Life science marketing consultancy


Recent Life science marketing consultancy

Life Sciences Marketing Plan Preparation

Life Sciences Marketing Plan : Stage 1


Why use a life sciences marketing agency?

If you’re in the early stages of formulating your B2B biotech, or life sciences marketing plan, or alternatively need some pointers to get started, you’ve come to the right place. Working with a life sciences marketing agency (like Onyva) can provide you with added resource due to our extensive experience in the industry and access to relevant tools, which can complement in-house staff and often provide better financial value. In addition, our life science marketing consultants can save you time by helping you implement an effective marketing plan rapidly. We increase your customer base in the life sciences market and nurture them into qualified leads for your product.

Stage 1: Fundamentals and Foundation work

>This article covers key background work that you need to do, before you formulate any effective life sciences marketing strategy. It’s important that you take time to ensure you have these fundamentals in place as a solid foundation to direct you. You will need them on both inbound and outbound aspects of your marketing. Dedicate this time in advance before outlining all the specific plan details, including marketing channels and scheduling.

1a. Customers

You need to have a clear insight into your current customer base, and specifically what qualifies them as leads for your products. Ensure you know what lead qualification data you hold and where the gaps are — e.g email, job titles, location, life science research or technology areas of interest, sector (academia, Pharma etc.,), purchasing history, to name a few. Note that the latter should be captured through active opt-in from subscribers to comply with your country’s data laws. Ask yourself — can you split them into different personas, or demographic groups? Do they need a different marketing approach and campaign? What are there pain points? Who makes the purchasing decision? How do you keep in touch with your customer base and inform them about your products? What is the current approach used to retain customers and make them loyal to you?

1b. Personas

Personas, from a marketing point of view, represent distinct customer groups that require different messaging to convince them to buy or use your product or service. For personas specifically, we recommend preparing a centralised resource that all team members can refer to for customer communication. This ensures all messaging is consistent.

Some examples of life science roles that could require distinct personas depending on your product:

  • Academic research: Lab technician; PhD Student; Post doctoral researcher (Postdoc for short); Senior researcher; Assistant Professor; Principal Investigator (or PI)
  • Pharmaceutical or biotech companies: Research Scientist; Senior Scientist; Group leader; Team Leader; Director

Data sources for personas:

  • Combined knowledge of sales and marketing team. Customer facing team members should have the greatest input and collate knowledge from the conversations and interactions they have with customers
  • Your CRM and accompanying data can help you identify trends for the distinct personas your company is dealing with. Also, any data and knowledge gaps you have
  • Use a short interview format with any customer interactions, or set up new ones to help collate the relevant data

What information should persona resources include for life science sectors?
This will be different for each use case, but here’s an indicator for B2B life sciences marketing:

Job title (skills, experience); Preferred method of interaction; Challenges they face (relevant to your product); Their goals (relating to your product); What can your product do to help achieve their goals; What problem is your product solving; What objections would they have to our product; What reason would stop them buying; Key marketing message; Key short sales (elevator) pitch.

Store your persona as a centralised PDF or presentation that all the sales and marketing team can access.

2. Products, market positioning and price

Product USP and lifecycle phase

If you’re responsible for a specific product or product portfolio, you need to have a clear vision of the product USP. Which stage of the product life cycle is it at — introduction, growth, maturity or decline? Different approaches are needed for each stage. It’s common for a product that’s developed in-house to be preceded by a lab to launch stage. After initial feasibility and idea generation, it’s common to invest considerable time and money for R&D, testing, QC and compliance. An alternative is the use of an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) model. Here, you opt to buy and source a product or technology from a smaller supplier, and rebrand it to sell to your customer base.

In-house development versus OEM

If you’re offering a unique product that you’ve developed in-house, you have an advantage in the market. However, you may also need to recoup considerable development costs with your pricing.
A rebranded OEM product can have smaller margins, but you forfeit development costs. As a result, market positioning could be very different to an in-house product. Especially, if your competitors are doing the same thing, or the OEM manufacturer is also selling the product directly to customers.

