The landscape in which we as Life Science marketers are working is becoming more and more complex. The number of marketing tools available is increasing rapidly with no sign of slowing down. Below is a great infographic, produced each year by Scott Brinker of Valtech showing the marketing technology landscape (1). The number of marketing tools has increased from about 100 in 2011 to over 3,800 in 2016, that’s a compound annual growth rate of 108%!

Added to this, the number of social media channels available is also increasing. This infographic by Luma Partners (2) shows the increase in social media channels between 2011 and 2016. Both the number of categories and the number of channels have increased.

More marketing technology and more ways to communicate with customers should make marketers more effective. But this isn’t the case. The landscape is changing so rapidly that there isn’t time to assimilate the changes before it changes again. Added to this, the amount of content available is also increasing which is resulting in a proportionally large increase in noise.

A September 2016 survey by Hubspot (3) asked B2B companies what their top marketing priorities were over the next 12 months and 74% said converting leads to customers. Driving lead conversion is as important to business as ever before.

The same survey found that the average lead to customer conversion rate is below 20% which means that over 80% of leads are not of sufficient quality to convert. That’s an enormous attrition rate. It’s not surprising that sales reps are complaining that they are faced with far more, lower quality leads than ever before.

What are the implications for the sales funnel? Here’s an example based on average conversion rates for life science products. In our experience, Life Science products typically have a lead-to-sales conversion rate of between 10% and 20%. Let’s assume that you need to sell 100 units. With these typical conversion rates you would need to contact over 300,000 prospective buyers, which is a very large number and extremely difficult to achieve.

If you could improve lead conversion by 10%, from 20% to 30% what would the impact be?

For simplicity let’s keep all other conversion rates the same. Now the number of contacts needed at the mouth of the funnel has decreased by 1/3 to just over 200,000. This is an oversimplification to demonstrate a point because improving your marketing in a way that increases your lead-to-sales conversion ratio is also likely to positively affect conversion rates at other stages of the sales funnel. And while the average Life Science marketing campaign might only achieve a lead-to-sales conversion rate of between 10% and 20%, it is possible to achieve rates around 30%.

So how can we improve lead quality?

We need to stop trying to understand the latest marketing technology or social media channel and stop producing even more content and go back to creating compelling campaigns based on solving the customer’s unmet need.

Once we have insight into the real need that our product is solving for the customer i.e. the value proposition, we can formulate a compelling message and communicate through just enough engaging content at each stage of the customer purchase journey. An excellent framework to design the message and the accompanying content is Hamid Ghanadan’s content centric model for Life Science and Healthcare marketing (4).

Hamid talks about 3 classes of content, each one intended to resonate with the audience at the appropriate point in the audiences’ decision journey. The first is Leadership content – to make prospective customers curious so that they recognise that they have a need. The second is Educational content which is aimed at helping the scientist explore that need and begin to formulate a hypothesis as to how they might satisfy the need. And the final class of content is Persuasive content which will help the customer to validate their hypothesis and be persuaded by your product’s value proposition.

A lot of Life Science marketers struggle to know what content is most appropriate at each stage of the customer purchase journey. In a recent webinar poll, we asked participants whether they agreed with the following statement: “I know what the most appropriate type of content is to use at each stage of the customer purchase journey”. Fewer than half felt that they could agree with the statement.

At Viveo, we’ve used our experience of marketing to life scientists to create a map of the type of content that is most appropriate at each stage of the customer purchase journey. Once you have developed the value proposition and used a framework like Hamid’s content-centric model to craft the message, the next step is to decide the most appropriate content to use to deliver that message. This is where the content matrix is helpful. Then you can decide the relevant channel to use to communicate about the content. The choice of channel will flow more naturally once you know what type of content you want to use at each stage in the purchase journey.

We’ve summarised the type of content that’s best suited to each stage on an infographic which is available for download here.

At the top of the Content Matrix you will see the stages that the customer goes through on their purchase journey. On the left hand side are listed some of the activities that the customer might be doing along the way.

The infographic is intended to be a guide to help you explore the options available and get you started with you content strategy. These are no hard and fast rules about the type of content that can be used, just suggestions based on our experience of marketing instruments and consumables to Scientist. For example, using a short viral video or a quiz or poll at the problem awareness stage is likely to be more appropriate than using them at the evaluation and close stage.

Content that is more relevant and persuasive, delivered at the right point in the decision-making process will:

decrease the content generation burden on marketing;
create better customer engagement and improve long term customer relationships and
increase sales efficiency as sales people can focus more attention on fewer, better qualified leads.

In summary, taking a step back and getting the basics right, like developing a message that matters to customers together with a strong content delivery strategy, will boost lead quality. Why? Because you’re providing customers with what they need when they need it.

Is your content currently aligned with the customer journey and is it generating the quality leads that you need?

Sources:

1. Chief Marketing Technologist blog by Scott Binker http://chiefmartec.com/2016/03/marketing-technology-landscape-supergraphic-2016/

2. Lumascapes by Luma Partners http://www.lumapartners.com/resource-center/lumascapes-2/
3. Hubspot: The State of Inbound 2016 Is Here, September 12, 2016 https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/state-of-inbound-2016#sm.0001lyxmlgsxse5yqhd2qsexletj6
4. Catalytic Experiences: Persuading Scientists and Clinicians with Effective Digital Marketing Hardcover – May 1, 2016 by Hamid Ghanadan