life science marketing

Recent life science marketing

A review: Generative AI content tools for life sciences and biotech marketing

In this article, I review some of the generative AI tools, and their application in marketing for the life science and biotechnology sector.

Introduction

In the wake of a recent upsurge in AI powered generative content tools, I took a deep dive into a selection of them, from a life science marketing perspective. Many have been launched with the promise of increasing productivity, creating ‘humanised’ technical content to evade AI detectors, and save time on content creation. These class of tools, including ChatGPT (GPT standing for Generative Pre-trained Transformer), created by Open.AI, work by integrating information and data from generically available web sources as a predictive model.

So how well do they actually fair for creating written content for the biological and biomedical domain? Do they grasp novel life sciences applications, innovations and technologies as they emerge? This is an especially pertinent consideration for marketers in the life sciences and biotechnology sector, when content requires scientific credibility. Furthermore, the key to success is to differentiate your innovation against the competition, which requires more technical considerations and nuance than other sectors – like retail for example.

AI tools for life science marketing

ChatGPT (Open AI tool) – for life science content marketing

The free version of ChatGPT, (GPT version 3.5 – you’ll need a subscription for 4.0), can rapidly create predictive text responses to questions you pose, or content you ask it to create. In my experience, this can be helpful when researching life science applications to gain a quick overview of markets, and potential users or B2B customers for a new innovation or platform. I’ve found this most useful for early stage market research and analysis. For example, if you’re completely new to an application, it can provide a basic overview of who the users are, which you can then build upon. On occasion, this can highlight some customer areas, or use cases that you haven’t considered, even if you’re a little more familiar to a field. This all needs further in-depth verification of course, but is a good starting point for background and early stage fact finding.

For example, when I asked ChatGPT – ‘Who uses X platform?” — (the latter was a predictive software platform for modelling chemical structures and biologics, that I had good knowledge of), ChatGPT generated a good overview of customer cohorts and market applications – including some lesser known ones, that stacked up against my understanding. However, it should be of note, this was not something I would present to a third party. It would require integrating information from further online searches, market reports and citations.

In terms of technical content marketing for the life sciences — ChatGPT swiftly creates marketing literature, if you provide it with a company and product. To experiment, I used it to generate a comparative example for content marketing I had already written. The latter was literature for a biotechnology company I consult for, whose key products are a series of induced pluripotent stem cell lines (known as iPSC’s for short).

In this case, whilst the overall structure and sections for a leaflet were there, the generated content would need significant editing to be on par with what I’d created. In fact, extensive re-writing would be required prior to it being deemed fit to put before an individual with any sort of specialist scientific training in that field.
Worryingly, the text ChatGPT generated completely missed the key product term (iPSC), even though it is mentioned multiple times on the company website, and all existing public literature. This is a major oversight, given this is the terminology the B2B customer, most likely a researcher in Pharma or Biotech, would be searching for.

Furthermore, a major drawback for me was that the language had a surplus of exaggerated adjectives, in sequential sentences. Whilst they do have a valid use in context, they were in a quantity that we as an agency simply would not use when marketing to a life sciences B2B audience, (e.g groundbreaking, unprecedented, revolutionary, revolutionize, remarkable, unparalleled, harnessing power). There was no qualification of claims or citations included. There were a number of instances in the text when the context was missed too.

More generally, on a positive point, the grammar used was near perfect, however I did spot a couple of mistakes. There were also a few turns of phrase used that you would expect when browsing a webpage, not reading a piece of literature (e.g ‘Welcome to *company name*’ as an opening sentence).

My overall conclusion is – ChatGPT can serve as an adequate starting point in terms of layout for content literature for life sciences marketing, the speed is astonishing, grammar is good, but it will need extensive editing and re-writing for a life sciences audience. Scientific customers are used to a subtler, drier form of language, that derives from the style used in peer review papers, and may be adverse to this style of content writing.
Finally, since GPT models work by integrating data sources, in effect taking an average, this isn’t great for competitor differentiation.

