Life sciences marketing can be difficult to navigate; while you might have scientific expertise to be able to easily digest the latest scientific research, it might be that you need a bit of help with your marketing ‘know-how’. The aim of this article is to guide you through the creation of a successful life sciences marketing strategy for your business.
First and foremost, if you’re daunted by the thought of marketing, then you could always opt for a life sciences marketing agency, to fulfil your marketing requirements for you (we know of a good one, hint hint).
However, if you’re dedicated to gaining a deeper understanding of all aspects of marketing, let’s get stuck in. Any questions? You can contact our award-winning marketing team for further guidance.
Why create a life sciences marketing plan?
You can use your marketing plan as a strategic tool to map out business objectives, guiding you towards achieving your goals. Your marketing plan can help grow your customer base and market share and can help increase awareness of your products and your company.
As the saying goes, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!”. Get the basics straightened out from the get-go, before you even contemplate how you plan on executing your life sciences marketing strategy. Think about; who is your target audience? What are you hoping to achieve? Sales? Brand awareness? Lead generation?
For our clients we tend to find that the focus is lead generation and sales, with brand awareness supporting those goals.
One of the best ways to start is by conducting a brand audit. It allows you to take a deep dive into your businesses standing in the marketplace. A brand audit should help you define your brands missions, visions and values, analyse your market position and review your internal and external branding.
For your audit, you’ll need to undertake both an internal and external audit. These can be used to facilitate other elements of your life sciences marketing plan, including the development of a SWOT analysis.
Internal brand audit
Understanding what your employees think about your business and brand is crucial. If your employees don’t have a good understanding of your brand and service, how do you expect your customers to?
Ask them about their views on your unique selling propositions, branding identity, services, and key competitors. Gathering this internal intel provides valuable insights into how well employees understand and align with the company’s mission. This alignment not only strengthens your brand internally but can also influence how you shape your life sciences marketing brand strategy going forward.
External audit
As the name suggests, an external audit focuses on influences outside of the business, such as customer insights and market analysis.
When it comes to customer insights, before turning to Google, consult with your internal team first. Your sales, technical, and support teams likely have valuable insights about your customers. Whether they’re making telesales calls, generating leads, conducting competitor research, or developing sales strategies – like our own Sales team – they can provide you with a broader understanding of your customers’ wants and needs.
In addition to your customers, you’ll also need to evaluate the market. First and foremost, you need to define your target market. What is the current state of the life sciences market? Are there any new regulatory guidelines you need to be aware of? Are there any identifiable gaps in the market, or potential opportunities you could take advantage of?
Any findings you discover from your audit can be used to fuel your competitor analysis, as you can see as we continue throughout our life sciences marketing plan.
Competitor Analysis
Hopefully you’ve already identified your direct competitors, but it’s also key to consider indirect competitors too. Are there any companies, aside from your direct life sciences competitors, who can offer alternative solutions to your offering, or to your customer base? If you ignore your indirect competitors you’re putting your market position at risk.
Now onto conducting the competitor analysis itself…
In order to create a thorough life sciences marketing plan, both competitor analysis and SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analyses play crucial yet distinct roles, each contributing unique insights that can support your overall strategy.
While you may be able to use one to support the other during the creation, they both have separate purposes, and each offer their own benefits.
Competitor analysis focuses exclusively on external factors by examining your competitors’ strategies, strengths, weaknesses and marketing activities. This analysis provides a better understanding of where your competitors stand in the life sciences market, and offers insight into what they are doing well, as well as less so, and how your business could use that knowledge to its advantage to differentiate or compete more effectively.
When creating a SWOT analysis, you’re looking at both internal and external factors. Evaluating the strengths and weaknesses within your organisation, these are factors that you’re able to control, such as resources, expertise, and processes. It considers external factors in the form of opportunities and threats—market trends, regulatory changes, or competitive pressures that can impact your business. The SWOT analysis provides a wider view of where your business stands, helping you identify strategic priorities, mitigate risks, and leverage opportunities to achieve your life sciences marketing goals.
