search engine placement or email promotions.

Paid campaigns in Life Science Marketing

A well-optimized page will make a lot of difference, but sometimes that’s not even enough to convert sales. You will have to allocate marketing resources to paid campaigns. 

Paid search, promotional emails, social placement and retargeting ads are all critical components of paid media placement. You will need a team that is competent in media placement across platforms (Meta platforms are very different from LI, which is nothing like Google). Each has its own dashboard and capabilities, and often can be customized 

Now let’s say you’ve done a great job on your SEO and you managed to bring visitors to your webpage. They are reading your content, checking your products, but are they buying? 

In other words, is your content converting? This means your visitors take the action you want them to take, for example, buying your product.

In fact, your goal might be lead generation, engagement, sales, and awareness. If this is happening, you are converting.

You made it all the way here to build your brand, find the keywords, sharpen your SEO. Now you need to think about how to retain your visitors and make them convert.

These five strategies are the easiest way to turn your visitor into a customer and increase profits:

1. Use colloquial language to engage your visitor. In a world where machines are taking over, people tend to miss the human touch, At the end of the day, make them feel that a real person is on the other side of the screen.
2. Create a sense of urgency. Proven by studies, people feel more tempted to buy something when they feel time pressure.
3. Conduct A/B testing. Testing, testing, testing. You won’t know immediately what works best for your marketing strategy, it’s all about being flexible and adapting continuously.
4. Define your customer value proposition and make it visible. People need to know why they should buy from you and not from the competitor.
5. Make your customer feel comfortable about their purchase decision. For example, you can add an FAQ to your website, or testimonials, or live chats to answer questions in real-time. 

So, now that you’ve gained this new knowledge, it’s time to take action! With this overview, we hope to have clarified the basics of life science marketing for businesses in the industry. For a deep understanding of each of the mentioned areas, check out our life science marketing tips for biotech and biopharma here.