The five biggest marketing challenges faced by Life Science start-ups and how to overcome them

Life science tools and service start-ups are helping to drive research that advances therapeutics, diagnostics and personalised medicine. However, start-ups often face significant hurdles when it comes to producing effective marketing. So, we’ve examined some of the most common challenges and how these can be addressed.

1. Limited marketing expertise

Many Life Science start-ups are founded and staffed by scientists and engineers, often with little or no marketing background. Many try to fill their marketing void by putting a product manager in charge. Some even hire a marketing junior. But these are sticking plasters at best.

To develop a powerful brand and effective marketing takes expertise, on both strategic and executional levels. It makes sense to engage experienced marketers to help you take the first step to marketing success.

2. Lack of brand basics

The Life Science market is brutally competitive and noisy. Any serious start-up needs the brand basics in place to ensure that they get noticed (in the right way!). These basics are a brand name, logo and visual identity. Once these are in place you can lay the foundation blocks of your brand. Think PowerPoint deck, website and social media presence. Online activity is key to raising your brand visibility.

3. Absence of a clear marketing strategy

Few start-ups are clear about who their most profitable target customer groups will be. Identifying and prioritising the target audience is crucial to be able to craft an effective marketing strategy. You need to articulate who the target audience is, why they will buy from your company (the value proposition) and how your company will position itself in the often-crowded Life Science market.

4. Limited budget

Due to significant investment in product development, start-ups are rarely awash with cash when it comes to marketing. You’ll need to be creative to make the most of limited budgets and resources.

Understanding how to split your budget effectively between brand building and tactical lead generation is so important. Both are needed to ensure that you’re addressing short term business needs as well as long term brand awareness. The latter is needed to achieve lasting gains in market share. Click here to use our marketing spend calculator.

5. Not enough content

Early-stage companies often lack the content necessary to attract and engage potential customers. Great content gives people reasons to visit your website, learn about your products or services and ultimately become customers. Content helps to establish credibility in your field. It increases website traffic and social media engagement which is key to generating more sales leads.  

Five ways to be better at marketing

Invest in the brand basics from the off; it will pay off in the long run. It’s important to take the time to create a distinctive brand and a robust marketing strategy before launching the company or product. Getting outside help from experts in Life Science marketing who know the sector and your audience will help you to get this right more quickly. This will also prevent you from having to redo things later that might disrupt your business. For example, redesigning your website. Once the brand and marketing strategy are in place you can move on to designing and executing the marketing plan.

Identify your main business challenge. Is the business facing a lack of awareness in the market because customers don’t know you or why they should care? Or is the problem that potential customers are not sufficiently motivated to change? Is the technology too nascent for them to risk using it? Once you’ve identified what you’re up against, you can create a cost-effective marketing plan that addresses this challenge. This requires a considerable amount of creativity especially if the budget is limited.

Create impactful content. Start developing content as soon as possible. If you don’t have original content to begin with, we recommend using ‘borrowed’ content by sharing and commenting on industry articles that your audience will find useful.  You can then develop your own content around topics that your audience has engaged with.

Focus on consistency. With limited resources, we suggest focusing on a few things that you can do consistently and well. For example, choose one social media platform where your target customers are present and post relevant content as often as you can.

Build credibility through collaboration. Building credibility and trust takes time. So, develop a network of collaborators and beta-testers for your product as early as possible. This offers two advantages. It provides borrowed credibility and you can use these collaborations to produce content for marketing purposes.

Life Science start-ups face numerous marketing challenges. By investing in brand building and developing a clear marketing strategy with the help of marketing experts, you’re more likely to succeed commercially. The right agency will be pragmatic about what can be achieved within your budget. And if they’re super creative, they’ll find lots of clever yet inexpensive ways to maximise your company’s exposure.