Marketing to a life sciences audience is different than talking to the average consumer. Particularly for biotech companies, the profile of the potential buyer is an intelligent, well-educated person who wants facts about the value of your product, not fluff or sales-speak.
That’s good news for biotech companies creating their marketing strategy, though, thanks to some common content marketing assets that answer the needs of this kind of audience. With these marketing pieces, you’ll build trust in your brand and product while also moving customers along the buyer’s journey.
Competitive Analysis
A competitive analysis as a marketing asset might take a number of forms. It might be a chart showing how your product measures up, point by point, to a competitor. It might be a long-form document that discusses the results of a study that compares your product to others. Or it could be a visual representation of data – like an infographic – that presents comparison results as easily digestible data.
There are a number of ways to represent how your product is superior in the market. In fact, one of the advantages of using competitive analysis as part of your biotech marketing strategy is the information can be reused and re-presented in multiple formats, allowing your audience to choose how they want to consume the information.
What is important, though, is the content, regardless of format. That content should follow a few rules.
- The content must be true: The fastest way to lose your audience is to lie to them, and with a highly intelligent audience that is doubly true. Whatever you present in your competitive analysis marketing pieces must be factual or you risk alienating your potential customers.
- The content should be based on provable facts: While related to the first point, this is slightly different. When providing competitive analysis data, the facts must be provable, not opinion or conjecture.
- Minimize negativity: Otherwise known as “don’t punch down”, be sure to use your competitive analysis to show the value of your brand, not as an excuse to tear apart your competitors.
Whitepapers
Content marketing is about helping your audience solve problems. Whitepapers are the perfect marketing asset to prove your biotech brand’s worth in helping them do that. A well-written whitepaper combines research with a particular world view on the problem set to offer potential buyers a path to a solution.
Whitepapers go beyond being a roadmap to solving a problem. They are highly influential marketing collateral. According to Marketing Land, more than 25% of companies that use whitepapers have found them to provide valuable leads.
Whitepapers attract your audience to your content, prove that you are knowledgable in your field, and offer assistance to a problem the audience is experiencing with little asked in return. There are some rules to creating whitepapers, though, that are especially important for marketing to an audience interested in biotech products.
Don’t try and sell in the paper. Yes, you’re creating a marketing asset. But that doesn’t mean you’re (overtly) using it to sell. Think of a whitepaper as more like a friend giving advice. When you know that you can trust that friend to help you, you turn to them more and more. A small call to action is appropriate at the end of the paper, but sales talk should not appear in the rest of the document.
Do your research. Your audience is smart, and they are coming to you to learn. If you simply present them with common facts, or poorly researched ones, at best your audience will learn to ignore you.
Get to the point. Whitepapers are a long-form document. Most are between 3 – 7 pages. Don’t write to fill the page, though. Your points should be concise, and prose should be to the point. A two-page whitepaper that solves a problem clearly is far superior to a seven-pager that takes forever getting to the point.
Don’t make it a wall of text. Be sure to include both your well-researched text and visuals that will help break up the content. Even boxes with important statistics can help break up the copy and make the paper easier to read.
Case Studies
Case studies are the proof in the pudding, so to speak. A case study proves to your audience that you’ve worked with others and that they saw results. What a case study offers your audience is a working example of the benefits of your products. In the life sciences, little is more convincing than that.
A case study shows how the lives of medical professionals and patients were improved by using your biotech company’s products. It takes your marketing out of the realm of theoretical studies and research papers and provides “social proof” – real people and real results.
Case studies should take the form of a journey. Begin by talking about the specific problem that your customer had that they wanted to solve. Next, talk about how they evaluated other options, but chose yours based on certain benefits. You should then illustrate how your client used your product with patients. You should close by talking about how the product benefitted the customer in some tangible way – better patient outcomes, ROI, faster recovery, better care, etc.
Your case study should also include the key benefits of using your biotech product in the words of the customer, whenever possible. Quote them, and make sure that they approve of the quote. That way you can be assured that they will stand behind their words should anyone ever ask.