So, how do you differentiate your product to the customer? Critical to success are your brand reputation in the area, and out-manouevering your competitor on customer reach in the target market. Other ideas include further in-house testing, more expedient delivery, and better support to help your re-branded product get ahead. You need to communicate these advantages clearly in your marketing messages.

You should be also be aware of the product pipeline for the upcoming year, including new product releases prior to starting your annual marketing plan.

3. Competitor Analysis

You need to have a clear idea of the position you occupy in the market with your products, before you embark on marketing activities. This also feeds into determining your USP. Hence, a competitor analysis is a fundamental part of your marketing plan. You need to identify your competitors and evaluate their strategies to have a thorough understanding of their strength and weaknesses, relative to your offering.

4. Your sales growth targets

A critical task is to establish annual projections for growth for product offerings to help prioritise your marketing activities. This will help you allocate marketing time and budget effectively as well. Depending on your company structure, this may be the remit of the sales team. It’s important you have a clear understanding for the basis of sales projections. They may be based on year on year growth trends from previous performance — so-called bottom up approach. Alternatively, they can be the result of a company priority designated by the executive board, or the revenue you require to recoup R&D costs of a new product. This will help direct your strategy. The latter two reasons may require more initial time and effort allocation than the former. Especially if your product is already in a sustained growth phase.

5. Available Budgets

You need to have an idea of your allocated fiscal marketing budget. If you have a joint budget pool for your team, it’s common to have to submit a plan as justification for the budget you receive.

In summary

Doing your ground work is essential to provide direction and a solid foundation for your marketing plan. As your first quarter progresses, you may need to modify to account for changes. These could include unseen market factors, a new offering from a competitor for example, and sales performance. Indeed, adaptability is a key skill for marketers who suceed. However, researching thoroughly at the planning stage provides you with clear justification for the strategies adopted.

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Happy New Year 2022 - Onyva Scientific Marketing Agency

Happy 2022: Building on the year that’s been

As we embark upon the New Year, we’d like to wish all our supporters, friends, and fantastic clients all the best for 2022. Thank you for your continued support of our scientific marketing agency!

Onyva the Agency – The year that’s been

During the last year, the pandemic has continued to challenge global health and workplaces. As such, we are thankful for the many clients that have continued to put their trust in us in 2021. One of our key projects has involved transforming the brand and website for a national cancer charity. As part of an ongoing process we are interfacing with patients, clinicians, and the charity to produce distinct medical technical content and graphics to support clinical professionals, and patients at all stages of their cancer journey.
We are looking forward to continuing the project, this year with Melanoma Focus. They rate our work high on professionalism, responsiveness and the clarity of communication.

“Onyva are a dream to work with – professional and responsive with a great understanding of brand and tone of voice. They have expertly communicated complex medical and scientific information in a clear, user-friendly way”

Jen Rush, Melanoma Focus

Also in 2021, we successfully consulted for global life science startups with strategic marketing plans to help them secure key funding partners. We carried out fundamental research for a life science venture group. Part of the project involved summarising cutting edge peer-review on a range of lifestyle factors that impact the global burden of non-communicable diseases. These included sleep, stress, diet, exercise and alcohol amongst other fields.

We look forward to working with new colleagues in the life sciences, Pharma, medical and scientific publishing fields in 2022.

Free marketing agency consult offer – Jan 2022

If you would like us to review an existing scientific marketing strategy, we are offering a free 30 minute consultation once we receive your documentation to be reviewed in Jan 2022. Just quote – Free Onyva Consult and email us: info@onyva-agency.com

We wish you a happy and healthy start to 2022.
The Onyva Team.

IWD2021. Women Scientists. Nobel Laureates

IWD2021: Women who changed science

In celebration of this year’s international women’s day, we’ve taken a look at some of the women who have changed science over the last century.

