Latest Posts
The Importance of Conversion Tracking in Life Science Marketing
The Importance of Conversion Tracking in Life Science Marketing You Can’t Improve What You Don’t Measure In life science marketing, success isn’t just about driving website traffic or racking up...
Google Performance Max Campaigns Make Revenue Attribution Critical for Life Science Marketers
TL;DR Summary: Google Ads AI is smart, but it’s your job to ensure it has the data it needs. Google Ads AI: a Blessing and a Curse? Performance Max (also...
Scientists Hate AI Spam as Much as Old School Bulk Spam
I’ve been getting AI generated spam for well over a year. It was immediately clear to me when it started. My spam emails became slightly more personalized than regular spam....
Supercharge Your Google Ads With Every Possible Extension
Life science companies constantly face numerous challenges in capturing their audience’s attention on crowded search engine result pages (SERPs) with Google Ads. To make their ads stand out and attract...
What is Generative Engine Optimization and can life science marketers make use of it?
Everyone knows what search engine optimization (SEO) is, and many companies take great efforts to ensure they show up near the top of organic search results and benefit from the...
Do Scientists Use AI / LLMs for Product Discovery?
There has been a lot of talk about AI optimization in the marketing world, much of which was spurred by the release of a preprint article published to arXiv (pdf)...
Can Perplexity Reliably Answer Technical Questions in the Life Sciences?
The generative text AI tool Perplexity has rapidly gained popularity in the life sciences for its ability to show its references when answering. As those references can include scholarly articles,...
Don’t Stress About “Nofollow” Backlinks
TL;DR Summary The History of HTML Link Relationship Tags As the name implies, a link relationship tag provides context to search engines and other automated crawlers on the nature of...
AI-based Language Models: the End of Life Sciences Copywriters?
On November 30th, 2022, the world witnessed a technological revolution that would forever alter the landscape of content generation and communication. It was a day that will be remembered as...
Don’t Optimize for Quality Score in Google Ads
Sometimes you just have to let Google be Google. Large, complex algorithms which pump out high volumes of decisions based in part on non-quantifiable inputs are almost inherently going to...
Avoid CPM Run of Site Ads
Not all impressions are created equal. We don’t think about run of site (ROS) ads frequently as we don’t often use them. We try to be very intentional with our...
Can DALL-E 3 Generate Passable Life Science Images?
For those uninitiated to our blog, a few months ago I ran a fairly extensive, structured experiment to compare DALL-E 2, Midjourney 5, and Stable Diffusion 2 to see if...
Can AI Replace Life Science / Laboratory Stock Images?
We’re over half a year into the age of AI, and its abilities and limitations for both text and image generation are fairly well-known. However, the available AI platforms have...
Google Ads Auto-Applied Recommendations Are Terrible
Unfortunately, Google has attempted to make them ubiquitous. Google Ads has been rapidly expanding their use of auto-applied recommendations recently, to the point where it briefly became my least favorite...
How to Write a Life Science White Paper
From the perspective of the marketer, a critical early task in the life science buying journey is education. It may even come before your audience of scientists recognizes they have...
Stop Hosting Your Own Videos
I know this isn’t going to apply to 90% of you, and to anyone who is thinking “of course – why would anyone do that?” – I apologize for taking...
We Just Got Skyscrapered
Just yesterday, we got skyscrapered. No, we didn’t get an office in a giant building or fly an ad from one or anything like that, nor is that some weird...
Why People Are Loyal … to ANYTHING
I was reading the MarketingCharts newsletter today and saw a headline: “What Brings Website Visitors Back for More?” The data was based on a survey of 1000 people, and they...
Are You Providing Self-Service Journeys?
Customers are owning more of their own decisions. We’ve all heard the data on how customers are delaying contact with salespeople and owning more of their own decision journeys. Recent...
What Google RankBrain Means for SEO
There’s been a ton of buzz in SEO circles about Google’s new RankBrain algorithm. This is very understandable for two reasons. First, it’s a nerd’s dream. It’s an artificial intelligence-based...
