Date:  March 13, 2012

7:30-8:30am | Peabody Hotel- Orlando, FL (Barrel Spring Room)

Seats are limited.  Register with LPA

Title:  Maximizing Demand Generation for the Lab Products Industry

Synopsis:  In a recent survey of over 100 science marketing professionals, demand generation was rated as the number one priority for scientific product manufacturers. With the availability of sophisticated online marketing technologies, demand generation is easier to deploy, manage, and track than ever before. On the other hand, it is much more difficult than ever to create compelling content to be effective. During this talk, Hamid Ghanadan will present a model for how scientists make purchasing decisions, and will offer a framework for developing and managing the most effective content to maximize demand generation.

• Use of Back Buttons: Spool’s research suggests that the more a user utilizes a back button during a session, the more likely the user is not finding the content they need. Clickstreams (a series of mouse clicks made while using a website) in which the back button is used once predicts an 82% failure of a user finding the content they need. Clickstreams where two back buttons are used is indicative of a 98% failure rate!
• Pogo Sticking Behavior:behavior is when users bounce between levels of information hierarchy–for instance, a user needs to compare similar products and has to toggle between several different product pages in order to compare the desired information. Pogo sticking is correlated with lower eCommerce sales. Spool’s research suggests that the harder people need to work to get to the content they need, the less likely they will purchase on your website.
  

  Pogosticking is defined as the action of bouncing between hierarchies of information.

• Search: The more people use search fields, the more likely that the website is not delivering content in a way that users can easily find. It may also suggest that the link and navigation copy being used on a web page may not be resonating with users. Spool suggests reviewing search logs to see the search terms people are using most often. These may be key trigger words that should be incorporated into web page content and ultimately aid in delivering relevant content more efficiently.

These three user patterns are simple to diagnose and fix; and can result in better delivery of content, and higher likelihood in sales.

^{1. Spool, J. 2011, “The Secret Lives of Links”, An Event Apart, San Francisco, CA, The Sheraton Palace Hotel, pp. 17-25.}

Exactly 82.6% of internet users use search (eMarketer, July 2011) and one must acknowledge that search usage influences the point at which users engage with your content. Type in the search term ‘chemical analysis lab equipment reviews’ and you will be served 9.1M results. The top four search results (as of this posting) were: 1) a lab equipment quiz, 2) company product page, 3) company press release page, and 4) company homepage.

The homepage is only one of hundreds of ways a user can find your website and each of your web pages should be optimized to capture this moment when customers are searching for information related to their specific needs. While we could talk at length about page optimization, here are two quick, actionable tips for getting started.

Google Search Results for search term "chemical analysis laboratory equipment review"

1. Trigger Word Analysis: Review your website’s search log and see what search terms are being used to find content on your site. These are trigger words, words that users look and scan your pages for to find information that is relevant to them. When they don’t find these words on your page, you can bet their next action is to type these words into your search box to find them on your site.
2. Search Term Analysis: Google offers a free tool, Google Insights for Search which is useful for looking up search terms related to your specific product or application focus and understand the patterns and trends around them.

Doing just these two things will lead to a wealth of data and get you started on optimizing your pages for a more relevant and user-friendly experience.

Too many times we’ve seen the “launch it and leave it” approach to content marketing and thus argue for an approach that considers content as a life cycle, focusing heavily on the development of an organized plan and ongoing stewardship of your content. For instance, you want to build a blog, but what specifically are you going to say? What topics and messages need to be addressed? Does the content already exist? Who will write and how often? How will content be deployed and by whom? How will it be tagged to ensure that the entire effort helps with your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy? It can get overwhelming to sort out the details and logistics around development and execution of a content strategy. Below are a few tools we recommend:

• Content Audit: Start with what you have and build from that. A content audit will help organize what you have, what stays, what goes away, and what is missing. To begin a content audit, start with a spreadsheet that itemizes each page of your site. The grid should be organized by section and sub page, providing details on the page’s title, URL, associated imagery, and content along with a notes section to detail action items for each page.

