Marketing
Does Your Customer Think You’re Ugly? Three Design Tips That Can Improve Your Lead Generation Efforts
Due to the vast bombardment of advertising through evermore communications channels, audiences are more selective when engaging in demand generation activities online. Research suggests that audiences make a judgment about whether to engage on a site in as little as 50 milliseconds, or approximately half of the time it takes for one blink of an eye1. Design of a digital environment is just as important as content in influencing audiences to act. This post presents three tips that can improve design and thus lead generation efforts.
Current Dynamics in Marketing Science
Results of the 2012 Survey of Science Marketers
Many companies within science-related industries are increasing the sophistication of their digital marketing strategies, and investing in sales and marketing technology to support more effective engagement with their audiences. In our 2012 survey of science marketers, we set out to benchmark the movements toward digital marketing among science marketers, investigating several facets of marketing channels. In this issue of Linus Report, we present the results of our survey of 125 respondents, which provided us with insights about budgets, priorities, investments and challenges that science marketers face.
Effective Marketing within a Complex Organization
No function within the organization can operate independently, and such dependency is especially felt in marketing, which acts as the pivotal point between internally focused teams and externally facing channels. As this industry continues to consolidate and teams of different cultures come together and are forced to work more effectively, cultural alignment can become the key ingredient in continued organic growth. But culture can be influenced. Marketing can positively influence culture by focusing on achieving execution excellence. This report provides the critical factors for effective execution as well as suggestions for how marketers can influence culture through each of these factors.
Who do you need: a Leader or a Lemming?
Viral marketing sounds great on paper—free delivery of your message to a wide number of people. But it’s surprisingly difficult to achieve. Why do some videos, images, or stories go viral?
Answers to Viewer Questions from Life Science Branding Webinar
In the last post, I chronicled my recent participation as a panelist in Science Magazine’s global webcast about branding in the life sciences. We had a very interesting live discussion around the Brand-vs-Product Marketing paradox, which led to additional questions being submitted by viewers. Below is an excerpt from the follow-up questions that I received, and my responses.
Content-Centric Marketing for Science
Part 2: Engineering an Effective Marketing Program
Value propositions should be experienced. In the content-centric marketing model, the three classes of content that facilitate the scientist’s own buying journey are also intended to influence them to adopt the company’s way of thinking. This requires translating the value proposition into an engineered experience for audiences.
In this issue of Linus Report, we leverage the principles of content-centric marketing and describe the planning needed to build robust marketing campaign strategies.
Missing Insights in Life Science Marketing: Qualitative vs. Quantitative Research
There are many market research instruments available to marketers, yet the majority of research in the life sciences is conducted with online surveys for their ease of deployment and statistical significance. However, focusing on quantitative surveys alone may cause marketers to miss another class of highly actionable insight. This article provides context for a balanced approach to life science marketing research.
Content-Centric Marketing for Science – Part 1: Understanding the Way Scientists Make Decisions
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.
Where Life Science Marketing is Headed: Results from the 2011 Quantitative Study of the Dynamics of Science Marketing
There has never been a time of more rapid change in the scientific industry, signaling the need for more sophisticated marketing practices. How are life science marketers evolving their strategies and tactical mix during these times? We recently conducted a quantitative study of over 100 science marketers in order to understand their priorities and their budget expenditure, as well as their attitudes towards current topics such as demand generation, brand awareness and social media. In this report, we present the results and synthesize our findings.
Sizing Up Social Media: An Investigation of Scientific Community Dynamics on LinkedIn
Social media enables marketers to monitor, instigate, participate in and measure audience engagement. LinkedIn, the professional networking site, hosts an array of scientific discussion Groups, offering tremendous potential for life science marketers to capture engaged audiences. Before developing a strategy, life science marketing professionals need to optimize their audience selection strategy when targeting these Groups as part of a marketing program. By not strategizing the process of audience selection, the outcome could unnecessarily result in the high cost of an un-optimized marketing program. To understand the dynamics of instigating audience engagement on LinkedIn Groups, we studied several scientific Groups of varying sizes on LinkedIn to determine whether size affects the level of group activity. We found that the level of engagement follows an asymptotic regime as the size of Groups gets larger. More interesting, however, is the significantly higher level of Group activity in smaller Groups as compared with larger Groups. This issue of Linus Report discusses the results of our investigation and offers recommendations for how science marketers should prepare to engage with LinkedIn.
Marketing to the World's Most Skeptical Audience
The first book in the business literature focused exclusively on marketing within the scientific industry, Persuading Scientists sets a new standard for managers of any experience level to develop marketing strategies that align with way scientists make purchase decisions.
Buy the book