ChatGPT for PPC content for the life sciences (Pay per click advertising content)

One application that is particularly useful for ChatGPT is the ability to rearrange and condense short text pieces you enter within specified character counts. This is applicable for PPC ads for the life sciences on LinkedIn, and Google search ads, for example. Here, specific character counts are required or deemed optimal for ad headlines, introductions descriptions, headlines. Furthermore, some PPC ad fields allow for several variants to be entered, or alternatively may be required if you’re running A/B testing. ChatGPT can generate these rapidly, if you enter good quality starting content.

Do be very careful to double check the output, as once when I’ve tried this, some variants were non-sensical for life science and biotechnology, as it had misunderstood the term ‘model’ in the context of a disease model for drug screening.

ChatGPT has recently released an offshoot – Humanizer Pro. It claims to help you get past AI detection software, whilst maintaining content meaning and quality, and create more human sounding content. It requires a professional subscription to ChatGPT, so I haven’t tested it yet, but if you have a subscription it may be worth looking into for comparison.

BioGPT – Biological domain specific GPT.

Microsoft has developed a tool, known as BioGPT [Renqian L et al., 2022], which has been trained on more large-scale biomedical literature, including PubMed. This provides a much more appropriate language trainer than Wikipedia, which was a major data source for ChatGPT. It’s currently in a Beta stage and accessible via the hugging face site here or GitHub.

At the moment, you can’t use it to generate scientific marketing literature, as its primary training source is peer review abstracts and titles from Pubmed, and not broader internet content sources. Scientific marketing literature sits between the two styles. BioGPT is geared to answer specific research questions in its text-generation mode, rather than predictive text generation.

For example, it didn’t understand me asking about an overview of “commercial sources for human induced pluripotent stem cells”. Instead, it provided the following suggestions for questions I should ask it instead:
Can we generate cardiomyocytes from hiPSCs derived from patients with inherited cardiac diseases?
Can we use hiPSC-derived cardiomyocytes to study the mechanisms of cardiac diseases?

When I rephrased the question and asked –
“What are recent reviews of the use of iPSC models for Parkinson’s Disease?”
It provided a summary of a single paper review from 2010. Whilst the sentences were written well for a scientifically trained audience, it didn’t really answer my question, and dropped off mid sentence at the end.

Its other applications include are for biomedical data analysis (for example, patient data analysis for clinical decision pathways, raw genetic datasets to predict gene and protein structure) and data extraction. We didn’t test these applications.

ScholarAI – for research question answers and references

ScholarAI (currently in beta) – can provide lists of relevant references for technical content articles and literature. Also, synopses to a particular research question you pose. (Note – I tried the standalone version, not the one that integrates with ChatGPT).
There are several reference managers out there, and manual citation sources like PubMed, of course. One advantage with Scholar AI is that you can input a specific research question and it will provide a comprehensive answer. This is written in a scientific and academic tone, with relevant peer review references and a summary.

For example, I posed the same question I did to BioGPT –
“What are recent reviews of the use of iPSC models for Parkinson’s Disease?”

It came back with a summary of developments in the field over time, ranging from a decade ago to more recent, with a range of references that were all credible. It didn’t drop off mid sentence, or focus on one single source like BioGPT. However, once I compared it to a manual equivalent I did using PubMed as a reference source, I found that I wouldn’t have picked the same references. This is based on their relevance to the statements made, journal quality (granted this may be subjective – but most people in the neuroscience field would know which journals they trust), and other key metrics, like the number of peer citations they had received.

Baked in AI

Most content platforms, including design, and social media, now have some level of AI included. For social, this tends to be a button you can press after inputting content to re-write what you’ve written. This is good for improving on sentence structure, catching typos and grammar, at the cost of making posts sound very generic, and undifferentiated.

