Life Sciences
Biotech and Medical Device Manufacturers are at the forefront of cutting-edge technologies that often influence our lives in profound ways. Staffed with the brightest minds and latest tools, bio-technology firms are discovering, inventing and innovating at a furious pace. So why are so many biotech and medical device websites so bad?
Life sciences websites are generally not cutting-edge for many reasons, some less obvious than others. Biotech and medical device manufacturing companies are founded by doctors, engineers and scientists passionate about their field and highly focused on their company’s vision. And like many other industries, biotech and medical device companies will frequently assign an inexperienced junior staff member to “deal with the website” while nonetheless expending marketing budget on traditional ways of marketing, including colorful print ads and product catalogs. Even less obvious are web properties meant to look bad so that potential investors aren’t led to believe that the company has invested any significant resources in anything other than their products or services!
But life sciences firms with bad websites may be missing out on a very important audience: those who are looking for their products and services for purchase or as an investment target.
How can we help make your life sciences business more successful? Contact Boomcycle today
All Great Websites Have A Lot In Common
A great biotech website or medical device manufacturing website have the same ingredients that any quality web presence enjoys:
- A clear explanation of what the company makes or the services that it provides
- A clear value proposition
- The latest product information
- A frictionless sales funnel
- A understandable and flexible navigational structure
- Clean XHTML and CSS “under the covers”
- An esthetically beautiful design
Unfortunately “design” is usually the most obvious feature of a website and the one aspect on which every person at the company feels comfortable weighing in. But “web design” is not a simple subject. Esthetics, while important, play a lesser role as compared to the findability of the website, the effectiveness of the communication, the value proposition, the product information and the sales funnel.
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Push Marketing vs. Pull Marketing
Let’s quickly define two marketing concepts:
1. Push Marketing – Going after your prospect using traditional methods: cold calling, display advertising, appointment setting – these are “interrupt” methods. Push Marketing is still useful and unquestionably vital to new life science companies.
2. Pull Marketing – Getting your prospect to find you. Pull Marketing is enabled by the amazing power of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. In Pull Marketing, your prospect is searching for a company like yours, though they don’t know that you exist. If you deliver a quality online experience once they find you, you then get a warm lead and a pre-qualified prospect. It is Pull Marketing that many life sciences companies are ignoring to their detriment.
Let Your Best Prospects Find You
In order for a website to be effective, it must communicate with the client base and potential client base of your company. The order in which these things happen is important to note — your prospects must find you, and you can help them by implementing a Pull Marketing strategy.
Pull Marketing begins with essential market research. Fortunately most biotech and medical device manufacturing companies have already identified their potential business prospects or at least, the ones they know about — the other interesting clients are the ones they don’t know about. In many industry verticals, this latter audience is by far the largest (if you already know there are only two or three possible potential buyers for your product you’re probably not reading this!)
So how do you go about helping your potential clients to find you? Integrate your market research into your website and let your potential clients find you via a search engine.
Fortunately for new life sciences companies looking to make a big splash, very few existing biotechnology or medical device manufacturing companies bake their marketing research into their website. With a fairly modest effort, a new life sciences company can often quickly dominate their chosen niche online.
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The Current State of Biotech Marketing On The Web
Let’s take a simple example. I searched “cancer diagnostic kits” in Google. The first few search results which appeared in my web browser were as follows:
- A biotech company’s web page
- Two press releases on medicalnewstoday.com
- One press release on bizjournals.com
- A biotech-related FAQ on faq.org
- A biotech company’s product web page dated 1992(!)
- A spammer website
You might think that the biotech company in position #1 was staffed by some smart cookies — however, the biotech company’s web page was blank. You can blame Google for many things but generally Google is pulling the most relevant results based on their sophisticated search algorithms. The problem is more basic: there’s just not much in the way of relevant biotech search results. A great many bio technology companies are missing out on an incredible biotech marketing “gold rush” since in many cases their competition is not doing much either.
The fact is that many life sciences companies are not using the web effectively and their websites often contain broken, hard to search (Flash websites are difficult for search engines to penetrate), irrelevant or out-of-date information. Savvy new biotech or medical device companies who develop effective web presences can leapfrog over competitors who have been around for years.
You’ve Pulled Your Prospect, Now What?
The next biggest mistake in life sciences online marketing today is the confusing, out-dated or ineffective layout and design of their website. Some biotech websites put forth tedious Flash, Silverlight or other graphic animations (animations are still an effective way for web designers to sell web design jobs!) to make a splash but unless they are communicating information, animations are a waste of time. Menus on these websites are often hidden, confusing or broken. Thus even if a life sciences company’s website is found, the potential client has precious little idea of how to engage or worse, is potentially annoyed.
It’s time to go back to Marketing 101: Make it easy for your prospects to do business with you. Your website must be easy to use and make it clear to your potential clients:
- What you have to offer
- What makes you different/better/special
- How to contact you
“Dive level” is a web marketing term that means how many clicks and/or pages your prospect must traverse in order to reach a contact form. A dive level of zero meant that your contact form is on your home page. This is considered ideal for quick Business-to-Consumer retail or other generic consumer engagements.