Together, they form a comprehensive foundation for a successful life sciences marketing plan, with each analysis complementing the other to ensure that all angles are considered in decision-making.
You’ve gathered all the information, now what?
Now it’s time to digest and use all information obtained to define your marketing objectives. No doubt you’ve gathered a lot of information, so make sure you take the time to review it thoroughly – this is not something to rush. Rember this is the information that can help drive the success of your business objectives going forward.
This intel should not only provide you with a clearer understanding of your customer and a solidified brand identity, but also enable you to use this information to develop your marketing objectives.
Start by creating SMART marketing goals; these should be:
- Specific: What do you want to achieve? Be clear, make sure there is no ambiguity with what you’re wanting to achieve.
- Measurable: How are you going to measure your goal?
- Achievable: Make sure your goal is realistic. You don’t want to fall at the first hurdle because you’re setting yourself unattainable goals.
- Relevant: Make sure your goals align with your business mission.
- Timely: When do you want to achieve this goal by?
By using this model helps to transform your big business goals into achievable actions.
Make sure you include long-term strategy goals within your life sciences marketing plan, as mentioned in our recent 95-5 success rule for marketing blog. The rule suggests that 95% of your target market aren’t interested in your products or services at any given time, and you need to give yourself time to build your profile as the ‘go-to’ company and increasing brand awareness. The aim is to position yourself as the top choice when potential customers are ready to make a purchase.
Implementation Plan
Almost there, now it’s time to create your implementation plan.
Taking into consideration your newly created SMART goals, you now need to consider which channels you’ll use to support these goals.
Make sure you’re considering the niche industry of life sciences when choosing your marketing channel. You’re not marketing the latest lipstick with a TikTok dance, your audience is likely to be vastly different. Instead consider digital marketing channels such as LinkedIn if you’re targeting a more professional audience. You need to ensure you’re creating a trusted profile to help drive awareness and credibility, so using the right channel is imperative.
Other channels to consider could include:
… all of which, we are highly skilled in by the way, hint hint, should you need any help! Don’t believe us, browse our case studies, including this client win highlighting our abilities within the life sciences marketing arena.
In addition to the channels, you need to think about how you’re going to monitor and evaluate performance. You’ll need to regularly assess progress against your goals using analytic tools, such as Google Analytics.
If you’re new to marketing, then you might be feeling overwhelmed with the metrics you need to track, not knowing the difference between SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and CEO. Here’s where we can help. Here’s a rundown of the top metrics you’ll measure once you’ve launched your life sciences marketing plan.
- Average Time on Site: The average duration visitors spend on a website during a single session.
- Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who leave a website after viewing only one page.
- Click Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of users who click through out of the total who viewed it. This term is widely used when measuring metrics on social media, ads, website traffic, email campaigns.
- Cost per Lead (CPL): The average cost to acquire a single lead through marketing efforts.
- Conversion Rate (CVR): The percentage of visitors who completed a desired action, like making a purchase, out of the total visitors.
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The total cost of acquiring a new customer, including marketing and sales expenses.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): The total revenue a business expects to earn from a customer over the duration of their relationship.
- Engagement Rate (ER): The percentage of users who interact with content (likes, shares, comments) relative to the total who viewed it.
- Impressions: The number of times an ad or content is displayed to users.
- Lead to Close Ratio: The percentage of leads that convert into customers.
- Sales Revenue: The total income generated from sales of goods or services.
- Website Visits: The total number of times users visit a website, counting multiple visits by the same user.
All of these metrics can help contribute to differently to your marketing objectives, whether that be increasing awareness, engagement, and/or performance.
Ready, set, go
Now you’re ready to go, equipped with all the information you could need to create your own life sciences marketing plan.
While this process may seem daunting, it is essential for growth and long-term success in the competitive life sciences market. If you need further assistance, then get in touch, we’re here to help, life sciences marketing is our speciality after all, along with any other scientific and technical sectors.