AI – Generative and predictive models for life sciences as a whole

There are many diverse applications of AI for the life sciences, aside from generative AI (content generation), which I’ve covered here. These include, but are not limited to, In silico biologics, drug target predictions, interactions, and a whole range of predictive models for drug discovery. Similarly, clinical and healthcare applications, like identifying disease tipping points, optimal clinical care pathways, diagnostic tools for imaging, and personalised treatments. These are all Predictive AI tools and rely on integrating historical data outcomes, mostly derived from patient data.
These will be (and are) integral to future development in the life sciences and healthcare industries. They are beyond the scope of this article, and we will review them separately.

In summary

The AI offerings reviewed here definitely need to be checked by HI (Human intelligence!), for use in life sciences marketing. However, many are in beta phase, so progress will be made. They can, however, provide useful starting frameworks at speed, which need to be re-written to provide trust-worthy, meaningful content with scientific credibility for a specialist life sciences audience.
There is currently a gap between non-domain specific AI tools (like ChatGPT) and biological domain specific tools (BioGPT), and neither fulfil the specialist scientific content writing role adequately.

References:

Renqian Luo, Liai Sun, Yingce Xia, Tao Qin, Sheng Zhang, Hoifung Poon, Tie-Yan Liu, BioGPT: generative pre-trained transformer for biomedical text generation and mining, Briefings in Bioinformatics, 23: 6, November 2022, bbac409, https://doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbac409

Useful links for tools discussed in this review:

ChatGPT https://chat.openai.com/
Open AI https://openai.com/
(Note their recent offering is the tool Sora – that creates generative video content from text prompts)
BioGPT https://huggingface.co/microsoft/BioGPT-Large
Scholar AI https://app.scholarai.io/home

Useful links for tools to try, that are not reviewed here:

Grammarly https://www.grammarly.com/
AI Writer 2.0 – https://app.neilpatel.com/aiwriter/ For blog content
Jenni https://jenni.ai/ Research paper writing

Life sciences marketing lifecycle: The six stages

Life sciences marketing cycle : 6 stages

A guide to the marketing lifecycle for the life sciences

A key success factor for any business is being customer-centric — and the life sciences sector is no exception. In this article, we discuss how you can ensure your life sciences marketing strategy centres on your customer.
We cover all 6 stages of the marketing lifecycle. In addition, we discuss how to refine your plan and optimise tactics to ensure you include all aspects of the customer’s journey.
Indeed, although life sciences marketing is considered B2B, it has some unique characteristics that come as a result of the behavioural approaches of scientists, something we’ll touch on in this article.

Overview of the marketing lifecycle

The marketing lifecycle, (sometimes referred to as the marketing funnel), is distinct from the sales funnel. While the latter is a breakdown of the customer journey up to the point of purchase, the marketing lifecycle goes well beyond that. Critically, it also covers how to improve the customer purchasing experience using post-sale support, and importantly, methods to retain their custom. The latter include engendering loyalty and encouraging repeat sales. In addition, creating brand advocates amongst your customer base to amplify your marketing reach.
The length of the lifecycle can vary depending on the product or the customer. For example, the time to purchase for expensive research instrumentation will often be considerably longer that lower price point products, like lab consumables or reagents. Academic customers testing for a specific application on a research grant, will differ significantly in their interactions and requirements to say, a bulk purchase for a screening project or previously untested application in the Pharma industry. The latter project may require lab involvement and technical support for example, prior to conversion.
For convenience, we have segmented the marketing lifecycle into 6 different stages, each being unique in terms of customer needs and behaviours. Your duty as a marketer is to carefully analyze each step stage of the lifecycle and create a tailored marketing strategy that attracts new customers, retains current ones, and incentivises your advocates.

The stages of the marketing lifecycle

1. Awareness

At this point in time, you’re trying to get your brand onto the radar of your potential customers as a solution provider. If you haven’t already created your customer personas, this should be your first step and there are several sources of information you can use. One key approach is talking with the sales team. Use methods to reach out to your existing customers and understand what drives their purchasing decisions, what information they consume and through which channels. See our life science marketing plan article for more detail on personas.
It’s too early to speak about specific products yet, so try addressing any challenges your audience face instead. Alternatively, create specific educational material relevant to the scientific field in question. Always keep your target audience in mind, craft engaging content focusing on SEO and use the channels you identified above to disseminate it. Always keep your target audience and their challenges in mind. For example, if you’re targeting academics and the price point of your products is low enough for graduate students to buy, why not implement a new student starter pack? This is a great way to welcome them into their research life, while grabbing their attention and creating a positive rapport.

