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.
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.
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 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!
This years International Women’s Day IWD2022 has the theme of ‘Break the Bias.’ The Onyva Team Members have come up with four approaches that they feel contribute the most to tackling gender bias in the workplace.
1. Amplification
Different genders have been shown to have different communication styles, with male styles typically being more direct in expressing their opinions or needs. Common female complaints include being talked over in meetings or when stating an idea, which is then picked up by another male colleague in the room and rephrased as their own.
So if you hear a good idea – amplify it by repeating it and giving credit to the person who came up with it. Don’t let them be talked over, or someone else rephrase it, and make it their own.
2. Don’t let the loudest dominate
Ensure everyone is heard. In meetings, having short summaries from those attending in advance, with the points they want to make to the Chair/Organiser can help.
3. Don’t be a bystander, speak up
Step in and support each other and don’t be a bystander to gender based put downs or biased comments. These comments may not be significant enough to raise with HR, but nevertheless help fuel bias. Having colleagues, both male and female that speak up against low-grade bullying or inappropriate comments, can provide much needed support and change workplace culture.
4. Challenge ideas of merit
I’ve often heard ‘We promote on merit,’as a catch all term that makes organisations feel better about themselves, and even ‘it’s impossible to promote women,’ (said to me directly by a male CEO at one company).But who defines that merit, and what does it actually mean in real terms? We need to challenge an organisation’s idea of merit. Especially, when it equates to traditionally male characteristics, as is still the case in many workplaces.
In our new video our MD, Seema Sharma, talks about our specialist scientific marketing agency. We focus on our services, team and the sectors we cover. In addition, we include some recent global examples of life science marketing projects. For example research instrumentation campaign launches, digital marketing for life science reagents, and SEO for scientific publishing.
We are a full service scientific marketing agency
If you are looking for marketing strategy, brand & design, digital marketing, copywriting, or PR in a scientific field, please contact the team. We’d be happy to provide advice and let you know more about what we do: info@onyva-agency.com
The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in many changes in the way we all work, as well as the drastic health consequences we have been unfortunate to experience or witness. In this short video, our MD, Dr. Seema Sharma describes some business challenges that have presented to us as an agency focussed on the scientific field, and how we have adapted our life science marketing services.
Covid-19 Vaccines: Global landscape of Phase 3 Trials
Our vaccine infographic highlights the key Covid-19 vaccines in full or early use, globally. Links to the original reference, where the Phase 3 trial has been published and referenced are shown below.
Company: Pfizer and BioNTech – US/DE
Name: Comirnaty, BNT162b2 (Pfizer vaccine)
Polack FP, Thomas SJ, Kitchin N, et al. Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine. N Engl J Med. 2020;383(27):2603-2615. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa2034577
Company: Moderna and NIH, US
Name: mRNA-1273
Baden LR, El Sahly HM, Essink B, et al. Efficacy and Safety of the mRNA-1273 SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine. N Engl J Med. 2021;384(5):403-416. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa2035389
Type: Adenovirus vector
Company: Gamaleya, RU
Name: Sputnik V
Logunov DY, Dolzhikova IV, Shcheblyakov DV, et al. Safety and efficacy of an rAd26 and rAd5 vector-based heterologous prime-boost COVID-19 vaccine: an interim analysis of a randomised controlled phase 3 trial in Russia [published online ahead of print, 2021 Feb 2]. Lancet. 2021;S0140-6736(21)00234-8. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(21)00234-8
Company: Oxford university (Vaccitech) and Astra Zeneca, UK/SE
Name: AZD1222
Voysey M, Clemens SAC, Madhi SA, et al. Safety and efficacy of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine (AZD1222) against SARS-CoV-2: an interim analysis of four randomised controlled trials in Brazil, South Africa, and the UK [published correction appears in Lancet. 2021 Jan 9;397(10269):98]. Lancet. 2021;397(10269):99-111. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(20)32661-1
For further information, our in-depth post on the results of the AZD1222 vaccine trial, covers more detail.
Peer review awaited: Phase 3 vaccine trials
The following vaccines are awaiting peer-review, so alternative sources for efficacy figures, some of which are press releases of interim analysis from the manufacturer, are shown.