• Editorial Calendar: Define your content format, topic, owner, publishing schedule. This documentation allows you to get the full picture of how your content is being supported and can be the starting point for developing timelines and identifying resources and requirements for content.

• SEO Content Grid: Every page on your website should have a unique and defined topic. Documenting page-level specifications (H1 tags, meta descriptions, SEO search terms) for every page will enable your content creators to stay on strategy when developing content.
  

  A spreadsheet grid that depicts the appropriate table headers to be used for proper content strategy

• Web Page Guideline Template: Contributors will focus on the core content they are producing, but what about the ancillary information that helps to frame content on a web page? Provide your content creators with simple guidelines that define what they need to deliver. A page guideline template should contain the web page’s objective, key message, and content priorities. It should also detail whether the content creator needs to develop headlines, subheads, pull quotes (a main excerpt that will be used elsewhere), reference data, page descriptions, imagery, citations, ideal URL, etc.

At first glace it may seem like an extraordinary amount of information to define and organize upfront, but having these details in place before you actually start will improve content development efficiencies in the long run, and without them, you run the risk of your content strategy dying on the vine.

Are there other tools you use when planning your content strategy? Share your thoughts or ideas with us. Together, we can built the best practices for developing effective, content-centric marketing campaigns for science.

Abstract

Most life science marketing activities are wasted because they prematurely try to persuade their audiences rather than first engaging them. But engaging scientists is far from easy, given their finely honed sense of skepticism and their strong tendency to filter out biased information. To develop more effective campaigns, marketers must first understand the psychological landscape of how scientists make decisions, and then to develop the most appropriate types of content to engage scientists, rather than deter them. In this first of a two-part Linus Report series, I introduce a model for how scientists consume information and then map this model to the archetypal scientific buying journey. This information will serve as the precursor for the second part in this series in the next issue, where I will offer the principles of Content-Centric Marketing for science and an actionable guide for the content types that make marketing campaigns up to 10 times more effective.

Introduction

Answer this question honestly: Could the science industry’s marketing significantly improve?

Most life science marketing activities are wasted. Advertising the way it is typically employed often garners little attention and generates dubious awareness—and not even measurable, at that. Lead generation statistically results in 1% response rates at best, or in other words, is 99% fruitless. Trade shows ordinarily convert less than 5% of attendees as leads. Finally, traditional printed sales collateral is expensive to produce, ship, store, inventory, update, and discontinue.

It’s not that these channels are flawed. What is flawed is the way we as marketers employ them today.

Marketing must produce results, and one of the most critical variables in effectiveness of marketing programs is content. Yet too often content becomes the limiting factor for success, treated as an afterthought. As content strategist Kristina Halvorson put it, “For years, we’ve been spending millions of dollars on strategy and research, user-experience design, visual design and technical platforms. In other words, we’ve invested in everything we need to build the vehicles for our content. And yet, strangely, it’s the content that gets left until the last minute.”¹ Too true.

The idea of focusing on content is not new. So why do so many science marketers fall prey to overinvesting in the mechanics of marketing programs that produce predictably mediocre results? It is not due to a lack of intelligence, experience, or resources.

It is because generating credible content is difficult. But it is not impossible. Indeed, it is our task. To make existing marketing channels significantly more effective, science marketers must drastically rethink how they develop their marketing programs. What is required is a simple shift: Instead of developing ads, brochures, electronic direct mail, and landing pages, science marketers should consider their programs as content strategies.

Such a change in view will have numerous and profound effects on a science company’s commercialization strategy in whole. Yet it requires no reorganization; nor does it require additional talent. It simply requires focusing the company’s current efforts toward developing and deploying the right kinds of content at the right time. By thinking of marketing programs as content strategies, companies will increase the effectiveness of their marketing programs by up to one order of magnitude.