IWD2021

Women who’ve changed science

Marie Curie: Physicist


Year: 1903, 1911: Double Nobel Laureate for Physics, and Chemistry

  • Crucial study in spontaneous radiation (Physics)
  • Investigation in radium and polonium (Chemistry)
  • “We must have perseverance, and above all confidence in ourselves”
    Marie Curie

    Joan Clarke: Mathematician, Cryptanalyst


    Year: 1941

  • Joint codebreaker of the ‘The Enigma Machine’ used by the Nazis to transmit messages in WW2
  • Admiral Grace Hopper: Computer scientist, Naval Officer


    Years: 1941, 1952

  • Developed COBOL, one of the world’s first high-level programming languages
  • Invented the first compiler, to translate programming code to machine language
  • Received US awards- the Presidential Medal of Freedom (posthumous), National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

    Rosalind Franklin: Crystallographer


    Year: 1952

  • Discovered and photographed the helical structure of DNA (Photo 51)

    Rita Levi-Montalcini: Neuroembryologist


    Year: 1986 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or medicine

  • Discovery of nerve growth factor
  • Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: Geneticist


    Year: 1995
    Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine

  • Genetic control of embryonic development
  • Linda B. Buck: Neurobiologist


    Year: 2004 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine

  • Discovery of odorant receptors and advances in the olfactory system
  • Elizabeth H. Blackburn: Cell Biologist


    Year: 2009 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine

  • Co-discovery of telomerase
  • May-Britt Moser: Neuroscientist


    Year: 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

  • Discovery of grid cells in brain for positioning and navigation
  • Jennifer A. Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier: Protein Biochemists


    Year: 2020
    Nobel Laureates in Chemistry (joint)

  • Development of the CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing tools
  • For further female pioneers – take a look at our infographic “Pioneering women in science.”

    Life science marketing short survey CTA

    Survey poll: Marketing support for the life sciences sector

    Over the next few weeks, we seek to get your input on the marketing resources and support, that could help you with your business goals in 2020! If you’re a life science company, or work in a related scientific sector, it would be great if you could fill out our short poll.

    It’s embedded below and should only take a minute or two – we promise! We greatly value your opinion – and in the future this will help us deliver the best free content and marketing consultancy services.

    What’s more, there’s an optional opportunity to provide your email for entry into a prize draw for office goodies at the end of the survey. *Extended* We will select and announce the winner on Mar 31st 2020.

    Marketing support for the life sciences sector

    Interested in getting more marketing tips for the life sciences sector? Take a look at our recent article ‘Toolkit for life sciences marketing: Strategy, email & SEO.’

    Email Marketing Life Sciences

    Email marketing for the scientific sector: A practical guide

    by Seema Sharma

    Email Marketing Stage 1: Establishing subscribers, content ideas and platforms

    In our next series of blog posts, we’ll be covering practical approaches to email marketing for the scientific sector, which include the life sciences and related biotech, pharmaceutical and medical diagnostics fields. In this post, we’ll take a look at establishing your list, content ideas for the scientific sector, prerequisites for a good digital strategy, and platforms to consider. Our next articles will cover, content, layouts, A/B testing, KPI’s and metrics.

    Background and key groundwork

    B2B email marketing in the life sciences and related sectors, requires critical differences in approach to the B2C and retail areas to be effective. A strong content hub, relevant to your scientific audience is a critical prerequisite to an effective email campaign. You should include content thats relevant to all of the personas that are interested in your product offering. In fact, identifying your target customers, their demographics and personas, including a typical journey to purchase, is a critical task for planning your entire digital marketing strategy — including email.

    If you don’t know who your customers are, or their buying habits — finding that out is your first crucial step in the process. Typical customers could include academic researchers, industry researchers, clinicians and lab managers, amongst others, dependent on your company offering. They may need further subdivision if they intersect with different research focusses, clinical specialisms or stage of career. If you have sufficient numbers of each intersect – you need to produce tailored or specialised content that is deemed valuable to that demographic.

     

    ‘Identifying your target customers, their demographics and personas, including a typical journey to purchase, is a critical task for planning your entire digital marketing strategy.’

