Articles
We’re always keen to share expert insights and actionable advice for life science marketers.
Our articles explore various topics and
challenges that could inspire your success in
this challenging industry.
Marketing tactics that can have an impact whatever your budget
Marketing budgets are increasingly under pressure. So, marketers are being asked to do more with less (or in some cases with virtually nothing). But you can still create effective marketing, whatever your budget. Here are our top tactics.
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.
How small Life Science companies can measure brand performance quickly and easily
Smaller companies struggle to measure how well their brands are performing. Traditional methods like brand surveys don’t work well in niche Life Science markets where audiences are small and hard to find. Market research surveys are usually too expensive for small companies to afford.
How a clear marketing strategy can drive success in Bioscience start-ups
A successful start-up will go through various stages, from initial idea and business plan development to product launch and market penetration. In order to succeed, bioscience start-ups must secure funding.
This requires demonstrating a clear path to profitability within a reasonable time frame. Developing a marketing strategy early on is vital to attract investment, acquire customers, and drive long-term growth for these start-ups.
Improving lead-to-sales conversion rates in Life Science: challenges and how to overcome them.
Life Science marketing campaigns typically suffer from high attrition rates at each stage of the customer purchase journey.
Higher conversion rates can be achieved by examining each stage of the customer journey to understand how factors such as customer insight, careful planning, continuous monitoring affect conversion.
Building a stand-out brand in Life Science – the new reality
Life Science companies are having to work harder to stand out. Smaller companies in particular are competing more fiercely for customers and investors. And they’re not immune to the explosion of information vying for customer attention coupled with ever shorter customer attention spans in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Find out who’s winning the brand race and what your company can learn from them.
How to market a commodity product
When you have a parity or commoditised product with little differentiation from competitors, you need a profound understanding of what frustrates customers and what matters to them most before looking for ways to differentiate what you are offering.
Why gaining traction is critical for start-ups.
The level of scrutiny that start-ups are being subjected to has increased in recent years as the path to early profitability becomes more important than growth alone.
15 Questions you should be able to answer to improve your marketing
There are 15 critical questions that relate to each of the main stages in the marketing process. Companies that can definitively answer each of the questions are able to achieve a significant increase in sales performance compared to those that can’t. How does your marketing process compare?
Why Scientists resist change and what marketers can do about it.
The barriers to technology adoption are frequently higher than marketers recognise especially when that new technology brings seemingly huge new capabilities. Marketers often don’t anticipate the level of inertia that needs to be overcome for customers to change to a new product.
What your best customers won’t tell you.
By only talking to our best customers we potentially miss segments of potential customers whom we are currently not catering for and who might make up a significant proportion of the market.
Three ways in which Life Science companies destroy brand value
Companies invest heavily in establishing their brands yet there are 3 common ways in which they can destroy brand value, often without realising it.
Ten steps to diagnosing the causes of inadequate sales traction in start-ups.
Start-ups need to show how they will achieve sales traction to be able to secure funding. Traction has become a vital measure of future success because the lack of traction is one of the leading reasons for start-up failure.
Why robust business strategy needs to start with marketing.
What does it take to win in today’s highly competitive market where customers have ever increasing choice and with that, unprecedented power, to make or break a company? Competitiveness has always been the aim of strategy. But to be competitive, organisations need to take a more marketing-led approach to strategy development.
Where to go when existing markets are crowded
As Life Science marketers should we keep targeting existing customers with the latest version of our product or should we be looking elsewhere? Are there under served markets that we can tap into?
What to do when marketing is gifted a new product by R&D.
It’s not uncommon for R&D to develop products and then “throw them over the fence” for marketing to promote. This is a particularly common problem in Life Science companies because they are often run by scientists and engineers who focus on the technical aspects of the product, leaving the customer as an afterthought.
How to find out what Scientists really need.
How can marketing make sure that companies are developing the right products to meet the needs of scientists? Developing and positioning products to rapidly gain market share requires marketing to own the customer insight piece at each stage of the product development process.
Start-ups: using Marketing to achieve scale.
The first challenge facing start-ups is to make the transition from initial idea to producing and placing a product or service in the hands of paying customers. Once they have successfully placed the product in the market, they are then faced with demonstrating how they will achieve scale.
Measurably improve your lead quality with less content.
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. The number of marketing tools has increased from about 100 in 2011 to over 3,800 in 2016, a compound annual growth rate of 108%
Selling products is starting to look a lot like selling consulting.
As a consultant, working with marketers to position and sell B2B products and services, I’ve been thinking about how selling products today has become a lot like selling consulting services and what we can learn from this. Here are 5 things product marketers and sales reps can learn from management consulting.