Lessons from Scientific Publishing’s Fight to Survive
First it was open access, then pure and simple pirating (Sci-Hub), and now preprints, as this recent New York Times article outlines. The business model of the major scientific publishers...
Personalization Can Backfire
Marketers are used to seeing a lot of data showing that improving personalization leads to improved demand generation. The more you tailor your message to the customer, the more relevant...
The Plight of the Distributor
Let’s be frank: if you are a laboratory products distributor, you have a ton of competition. With inexpensive digital marketing at anyone’s fingertips and drop-shipping increasing in prevalence, it’s incredibly...
The Four Key Types of Content
There are a lot of reasons why content can fail to fulfill its objectives. When content fails, it usually just feels like “stuff” – things that are churned out more...
Increasing Customer Affinity
Affinity has a transformational value on brands. Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon have all moved beyond having a simple transactional relationship with their customers to one that creates intimacy and...
The End Is Not Nigh (now let’s get serious…)
People love to decry the end of marketing. It’s a good attention-getter. While those who shout about the coming of the end of marketing from their soapboxes are usually guilty...
If You Don’t Own Your Channels, You Don’t Own Your Audience
A very telling thing happened in October. YouTube, in preparation to release it’s paid subscription service, Red, told its top content creators that “any ‘partner’ creator who earns a cut...
Is Publishing the Holy Grail of Content Marketing?
There’s a lot of noise coming from some fairly reputable sources extolling the virtues of publishing as the next generation of content marketing (I’m sure you’ll be very familiar with...
Why MAPs Are Good Business
I’ve heard a number of manufacturers say that online sales are “a race to the bottom.” That’s a bit like hearing a dinosaur tell you that being warm blooded is...
Stop Thinking About Content
Content marketers in the life sciences have reached a critical point. The traditional paradigm of content marketing is becoming ineffective. Content marketers have endeavored to create, publish, share, and then...
The Growth Rate Disparity
Having compiled quite an extensive amount of published life science market size data, we’ve noticed a lot of very optimistic growth rates. That led me to wonder if that optimism...
Remove Steps With Content
While we strongly advocate that many content marketers in the life sciences shift from a content paradigm to a resource paradigm, there are still ample roles for more traditional content...
Wide Nets Don’t Win
The fear of loss is stronger than the desire for gain. This is a scientific fact. Here’s the first paper that describes it, but there are a lot more which...
Remarketing by the Numbers
We recently cited some newly released findings from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) stating that “display retargeting from paid search ads can deliver a 40 percent reduction in CPA.” It...
Are Conferences Worth It?
I don’t think I need to tell anyone just how readily reachable customers are these days. We have an incredible amount of channels and tools at our disposal to reach...
Avoiding Skepticism
The scientific buying journey is fraught with skepticism. From the buyer’s perspective, this is a requirement of a good buying journey. The buyer must decide what to believe and what...
Should You Be A Thought Leader?
Being a “thought leader” has become cliché. That’s what most brands and most content marketers aspire to be, however. They want to be visionaries; oracles of their respective fields. It...
Guide to Win / Loss Analysis
As we discussed last week, there are only two fundamental reasons why someone won’t buy from you. Either you are talking to the wrong person, or the prospective customer doesn’t...
The Two Reasons People Won’t Buy
Marketers and salespeople wrack their brains trying to figure out how to increase conversion – be it to turn eyeballs into leads or to convert opportunities into sales. Fundamentally, there...
Winning the Battle for Attention
The most precious and limited resource that life science marketers and salespeople must fight for is undoubtedly money. Everyone is trying to get a piece of those often set-in-stone lab...
Content as a Sales Tool
A lot of people think about content marketing in terms of inbound marketing and lead generation. You create content and either make it freely available with perhaps CTA at the...
Content Segmentation
A common strategic issue involves trying to be all things to all people. In general, it doesn’t work. You need some degree of specialization in order to effectively create comparative...
Differentiation Through Content
All of us life science marketers know that we need to differentiate our products and services. Nothing new there. It’s critical to demonstrate a unique value and avoid commoditization. But...