    To be the most effective, subscribers should be expecting to receive an email from you, having opted in actively. Note that the forms and opt-in need to be compliant with the data laws in your country, (GDPR compliant opt-in and emailing is required in the UK!).

    Email capture and content ideas

    Establishing your list requires a clear understanding of who you want to engage and capture as a subscriber. A good approach is to use a ‘give-away’ that is relevant to them. ‘Give-away’ is used in the broad sense here, to mean anything from your content hub that they would find useful. For those of you that like inbound terminology – this is sometimes referred to as ‘top of the funnel content.’
    Some online content ideas for the life sciences or scientific sector include:
    Email icon

    • Industry-specific reports
    • e-books / blog posts on recent scientific research developments
    • Webinar access
    • Research or clinical training video access
    • How-to technical summaries or research methodology guides
    • Posters, including pathways or disease mechanisms
    • New research discoveries and summary infographics
    • Interactive competitions that have research relevant prizes

    to name a few…..

    The latter all need to be posted on a landing page, with a plan to drive traffic to that page. Gating this content to include an email capture form that allows for key demographics, (e.g name, job, title, research field or clinical specialism and permission to contact etc.,), is a great way to expand and establish your subscriber list.
    SEO optimisation of your landing page will help it perform well organically. Promoting it through existing channels, like Social Media accounts can help spread the word and will ensure you have an integrated approach to your marketing across channels.

    You can also use a PPC (pay per click) approach here, using Google adwords, or Social Media advertising (promoted tweets, facebook ads etc.,). However, be sure to do an A/B test to optimise the format and wording that performs best, and set a small budget in the first instance. This will allow you to gauge performance against parameters for quality leads, before committing to a full campaign. Not doing so can mean you have sub-optimal performance and can heavily overspend very rapidly.

    Some offline ideas to expand your subscriber list include:

    • Organising events with key speakers on relevant research topics and including opt-in forms as part of the registration process.
    • Alternatively, exhibition leads who opt-in at your booth in return for a give-away or competition.

    Deciding between email providers

    There are an ever increasing range of email platforms available on the market, that claim to solve all your email marketing problems. The current trend is for complete marketing automation solutions that cover all digital touch points with customers (email, social, web and mobile app communications). They include email marketing as part of the offering.

    Key considerations when selecting an email provider or marketing automation software:

      • Your budget
      • Ease of integration with existing CRM systems
      • The complexity of your emailing. (Some platforms only allow for a certain level of complexity).
      • Road test a free version thoroughly, (if its available).
      • Use recommendations — Do you know someone else that’s used a platform? Chat to them about the pros and cons of using it and any headaches they encountered.
      • Data considerations – I recently worked with a client whose promise to its customers was that their data would not be transferred outside of Europe. As such, we had to exclude many platforms, as many data servers are housed in the US.
      • Level of HTML and IT expertise in-house — Most platforms will require a certain level of HTML knowledge to allow for the creation of a unique template that will appeal to your target customers. There are off the shelf-templates in many platforms, that allow for drag and drop template design with reasonably straight-forward UI’s, but they will most likely need customisations to fit your branding, content and layout needs. Some platform providers have in-house template development and support as an add-on cost.
        Note, they’ll also be basic things to do on your site like DNS entries, to ensure the email is coming from your domain, alongside this. Also, if you are at the larger company end of the spectrum, and have other platforms in-house like Salesforce or an alternative CRM system, you’ll need to consider how to integrate your chosen email platform with it.