Understand and define personas

Craft appealing targeted content (e.g educational, addressing challenges NOT product content)

SEO optimisation

PPC campaigns

2. Engagement

At this stage, you want to start creating a desire for your product or service by differentiating from the competition. Your content should become more specific, but never self-centred. Always keep the problem first. Bear in mind that scientists are conservative and make evidence-led decisions, so make sure that your content is objective and accurate. They are also a lot more likely to trust their peers than commercial sources, so think about leveraging scientific publications in a white paper or case study. If your existing customers are allowed to talk about their work that involved your product or service, ask them to do so in a webinar or video Q&A and share enticing snippets in your social media. Tip: avoid “death by powerpoint” on your webinars and plan them more as a lively discussion. This not only makes it more engaging, but also allows you to repurpose your content as articles or podcasts.

Product content with a focus on scientific credibility

Testimonials & Peer-review publications

Expand opt-in customer database

Social media, webinars and events

3. Evaluation

You’ve attracted enough attention to your solution and it’s time to entice your customer into taking action. Make sure your sales team has all the materials they need to make a conversion possible. You wouldn’t build a website without carefully considering the design and User Experience (UX), so put the same effort into those sales decks to make sure they look professional and impressive. Use email nurturing to make sure that customer interest doesn’t fade away, and if your business model allows it, entice them with demos or free trials.

Present your product

Marketing content and collaterals to support sales team (clear product value proposition)

Email nurturing for sales conversion (automation)

Re-marketing

NB: Extended conversion criteria for some product sales – technical team input, bespoke use case testing and data. Examples include bulk purchases for specific or non-tested applications of reagents / biologics, or alternatively, high ticket research instrumentation items for specific applications.

4. Conversion

This stage is the point at which your customers engage directly with the sales team, or alternatively, use your e-commerce platform to make the decision to buy. This is a result of the trust they have in your brand in stages 1 and 2. Furthermore, the relevant product knowledge they have gleaned, at stage 3. After evaluation of the suitability of your product for their application, they have decided it is superior to competitor products (or unique on the market if competing products do not exist). Ensure that all key customer demographics are captured electronically at this stage, (if they haven’t been earlier in the lifecycle), alongside research areas and applications field. It is fine balance between capturing the relevant demographics, and ensuring you don’t ask too much that it makes the process arduous. Also, if they havent opted-in to date, present a double opt-in option again to receive content ( or follow the relevant GDPR compliance relevant in your region). This serves several purposes. You can send highly relevant marketing and product content to them in the future, which they are much more likely to engage with. In turn, you increase the chance that they hold your brand in mind for future product purchases – which links in to our next step below.

Ease of purchase

Excellence in customer experience – process and delivery

Capture key demographics (including research areas – if you haven’t already!)

5. Retention

Retention is all about building long terms relations with your clients to ensure they keep coming back. For many life science companies that sell e.g. a product plus follow on support in the form of consumables or a software license, the attention that needs to be dedicated to this step is self-evident. In the case of other models, don’t make the mistake of forgetting your buyers and focussing all your energy into new customer acquisition. Existing customers should be made to feel valued and looked after. Make sure you have a comprehensive strategy to tackle customer support that involves FAQ and troubleshooting pages, Live Chat or Chatbot functions with well-thought out decision trees and of course a well-trained customer service team. Set targets on query answer times and vigorously measure customer satisfaction. The Net Promoter Score is a good metric to adopt for the latter, but also think what other factors are important for your business and incorporate them into your Customer Satisfaction Survey.