To achieve this shift, in this Linus Report series, I offer a model that describes the types of content needed to make marketing campaigns successful, based on the archetypal scientist’s decision-making journey. This model is called Content-Centric Marketing for Science. In our experience, employing this model can significantly improve the effectiveness of marketing programs by up to one order of magnitude from current trends. First, this model requires a fine understanding of scientists, which I will provide in this issue.

A Deeper Understanding of Scientists

Scientists are influenced about their product choices through one of two main channels: peers and content. They weight the credibility of content from a variety of sources, and then seek the most relevant and credible information to decide about their purchases. This represents the scientists’ own buying journey. Through richer, more nuanced comprehension of how scientists typically make decisions and of their archetypal buying journeys, marketers can develop effective marketing programs that influence the decision of scientists through their buying journey in favor of the company’s products and services. The first phase is to understand the psychology of the archetypal scientist as a consumer, and then to map his/her typical buying journey.

The Archetypal Scientist

Scientists are assumed to be rational. The idea of the nonemotional scientist is a common public misperception, that the scientific mind makes decisions based on logic alone. To conclude that scientists² are strictly logical obscures the rich complexities of the human mind. In fact, research has determined that humans become clinically indecisive if the part of the brain that controls emotion is damaged or compromised.³

Scientists are human beings. They exhibit all the subtleties of human thought and behavior in their work. For marketers to overlook this fact creates costly assumptions. Like everyone, scientists make decisions by balancing a set of logical, emotional, and ego-based trade-offs. Where scientists differ is that they have undergone formal training to evaluate information in an unbiased, evidence-based, factual manner. Given their highly refined minds, it is especially difficult to persuade them. To develop an effective mode of communicating with them, it is important first to put logic and emotion in context.

Three Decision-Making Drivers, Three Classes of Benefits

We can begin to understand some of the intricacies of the scientific mind by considering the drivers of human choice. Marketing strategist David Aaker, in his book Building Strong Brands, argues that there are three classes of benefits a brand can possess. Each benefit maps directly to one of the three decision-making drivers. The following figure presents details of each.

Figure 1: Each person relies on a different ratio of Logic, Emotion, and Ego for making a decision. Also, people will rely more or less heavily on one of these drivers depending on the product they are considering purchasing.

Most marketing messages for scientific products and services provide only logical feature/benefit statements, failing to engage the scientist’s emotion or ego. The key is to know when and how to engage either a scientist’s emotion, or his/her logic or ego during the buying journey. This can be approached by mapping how the archetypal scientist consumes information.

“What is the ideal number of follow-on touches after the initial lead generation campaign campaign?” They ask.

“Great question!” I reply, enthusiastically.

It’s an exciting question to engage for several reasons. It shows that life science marketers are thinking beyond the drive-by, single-instance lead generation that results in mostly wasted effort.  It also signals an underlying and fundamental need for content, which is the true driver behind nurturing leads into opportunities.

The answer to this question lies in two key variables that marketers should consider when deciding on how many touches to include within a campaign.  The first variable is the true value of the content being communicated.  If the substance of the communication is an overt advertisement or a financial offer, then may scientists would tell you that even a single touch is too many.  However, if each touch contains an incremental addition to a compendium of content about a specific topic*, then scientists may welcome or even covet as many touches as the company makes. So really, the number of touches depends on how good your content is.

The second variable is the scientist’s own preference for receiving information.  Why not ask your leads to determine just how many touches they prefer receiving at the time of lead generation.  Again, if your content is actually compelling and valuable, scientists will opt for more. Today’s marketing automation technology easily allows marketers to finely segment every single lead based on his/her demographics as well as content preferences, and then serve up the most relevant content to each person based on these segmentation criteria.  In other words, don’t ask me. Ask your audience.