    Email platforms to consider

    (NB: This list is not exhaustive and in no particular order. Monthly subscription costs of the most basic package available are shown in brackets)
    Mobile email icon

    MailChimp

     

              1. (Free for <1000 subscribers)

    Hubspot

              1. ($200)

    Marketo

              1. ($895)

    Oracle Eloqua

              1. ($2000 for <10K contacts)

    Campaign Monitor

              1. (£9 <2500 subscribers)

    Adobe Campaign

              1. (Pricing information not available)

    Pardot by Salesforce

              1. ($1250 for <10,000 subscribers)

    Zoho Campaign

              1. (Tiered according to subscribers/emails.Prices start at $3 for <500 emails)

    Emma

              1. ($49)

    dotMailer

              1. (£250)

    Get Response

              1. ($15)

    Active Campaign

              1. ($9)

    Red Cappi

              1. ($10 < 500 subscribers)

    NewZapp

              1. (£80)

    Newsletters2Go

              1. (free basic plan or $20 per month with more functionality)

    Email Templates and Layout

    Your layout should be reflective of your company’s brand and instantly recognisable as coming from you. A strongly branded header and footer can help with the latter. It’s tempting to add a lot of text heavy technical content into individual emails if you work in marketing the life sciences, or related Biotech and Pharma fields, but incorporating several images is crucial to make your content appealing.

    Subscribers like to click on images and they help considerably as content teasers. Consider what these images might routinely be for your company, (e.g product images, research data and graphs, cellular microscopy images, etc.,), what size they would look optimal at, and how many it would make sense to have in your initial template. You can of course, produce several variations if you’ll have say one template for events, with a venue displayed, another for product offers and another for new content from your hub. Calls to action should be clearly visible as clickable buttons and include action words (join, view, download etc.,) to encourage readers to act and maximise click through rates.

    You’ll need HTML, (preferably responsive!) and text based templates. Mobile optimisation is key for emails, with a sizeable shift in individuals using their mobile devices to read and interact with this channel, in the past few years. However, before you invest too much time optimising, check what proportion of your subscribers are opening your emails this way. Also, note that if you are using a responsive template, much of the optimisation will be automatic across devices.
    Regardless of whether you have a responsive template in place, you’ll need to keep your subject line between 25-30 characters for mobile, to display correctly without being cut off. Additionally, call to actions should be centred, high-up in the email, clearly visible on your device and have enough space around them so readers do not click multiple links at once. Importantly, note if you use a pre-header — a short line of text to provide context and act as a lead-in for your subject line, you can significantly improve engagement.
    Finally, there’s a legal bit — you must include your fully registered company contact details and an unsubscribe option in all emails,to comply with global data laws.

    Lead nurturing and cadence

    As mentioned previously, it’s really important to know the personas of your customers, and their typical journey to purchase. If you are at the early stages of setting up a company, you may not have this knowledge to hand and you can use your email marketing and other channels to help feed data into this.

    New lead that you capture through gated content, or at an exhibition, typically need some time to develop trust in your brand, and have sufficient product awareness before they commit to purchase, or can become qualified as sales leads. As such, you need to have a clear plan for your e-campaign to send content that enables this conversion.

    Here are some key questions to ask yourself, before we move on to the next stage of content planning:
    What would develop kudos and trust in your brand at the early stages of your e-campaign?
    To provide an example — if a cohort of your subscribers are researchers in a specific field – for example immunology, this could be a content piece on a newly discovered immunology pathway with input from a pre-eminent person in the field who is a current customer, or details of your companies attendance at a high-profile immunology conference or, alternatively, a link to a high-impact peer review publication featuring your product.
    Ask yourself — how can you introduce your product in a way that would appeal to your subscriber and solve their problems or enhance their work?
    Describe how you can solve a research or technical problem for your subscriber to create the context and need for your product and service.

    Email cadence, or how often you contact your customers is important to factor when you schedule your campaign. You don’t want to bombard your subscribers with information that results in annoyance and a rise on unsubscribes. However, you want to make sure you contact them enough to ensure that brand awareness is maintained. Bi-monthly emails may be a good starting point. Above all, the key is to send valuable and relevant content and keep your eye on KPI’s for engagement and unsubscribes, to see what is working. Subsequently, you can then adjust your content plan.

    In our next post, we’ll discuss email content, layouts, A/B testing, KPI’s and metrics.

    Finally, good luck with your email marketing campaigns!
    If you need help with your email marketing Get in touch with us now