Marketing Content

Posted on September 24, 2011 by Centine Advisors
ContentWe hear a lot about content in marketing for life science research. The goal being to provide our prospects and customers with the information they need about our solutions, when they need it, where they need it and in the form that they need it. In other words to provide them with value. All well and good, but what exactly is this value or content marketing? And why do we need to market content? 

Let’s address the “why” first. We invest considerable resources into producing whitepapers, applications information, videos, presentations and other collateral about the value of our solutions. It does not do us any good if all this content is just passively sitting on our website waiting for a prospect to view it. How do prospects even know we have this information if we don’t tell them about it. This is the main goal of content marketing. To make sure that our prospects and customers know that we have information about solutions that are valuable to them, and to let them know where they can access it.

In other words, Content Marketing is about getting the right information about your solutions in front of your prospects and customers at the right time and in the right place. Note that the key elements of this strategy are defined by the customer or prospects, not by the supplier. Let’s look at these elements and how the strategy works.

What is the right information? This is simply all the details of your solution that are needed for a prospective customer to understand how they will get better research results, reduce costs, save time or minimize waste by implementing your solution. As I posted in a previous blog (What Information?), the information about the value of your solution for their applications.

The information can be available in many forms. We can offer white papers, application notes, data sheets, videos and webinars as sources of information. We can also use blogs and tweets as sources of information. The point here is that the information is available wherever our prospective customers want to look for it and when they want to access it.

So how do we “market” content? Just like any other solution, we consider the information in the content (Is it a webinar, a video or a document?), value of the content (What are the core benefits of this solution, how does it provide better results?) and how it will be accessed (Trade show, internet browser, download or smartphone?). It is important in marketing content to make sure that the access is appropriate for the particular solution. For example, a YouTube video is appropriate for a smartphone or internet browser, but maybe  not for a trade show.

Having decided on the marketing approach, we can now promote our content through all the appropriate media – blogs, online communities and life science portals, emailers, websites, trade shows, press releases, etc. The goal of our content marketing campaign then is to present valuable information about our research solutions to life science researchers wherever they choose to access it.

Don’t wait for prospects to find your content – market your content!
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Bandwidth

Posted on July 31, 2011 by Centine Advisors

BandwidthIt is true when they say “less is more”, in this case we are referring to marketing of life science research products. While it sounds counter-intuitive, and may fly in the face of the conventional wisdom, there are compelling reasons why less activity is better.

Think about all the communications your research prospects and customers get every day – email, phone, print, web and personal. Now add in all the marketing activities they are exposed to on a daily basis, the emailers, banner ads, pop-ups, print advertising, snail mail, etc. We have limited bandwidth available to process our daily activities, so we consign most these communications to noise, and ignore them.

Like most of us, researchers in the life sciences are exposed to a huge number of marketing messages on a daily basis. As a result, they have become adept at filtering out messages that are not immediately relevant to their requirements to get faster results, better science or time & cost savings from their research tools.

This means that your life science marketing messages may not be heard. As posted in an earlier blog (Too Much Noise), our challenge then is to get past this bandwidth limitation. How do we accomplish this? Let’s start first by looking at bandwidth, and then how less is more.

Bandwidth as far as marketing communications is concerned, is the capacity of your target audience, your prospects, to absorb new information. It is their capacity to learn something about how your solution offers them better research results, improved efficiency in their daily lab work, or saves them money. These are the messages that we focus on in our marketing activities.

As life science marketing professionals, most of us (all of us?) work with limited marketing budgets. We sit down, review the goals of our campaigns and activities, then we come up with an activity plan to accomplish there goals that fits within our budgets. Defining which activities, the media and their timing are the challenges. And most of us probably believe that more communication activities would give us better results (more budget please…).

So how can less be more? This happens when we have a solid understanding of how and where we can engage with our prospects and customers in a meaningful dialog. Not only do we need to know what their solution requirements are, but we need to know when they will be looking for a solution and where they will be looking for a solution. Once we have this knowledge, we have the luxury of offering information about our solutions only where our prospects will be looking for it, and only when our prospects are looking for it.

Timing and location are critical to this “less is more” strategy. Our messages must appear at the right time (when the prospect wants to see them) and at the right location (where the prospect plans to look for them). Timing may be determined by when a meeting occurs, when annual budgets are due or when a new project starts up. The location may be in their lab during a sales call, an ad on Google AdWords during a search, or a referral by a colleague.

The key concept here is knowledge of our prospect’s and customer’s behavior. We need to know where and when they will be looking for solutions to their life science research problems. This is not easy, but after all, we are life science marketing professionals and this is our job. Once we have this knowledge, we can review our activity plans, remove the activities that don’t match with our prospect’s behavior and focus on the “less is more” activities.

Now we can get past the bandwidth filter and get selling!

 

 

 

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Ducks In A Row

Posted on June 26, 2011 by Centine Advisors

Success in sales today is more challenging than ever. There are more demands on us as salespeople to increase revenues, increase profitability, maintain customer satisfaction and work closely within our corporate environments than ever. Our customers and prospects also are being required to be more productive, produce better research results, save money, save time and generally do more with fewer resources. How we manage these challenges and how we respond to continuous change define our success strategy in this environment. It is called getting our ducks in a row. Let’s look at a selection of the challenges we face in research laboratory sales today.

The most common challenge in sales is the permanent challenge to increase revenues. How to meet this challenge and achieve revenue growth is a topic of vast scope and discussion. Yet some of the basics are often overlooked. Remember to sell solutions to prospects real needs, and sell complete solutions. Don’t forget to offer all the components needed to make sure your solution is complete and usable as delivered with all the consumables, tools and parts needed to work out of the box. And don’t forget repeat business from satisfied existing customers who already know about the benefits of your solutions!

Of course it is important to maintain profitability. If a sale is not profitable, it is not worthwhile. (Yes there may be a situation where a transaction is not immediately profitable, but will be in the future, but these are usually one-off or special situations.) Our research customers now have reduced budgets and expect more for less. How to maintain profitability in an environment of pricing challenges and reduced budgets is certainly a big challenge, and maybe the overwhelming one in today’s research markets. It is possible though if we keep the focus on the value that our solutions provide – better research results, ease of use, reduced waste, etc.

We must ensure that value of our solutions is in-line with our customer’s expectations and that they have the information that they need about the value of our solutions. We must also ensure that our customers expectations with respect to pricing are in-line with our pricing policies. Generally this means that we have to manage our customer’s value and pricing expectations.

In order to manage the whole value proposition, we need to have a relationship of trust with our prospects. They need to know that we will be there with useful information when needed – both before and after the sale. Implicit in this relationship, is the requirement that we are truly committed to their research success, and will keep them informed about how they can get better results with our solutions.

Now more than ever it is important to keep close to our customers and prospects. We need to build trust, make sure that they are getting better results from our solutions and that they know about the latest developments and for us to offer complete solutions that work out of the box.

Get those ducks in a row and get some sales!

 

 

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