I realize that it’s far easier to provide such general guidance about such an important topic than it is to actually implement content for a campaign.  It comes as little surprise that the biggest challenge that life science marketers face is generation of content, according to our survey of life science marketing trends in July, 2011.  But generating compelling content for scientists is far from impossible.  Consider the notion that content can be anything, from an image, to a word, to a sound.  And content can come from a variety of sources: It can be authored by company personnel or on the company’s behalf by content development experts; content  can also be crowd-sourced, instigated within the social media sphere, or curated from publicly available information; and companies can sponsor existing content from third-parties such as publishers.

So the next time you develop a demand generation campaign, consider focusing on the content exclusively.  The rest—including amazing results—will follow.

* By specific topic, I do not necessary mean scientific topic.  Engaging content can be about anything relevant to the scientist, including usability, workflows, life in the laboratory, or general information.  The topic does need to be relevant to the value proposition that is being demonstrated by the company, however.

The answer:  bias.

Scientists are trained to evaluate information from an objective frame of reference in order to learn and create truth.  As such, they subjectively filter out any information that they perceive as being biased, regardless of the actual credibility of the information.  Making claims and trying to persuade scientists to subscribe to your way of thinking through words only heighten a scientist’s sense of skepticism and create a further credibility gap.  The more effective approach is to demonstrate your value proposition.

There are several levers that you can pull to demonstrate your value without saying it; Your point of view; your engagement in the scientific communities where your audiences live, your corporate posture; your digital “body language”, and especially your brand all affect the scientists.

In a recent study reported in a Harvard Business Review article entitled Why Customers Rebel Against Slogans, researchers found that company brands were far more persuasive in getting retail shoppers to buy more than marketing messages (slogans). In this study, the investigators found that predisposing shoppers to brands associated with luxury would result in shoppers spending 26% more than when they were predisposed to neutral brands (the control group).  Intuitive, you might conclude.  But here is where the story becomes more interesting.

Marketing messages had the opposite effect:  Messages about luxury actually reduced the shopper’s bills by 26% compared to neutral messages.  The researchers posit that this adverse effect on marketing messages are due primarily to the fact that consumers detect bias and do not want to be manipulated.  Whereas brands transmit messages subconsciously, marketing messages are far more overt and subject to the consumers’ filters.

As the life science industry is becoming increasingly excited about the prospects of demand generation and adopting powerful marketing automation to increase short-term revenue, I caution that they may be, inadvertently creating barriers to their own success.  Barriers that create subconscious meanings, and are far more difficult to reverse.

Group registration for 3 or more:  $595

Course intended for: Product managers, marketing managers and directors, marketing program architects, Marcom managers and directors in the following science related industries:

• Life Science Companies
• Analytical Instrumentation Providers
• Scientific Laboratory Products & Consumables Providers
• Scientific Service Providers

Instructor:  Hamid Ghanadan 

Synopsis:
With unprecedented competitive and revenue pressures, science marketers are realizing that traditional marketing does not generate sufficient Return on Investment (ROI).  With new marketing trends and technologies rapidly changing the landscape, it is more difficult than ever to get the most out of every marketing dollar.

This course provides a framework for developing, deploying, managing and measuring marketing programs for product launches, with a specific focus on generating sustainable revenue growth.

Developed specifically for the science industry, participants in this course will be introduced to concepts that they can immediately apply in marketing planning and management.  After this one-day training, participants will:

• Create marketing strategies that shorten sales cycles
• Cut the waste out of marketing programs and focus on ROI
• Develop content that keeps prospects engaged
• Learn about employing channels such as marketing automation, social media, and search engine optimization.

This course has been privately taught at some of the fastest growing companies within the scientific industry and is now available to industry professionals.

Space is limited.  Please register today.

Syllabus
8:30 – 9 am:  Continental Breakfast
9 -10:30:   Introduction / Setting objectives / Situation analysis
10:30 – 11 am:   Snack break
11 am – 12 pm: Effective positioning
12 – 1 pm:  Networking lunch
1 – 3 pm:  Principles of demand generation marketing / campaign architecture development
3 – 3:30 pm:  Snack break
3:30 – 4 pm:  Deployment and measuring campaigns
4 – 5:30 pm: Hands-on workshop

At the WebContent 2011 Conference, Gian Fulgoni of comScore, Inc., cited some interesting statistics around mobile media use in the US—projections show that this year, around 50% of the general population will use mobile media, with 32% of the devices having a touch interface. Last year there was a 55% growth in smartphone ownership, with Android ending the year as the leading smartphone platform.