* Sputnik V consists of two adenovirus vector constituents (rAd5 and rAd26),
** This figure varies dependent on the source and trials in Brazil (50%), UAE (86%) and from the manufacturer (79%) state differing efficacies.
Publisher: About Us – Onyva The Agency
We are a scientific marketing agency. We have continued to support clients through the current pandemic, producing technical literature, articles and digital marketing support relating specifically to COVID-19 for the medical, healthcare and biotechnology industries. Our scientifically trained team are able to combine up-to-date knowledge on the evolving pandemic, with decades of marketing experience to meet you needs.Take a look at our services.
We’re celebrating 5 years since our launch this month! Onyva the Agency, founded by our MD Seema Sharma, officially launched in September 2015. We have been providing marketing services to the scientific sector for half a decade! During that time we’ve partnered with diverse clients in scientific publishing, biotechnology, medical diagnostics, research instrumentation and cancer charity sectors, to name a few.
‘We’re very proud to have reached this milestone, and provide our marketing expertise combined with our scientific and industry-specific knowledge to our growing client base. The recent challenges faced globally with the Covid-19 pandemic, have meant that we’ve had to work more closely to support the health, medical and life sciences sector in rapidly emerging situations with tight deadlines. We’re looking forward to the next 5 years, and expanding our Public Relations and bespoke marketing software offering.’
Dr. Seema Sharma. Founder and MD, Onyva the Agency.
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:
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)
(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
Onyva The Agency launched in September 2015, as a specialist scientific marketing agency. Founded by our Managing Director, Dr. Seema Sharma, our aim was to provide marketing excellence for life sciences, medical and technical fields. Since then, we’ve had an exciting journey working with several clients in diverse fields. These include medical diagnostics, scientific publishing, software and biotech, to date.
It’s been a busy and creative time at Onyva. To give you a flavour, here’s a selection of some of the things we’ve done for our clients over the past year:
What’s been keeping us busy…
9 bespoke cell culture kit label designs
6 content marketing articles
5 e-mail campaigns (beta-testing software launch, medical product marketing)
5 medical, software and life sciences marketing flyers
3 medical infographics
2 medical and life sciences company branding projects
2 biotech white papers
1 e-mail platform consultation, integration and launch
1 medical PR release
1 web redesign and content creation
1 life sciences catalogue
1 medical case study video
and a whole lot more!
Scientific Marketing
The feedback we have to date suggests we grasped technical product concepts quickly. Clients stated that this saved them time in explaining concepts, and their campaigns benefitted from this understanding. This was particularly valued for content creation, infographic design and targeted email campaigns. We’ve always ensured the latter were tailored to our clients customer base, taking time to discuss individual customer personas and messaging.
‘Onyva The Agency has provided concise, targeted and well crafted articles for the Mendeley Careers website: the content has bolstered the site’s reputation as well as its Search Engine Optimisation. Seema is a consummate professional and a pleasure to work with.’ – Dr. Christian DeFeo, Product Marketing Manager – Mendeley | Elsevier.
During the last year, our clients have varied considerably. We have worked with start-ups, possessing no marketing infrastructure, who are at a preliminary stage of establishing their brand, product and customer base. In contrast, our marketing agency has also helped established companies, founded over a century ago. As a result, we have had to take a highly adaptive approach to our clients. Critically, we’ve always taken time at the start of a project to assess a client specific needs. We’ve communicated this in depth with our partners, to ensure we focus on the right marketing channels with content relevant to their phase of growth.
‘Since our launch, we have worked successfully to bring a diverse range of marketing solutions to our clients in the life sciences, tech and scientific fields. We look forward to the year ahead, with the aim to provide the best possible scientific marketing services.’ – Seema Sharma, Founder and MD, Onyva The Agency.
If you need scientific or tech marketing expertise in 2018 — let’s talk
e: info@onyva-agency.com T: +44 1223 790557
In our free new industry report, we give a year’s retrospective on mergers, acquisitions and technology advances. We focus specifically on the Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology and Medical (PBM) sectors in 2016. Our specialist life science marketing consultants provide a concise summary of key developments during the year. In addition, we include a useful visual summary M&A reference chart. Furthermore, emerging technologies that have driven partnerships and growth are also covered. Some examples of the latter include CART-Cell therapies and CRISPR genome editing.