The Power of Print
If the forecast calls for rain, followed by ever-increasing amounts of rain thereafter, what is the end result? Assuming the forecasts are correct, you would have one heck of a...
The New Permission-Based Marketing
I want to take you on a trip into the future of life science marketing, not because I’m some kind of prophet (I didn’t come up with these ideas, nor...
Best Practices Aren’t Enough
Many marketers look to market leaders for examples on what to do. The thinking is: if I can replicate what the largest and most successful incumbents in my market are...
Research Sans Assumptions
In most market research, you start with a hypothesis or a set of assumptions and you take it from there. Those assumptions often aren’t conscious – for instance, when asking...
Transform Your Next Launch
The average product launch has a lot in common with a firework show. A lot of effort goes into it and it’s relatively expensive. It makes a big splash and...
Organize Your Content
So you have a really good content marketing program up and running. You and / or your team are routinely publishing high-value content for your target scientists – blog posts,...
Shift From a Product Focus
Most life science companies still have a product focus, and many can get away with it because our industry, along with many other B2B industries, is a bit behind the...
SEO Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Changed
It’s no secret that the SEO world has changed. Ever since Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm changes, and the subsequent updates to them, prior best practices fell apart. There’s no...
Content is for Your Customers
One of the biggest pitfalls of content creation – and by far the biggest content mistake by amateur life science marketers – is forgetting that your content isn’t just directed...
Personalized Experiences
The image below is of a Target which is near me. It shows what you would see if you just walked in the exterior doors of the Target. Can you...
Demand Problem? Brand Problem?
“But our product performs better than the competitors! And it performs better for almost all applications!” This is the cry of one too many life science companies (especially smaller companies)...
Content First, SEO Second
By now, any decent SEO-er knows that the old way of performing SEO – basically, manipulating ranks through inorganic backlinks – is worthless. Google caught on and killed it. As...
The Role Of Branding – Part 3
This is the final post in a three-part series on branding. For the first post, go here. For the second, go here Last week, we discussed solving the above equation...
The Role Of Branding – Part 2
This is the second in a three-part series on branding. For the first part, go here. The third part can be found here. As mentioned last week, the ideal brand...
The Role Of Branding – Part 1
This is the first in a three-part series on branding. The second part can be found here. The third part can be found here. Branding is an abstract concept, and...
Captivating Your Audience
Captivating your audience should be priority #1 for high-level marketing communications. Before you get into the details of whatever it is you want to say, you need to make sure...
Maximizing the Value of Content
Creating quality content takes a good deal of effort. When marketers endeavor to create marketing content, it is generally created for a particular purpose. That’s usually out of necessity –...
The Power of Expectations
For most of you reading this, your company will have a LinkedIn profile. It doesn’t require much – upload your logo, post some basic company info, and copy-paste a paragraph...
Content Is Not Enough
Very few things are immune to the law of diminishing returns. Content marketing is certainly not one of them. As content marketing has surged in the life sciences over the...
Branding vs. Demand Gen
When considering where to advertise, marketers frequently – and rightfully – consider how targeted / relevant the audience is. However, marketers often fail to consider the commercial intent (or “intent...
Prepare for the Contact
A lot of focus goes into optimizing marketing activities. That focus is important and very helpful in numerous ways, but all the A/B testing and conversion optimization in the world...
Experiences Over Awareness
Take a look around – at the marketing efforts of your company, your competitors, and others in similar life science markets. I’m sure you’ll still find a lot of marketing...
Start Building an Audience
A lot of companies focus heavily on short-term demand-generation efforts. For small start-ups without venture funding, that is often out of necessity. However, many companies do so even when it...
Why Remarketing Is Critical
It’s part of my job to be very familiar with the life science tools sector. The need for familiarity commonly drives me to the websites of a number of different...
Distributor Selection
Having worked with a large number of manufacturers, it seems that there’s almost as many different processes to grow distribution networks as there are companies looking for distribution. However, there...