Life scientists are clearly part of the general population, but does mobile content make sense for marketing to the life science sector? To really answer this question, we need to take a look at how the general population is using mobile media and then see if any of these uses translate into the life sciences environment.

One of the most important features of mobile media consumption is that context is king (well, this is true of media consumption in general), and that for mobile media, context is usually fluid and not static. By this I mean that people using their phone to access content are usually not sitting still at their desk but are elsewhere, perhaps walking, perhaps commuting (hopefully not driving). They also tend to consume mobile content in small bits—my favorite phrase from the meeting is “content snacking”—and the most successful content is either task-focused (navigation, finding movie times, finding out what to do at the moment), information-focused (catching up on email, reading blogs), or distraction-focused (playing a game while waiting for a train). Social networking such as connecting via Facebook and Twitter are particular standouts.

Translating these activities to the life sciences, the problem now becomes one of identifying your target audience in the life sciences and deciding if any of these contexts apply. The easiest one for me to address is the distraction-focused context. Having been a bench scientist for many years, I can confidently say that waiting takes up a substantial portion of your time (in addition to re-doing) and that there is definitely room for distraction-focused content. In this context, “snackable” is really key—ten-minute incubations, fifteen-minute centrifuge spins are common and are short enough that you don’t want to get distracted with something that would require too much focus. When you start getting into longer wait times, you are able to do something more involved and at your desk, so consuming mobile content is less likely.

And that content should be fun, and distracting, and short.

What other ways might we translate mobile content to the life sciences? I’ll have some more scenarios in my next post.

Matt, you mentioned that marketing antibodies is tough business. Specifically how do antibodies as a product category make for more challenging marketing?

Challenges for commercializing antibodies originate from the complications of the emerging field of proteomics. Determining the specificity and utility of an antibody requires a significant investment, especially when considering the variety of potential experiments, which may include multiple tissues, cell-based assays, genetically engineered organisms, multiplexing, protein enrichment, quantification needs, etc.

It is no surprise that the research community has experienced multiple barriers with obtaining the correct results. Companies often release antibodies with limited validation data to address such needs of researchers. If no antibody is available with data supporting the researcher’s intended use, a choice must be made to either test the existing commercially available products or initiate “custom” production. Both are costly, and the success rate varies.

Often times the preparation of sample, assay methods, or other experimental variation will determine the success of an antibody. For example, denatured conditions of samples have a much higher success rate when compared to frozen and untreated samples, especially if the antibody used was validated by Western blot. An antibody company addressing the variety of technical issues can greatly enhance success rates of antibodies and make large contributions to the research community.

It is important to mention information management, since the volume of products on any major antibody website is in the tens of thousands and this massive amount of product content requires significant systems and systematic efforts to update. Antibody companies have become experts for managing a massive amount of product information for both online and operational purposes.

Seldom does a product offering contend with this much variability. With so much complexity, it’s a wonder that there are any commercially viable antibodies businesses out there. How does your current company minimize the variability in product success?

Aviva Systems Biology takes a systematic approach for developing antibodies. Multiple protein domains per target are selected to synthesize peptide-based antigens to generate polyclonal antibodies. Antibodies are tested against multiple panels of cell lines and tissues to determine if they are acceptable for commercialization. Afterwards, we focus on obtaining additional relevant data from collaborators. Our main objective is to produce a significant number of discoveries and applications resulting from our reagents. This combination of high-throughput production and ability to establish hundreds of collaborative efforts for validation is one of our strongest differentiating factors.

Let’s talk about marketing. What are the top variables that you focus on to maximize the results of your marketing strategies?