Excellence in technical and customer support

Troubleshooting, FAQ and technical support pages and documentation

Customer satisfaction

New targeted content for regular re-engagement (owned media – social, online, literature and webinars)

6. Loyalty

Loyalty is not simply about a satisfied buyer making repeat purchases. We mentioned above that scientists are peer-led, so this is the stage where you want your client talking to his peers about the positive experiences with your brand. Small gestures go a long way into establishing that positive rapport. Establish touch points with your customers post-purchase. A simple way is to ask about their satisfaction with your product or service. Alternative ideas, particularly relevant to the life sciences are to scan the scientific literature and send congratulatory messages to your clients when they publish. Another approach would be to offer incentives to your existing customers when they act as advocates. For example, when they act as referrers, agree to provide testimonials, or engage in your marketing activities such as webinars or case studies.

Ongoing customer satisfaction

Loyalty schemes and offers

Incentivise

In Summary

The marketing lifecycle is a continuous process, and each stage is equally important for your company’s success. Here, we’ve outlined optimal marketing actions and activities to take at each stage of the marketing lifecycle for a B2B life sciences environment. There is often a focus on tactics to reach your customers and enable a sales conversion. However, due care and emphasis must also be given to retention by providing exemplary customer support, and giving incentives for ongoing loyalty. The latter stages are sometimes neglected, but are fundamental to the key goal of any successful business – a growing loyal and engaged customer base.

If you need help in planning a coherent marketing strategy that includes tactics around each marketing lifecycle stage, don’t hesitate to contact us

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Onyva The Agency 2022 Highlights: Happy 2023

Our 2022 Highlights!

It’s been a busy year! So we’ve put together some highlights from 2022 for you from our marketing projects for the charity, medical, life sciences sector and more.
We’re looking forward to working with you in 2023.

A few things we’ve been busy with this year:

1 New website for a national melanoma charity: Melanoma Focus

(Rebrand, full content production, unique patient guide and professional resources)

5 strategic marketing plans written
1 Award
200+ individual unique content pieces and graphics
1 case study, interview and graphics
Charity Partner sponsorship – Petals 10th Anniversary
10 medical infographics for patients
5 Medical literature flyers

Get in touch if you need marketing support for a free initial 1 hr consult: info@onyva-agency.com

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.

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.’

Toolkit for life sciences marketing: Strategy, email & SEO

In this summary article, we’ve collated insights and tips into key marketing tactics, if you’re working in the scientific sector. These include the fundamentals needed for a life science marketing plan, email marketing advice for the scientific sector, and an SEO checklist.

Life sciences marketing plan: Fundamentals and Infographic

This article, includes a useful infographic and covers the key background work you need to do, before you formulate an effective life sciences marketing strategy. These fundamentals, that cover customer personas, product, targets, form a core basis for both inbound and outbound marketing tactics.

Email marketing for the Scientific Sector

In this post, we cover prerequisites for getting your email marketing up and running optimally. We consider relevant content ideas for the life sciences, biotech, medical and related sectors — with tactics on how to grow and establish your subscriber list. We summarise the key email platform providers and provide insights on layout. In addition we cover approaches to lead nurturing and cadence.

Navigating SEO: Tips and infographic

Navigating SEO in a B2B scientific product marketing setting is business critical, but comes with its own unique challenges. In this post, we provide key pointers on starting your SEO plan. This is complemented with an infographic SEO checklist into tactics and resources, to ensure you’ve got the key things covered.

In summary

Doing your groundwork is essential to provide direction and a solid foundation for your overarching marketing plan. It’s important to take time to choose your platform, consider subscribers, plan content and optimise layouts for effective email marketing. Similarly, SEO for the scientific sector often sees you competing for similar technical terms, so optimising iteratively, is essential to get ahead.As your first quarter progresses, you may need to modify to account for changes. This could be due to market factors, a new offering from a competitor, for example, or sales underperformance.
Adaptability is a key skill for life science marketing success.

If you need life science marketing consultancy Email us today!