Optimize Your Messages
Think about how much money (not to mention effort) goes into disseminating your marketing messages. Think of all the resources spent on advertising, copywriting, conference exhibitions, social media, printed materials,...
Preferences for Content
We talk so much about content on a conceptual level that I thought it might be helpful to offer some more practical advice. Luckily for me, there’s a lot of...
Can the Shallow Content
We’re big advocates of content marketing, and we’re glad to see that content marketing is rapidly being adopted by life science companies. However, as content marketing becomes more popular, we’re...
Small Steps
It’s enticing to try to close every prospect at the first opportunity. You can certainly rationalize doing so – you’re just trying to make the most of every opportunity, ASAP....
Leads 101: Part 3
This post is the last in a three-part series. For the first post on lead generation, click here. For the second post on responding to leads, click here. Lead Scoring...
Leads 101: Part 2
This post is the second in a three-part series. Last week we discussed lead generation, and you can find that post here: https://biobm.com/2013/11/leads-101-part-1. Responding to Inquiries Unless you’re marketing and...
Leads 101: Part 1
Everyone wants more sales. Everyone wants more demand. Sales can’t come from nowhere and demand has to be realized somehow, and the way we marketers help generate sales and realize...
Validate Your Messages!
I think that this point is obvious to the vast majority of life science marketers who may read this – and you should certainly be well aware if you’ve been...
Easily Improving Retention
Nothing is better for customer retention than great products. As marketers, however, the quality of the product is at least somewhat out of our control. The easiest tactic that the...
Customer-Centric Content
Content marketing is no longer a novel tactic among life science tools and services companies. Truly effective content strategies, however, are still rare. Many life science marketers approach content marketing...
Marketing Channels
Many small life science companies have their preferred advertising / marketing channels. This approach, limited and highly focused, works well for demand generation campaigns (and, to a lesser extent, branding...
List of Lab Manager Surveys
Lab Manager Magazine routinely publishes surveys, often multiple per month, which briefly assess scientists’ utilization and preferences with regards to a particular laboratory technology. These surveys basically amount to free...
Analytics Will Save You
From a marketing standpoint, most small life science companies live in the dark. There is a near-complete lack of meaningful information; it is rarely collected and when it is,...
Motivating Your Distributors
Last week, we discussed how the key to a distributor successfully selling a given product line (from the supplier’s standpoint) is how motivated they are to carry, promote, and sell...
Qualities in a Distributor
We find that life science companies have very different ideas of what qualities are most important when looking to partner with a distributor. Some focus on the size of the...
Social Media Optimization
A lot of life science companies create social media accounts for the wrong reasons. Some do it strictly for demand generation (bad idea – scientific products are not impulse buys),...
Intent to Purchase
We’re avid fans of search marketing for demand generation-focused campaigns (both search engine marketing and search engine optimization). Even as other platforms begin to offer enhanced levels of targeting to...
Speak with the Customers
Life science companies rarely speak with their customers as often or as deeply as they should. You can make the common excuse about scientists being distant and antisocial (which I...
Differentiating Services
Some types of offerings can be especially difficult for life science companies to effectively market. Services, in particular, seem to cause companies problems. Services are intangible. Many services are customized...
Succeeding at Conferences
We’re no stranger to scientific conferences, myself especially. I’ve attended scientific conferences on all sides – as a scientist, as an exhibitor, and as a business developer targeting the exhibitors....
When Search Ads Don’t Work Pt.2
About a month and a half ago we wrote an article about times when search advertising isn’t worthwhile, focusing on the results of a study by eBay Research Labs. However,...
Single-Page Websites & SEO
One of the newer trends in website design, which has actually existed for quite a while but is just now becoming more popular and easy to implement, are single-page websites...
Find Positioning Opportunities
Your life science company could have a stellar new product or a unique new service. It could be wonderfully differentiated and offer your customers a unique value. If you fail...
Change to LinkedIn Groups
As just about anyone who uses Hubspot already knows, back in November Hubspot added some functionality to the Hubspot Social Media Tool which allowed Hubspot users the ability to post...