A dive level of zero is often not well-suited for a sophisticated Business-to-Business (B2B) prospect engagement. Informing and to some degree vetting your potential client is usually the best way to start a conversation that leads to a sale and an ongoing business relationship. The B2B life sciences audience is often busy, quite bright and require a healthy dose of information before making even a casual inquiry. The proper web architecture to engage a B2B life science company prospect is a clear path to the information in which they are interested, an appropriate amount of detail followed by an easy-to-use contact form — the “frictionless sales funnel”.
Prospect qualification — via a few optional questions on the contact form — is something for which your sales team will really thank you. Prospects who are delivered to your follow-up sales team who
Database Expertise Fuels Life Sciences Marketing Power
The key differentiator between Boomcycle and a generalist marketing agency can be summed up in a single phrase: “database expertise”. Boomcycle actually retains bio-informatics and database experts on staff who help make sense of the complexities of life sciences data. Company founder David Victor has over 20 years of enterprise class database experience dating back to some of the earliest relational database pioneers from UC Berkeley responsible for legendary powerhouses including Postgres and Ingres.
Boomcycle will help you integrate your product data into your marketing efforts in meaningful and effective ways.
Our database and bio-informatics expertise will ensure that your marketing efforts will be coordinated by Boomcycle online marketing database engineers. Your central product database as developed by your team (or Boomcycle engineers) and maintained by your product development team, is a treasure trove for your marketing efforts. Your life sciences product data can be re-purposed in myriad ways. Your most up-to-date product data:
- Populates your website – no outdated product information
- Can be used in conjunction with ecommerce to sell directly online
- Can be used to create printable PDF one-sheets
- Can be used to create printable catalogs via database publishing
- Can be exported in a variety of other useful formats: Excel, Word, Powerpoint, etc.
- Can be published and re-purposed by other websites via RSS, XML
Creating and maintaining all this biotech data can seem daunting. Fortunately Boomcycle database application developers can help you make sensible architectural and interface choices making it easy for your staff to coordinate their efforts. Boomcycle builds database systems featuring easy-to-understand User Interfaces, effective Role-based security and auditing, Approval queues as well as ecommerce capabilities.
The end result of a well-maintained biotech product information database are online and traditional marketing outlets that are always up-to-date.
Website Readability and Visibility
The human-readable text on a web page as well as what’s happening “under the covers” (the web page markup that most people don’t see) is critical. Your key phrases and marketing copy should read well and do double-duty as tasty “search engine food”. An example is our varied use in this document of the phrases “biotech”, “bio tech” and “bio technology”. Use of all these terms does not adversely affect the readability but does enhance the visibility of the web page since people may search using any of these terms and yet “mean” the same thing.
Well-formed XHTML and CSS-based layout means that your website can be cleanly viewed on traditional web browsers and many mobile devices. Did you know that as of this date (August 2010) Flash websites cannot be viewed on an iPhone? The best way to lay out a web page is to use the most up-to-date Web Standards. And while there’s no perfect world (all websites will render incorrectly to some degree when displayed in some web browsers) companies want their websites to display correctly on as many browsers as possible.
Meta tags are something that many people heard of in the 1990s and they are indeed still in use, but not in quite the same way they were before. For example, the “keywords” meta tag is not used by Google (too much potential for spamming) but is used by a few other search engines and is a useful device for focusing keyword-based marketing efforts. The “description” meta tag is used by Google for the descriptive paragraph that displays next to the search result (a great and under-utilized marketing tactic). There are many other meta tags which can be put to good use in a well-constructed website.
Boomcycle copywriters ensure the highest level of readability and search engine visibility, while our web developers stay up-to-date on the best practices use of web layout standards, well-formed markup and meta tags.
Best Practices For Life Sciences Online Marketing
Best practices for online marketing for Biotech and medical device manufacturing companies embodies many of the same best practices for other industries with B2B audiences:
- Market research that informs web content
- Great copy writing (and proof-reading!)
- Frictionless Sales Funnel – create a clear path that your prospects will use to engage
- Prospect qualification – the information provided by your prospect’s first contact is more than just name and phone number.
- Constant refreshing of content – search engines like fresh content — and so do your prospects.
- A well-built website that’s readable on the maximum number of devices
Then there are subtle differences with respect to the target biotech or medical device manufacturing prospects and major differences with regards to the advanced life sciences database requirements:
- Inform then Engage – your audience is more sophisticated than B2C web audiences and your website must offer more detail than is customary in order to engage and vet your potential clients.
- Your website is continuously updated with the latest product information.
- All product data flows from one source (your product database) – no confusing/conflicting product messages are put into the marketplace.
- Your team has appropriate access to make product data updates and updates flow through approval queues before publishing.
Life Sciences Marketing That Means Business
Don’t allow your biotech or medical device manufacturing company to make a bad first impression on your important prospects, be they potential customers or potential investors.
How can we help make your life sciences business more successful? Contact Boomcycle today