Since the primary method of commercializing antibodies involves web-based initiatives, we focus on web metrics like time-on-site, new visitors generated, and returning visitors. Associating these metrics to a particular campaign is also helpful for a comparative analysis to determine which commercialization methods are the most effective.

Marketing strategies in the antibody marketplace often involve adding additional resources to products to provide deeper insight to the customers. For example, at Aviva we added over 5000 disease, pathway, tissue, and related product categories to index our products. These categories provide more details on the target of interest and enable a more targeting browsing of Aviva’s products. Such enhancements can impact all three metrics described above.

At Aviva, we are constantly obtaining feedback from customers, which allow us to further identifying and prioritize customers’ needs. This valuable market research eventually leads to shifts in our value proposition, which can be monitored by metrics and compared to other company initiatives.

Sounds like you’re building an online relationship with each customer, providing him/her educational content as added value, and also responding to his/her needs. Do you systematize this level of customer-centricism, or is it as labor-intensive as it sounds?

One of my favorite aspects of life science is that customers are indexed to a greater extent than any other field I’m familiar with. We spend a considerable amount of efforts associating the available publications with our lead and customer database. Our interactions are never just an ordinary, “Have you heard about Aviva?”, but rather, “We see that your research involves cardiovascular disease. Here is a link to products which may be of interest to you.”

Maintaining a customer in this field requires a company to become a resource and provide additional details that the customer would not usually consider. At Aviva, we provide resources which list relevant genes based on disease, pathway, or other product category. We determine relevancy by listing number of available research publications which can be a baseline for determining priority. This enables the researcher to evaluate trends based on a particular topic. An excellent example is Aviva’s disease resource page, which can be found here, www.avivasysbio.com/research-areas/disease-related.

What are the top three axioms that you’ve learned in your career marketing antibodies?

The online marketplace is a key priority for antibody companies. Search engines like Google, have established significant online “real estate” which is battled over by multiple antibody companies. Webpage content, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics, and driving traffic to the website is key for success in this industry.
There is no question that a tremendous amount of energy and effort is taken by antibody companies to compete online for customers. Once a customer is obtained, a substantial amount of energy is needed to maintain that relationship to continue and build business. The antibody industry is no different than others. Repeat business drives profits.

Increasing relevant and appropriate product data can proportionately increase unit sales of that product. At Aviva, our primary focus is generating supporting data to assist researchers with their decisions to purchase our reagents. For example, we recently added hundreds of immunohistochemistry, immunofluorescence, immunoprecipitation, and immunoblot data to the products. By doing so, we expect a proportional increase in sales for those products.

Amazing! Have you actually witnessed a direct correlation between the increase web content and sales?

Increasing the criteria describing a product will expand the applicable customer base. With so many needed utilities for reagents, increasing the addressable markets can have a sizable impact on the business. I’m certain many organizations have witnessed the correlation between the amount of data for a given product and the revenue realized. Due to this, we have dozens of initiatives to enhance product data.

Can you share some takeaways that life science marketing professionals in other product categories can learn from antibody marketing?

Although the antibody industry is more difficult than most, the trade-offs are significant. From a marketing perspective, selling an antibody enables us to have more insight into a researcher’s methods, when compared to other solution-based products. By knowing the gene-of-interest, we can identify more needs of the researcher, which in turn can be used to promote more solutions.

Websites in the antibody space are optimized to a greater extent due to the competitive marketplace. These websites use tactics similar to Amazon in order to maintain a competitive edge. By reviewing antibody websites, a marketing professional can certainly identify the main commercialization strategies pertaining to the company.

The many complications and costs of developing relevant antibodies to research needs have inhibited many large organizations from entering the market, leaving an opportunity for smaller companies to obtain significant market share. Understanding the general needs of the marketplace, then prioritizing how an organization meets those needs should result in establishing significant business for many years to come.

Thank you, Matt, for sharing your insights and your wisdom with us.