Customer-Centric Websites
Many life science companies have problems converting website traffic to qualified leads. There are two common causes for this; either the quality of your traffic is poor (in other words,...
When Search Ads Don’t Work
Regardless of who you are or what you’re looking for, one of the most common ways to look for products and services is the mighty internet. An unpublished BioBM study...
Reflect Your Priorities
What do catalogs, websites, and many other general-purpose marketing tools have in common? There are a lot of possible answers to that question, but the answer of the day is...
Shed The Problem Customers
Anyone who has spent time in sales or customer support can recall a few customers who always demand more than others or are just notoriously stingy. Chances are that all...
Your Customers Can Love You
I think the concept of emotionally appealing to scientists gets taken to extremes. There are people who think that B2B scientific sales are largely emotionless and that customers in this...
SEO: Optimizing Clickthrough
You’ve seemingly done everything right – you have lots of high-quality backlinks pointing to the relevant page and the page has an optimized title, URL, and header tags. You have...
Think Like The Customer
A little while ago we discussed the importance of adopting the scientist-customer’s perspective in your marketing to create communications that have a customer-centric viewpoint – showing an understanding of their...
A Lesson in Communication
One of the most timeless lessons in the art of persuasive communication is about 2350 years old and written by Aristotle. Rhetoric, and particularly the second book of Rhetoric contains...
Get a Google+ Community
We get a lot of people asking us how they can better use LinkedIn for marketing or business development. It seems an almost universally accepted fact that LinkedIn, and in...
The Pitfall of Facile Claims
Previously on this blog, we discussed why a number of commonly-used claims are meaningless (such as “high-quality” “reliable” “improved” and “consistent”) and also how marketers need to validate their marketing...
The Customer’s Perspective
In most life science companies, marketing and product development work in somewhat close contact. Marketing (as well as sales) frequently relay customer needs to product development and help them to...
Using the Right Metrics?
Much of marketing is about measurement: be it in determining the success of that recent promotional campaign, determining how to divvy up ad spending, or making the case for your...
Focus on “Why”
While a large part of a company’s brand is controlled by what a company does, this is not a compelling corporate image to project. It would be far more beneficial...
Reduce the Risk in Buying
Life science marketers often hold many simultaneous viewpoints on why customers purchase products. Frequently, the attributed reasons include a hodgepodge of quality, price, ease of use, suitability for their application,...
Simplify Your Message
Last week, I discussed the importance of positioning statements in crafting and delivering marketing messages. Today I’ll discuss a similar topic: making your life science marketing more effective by keeping...
Positioning Statements
Over the 2+ years that BioBM has now been in business, we’ve had the pleasure of working with a wonderful diversity of life science tools companies and contract research organizations....
RSS Feeds & Publicity
Let’s face it: all companies love free publicity. However, many life science tools companies, especially small companies, don’t take full advantage of industry press. It’s certainly not for lack of...
Product-Unrelated Value
At BioBM, we often advocate that companies find ways to create what we call “product-unrelated value” (we first discussed it publicly in a blog post last month). Note that when...
User Testing & Conversion
I did a small study earlier this week to compare prices across six major US life science distributors (you can read about it here). Because of that, I had occasion...
Amazon Supply’s Positioning
Amazon Supply has been making some waves in the laboratory products market since they got into what they refer to as “Lab & Scientific Products”. A lot of manufacturers have...
Ads are Not Enough
Many of you reading this may be familiar with BioBM, but for those who are not: the best one or two phrase description of what we do would be “marketing...
Know What You Outsource
Something that we do here at BioBM is help clients strategically outsource; to improve and expand their capabilities and / or to help reduce costs. We’re not politicians and outsourcing...
Adapt to Your Customers
It’s no secret that traditional approaches to life science marketing are becoming less effective. Customer behavior is changing, and returns on advertising dollars are being hit hard. A recent Harvard...
Forget the Sunk Costs
Companies resist change for many reasons: corporate culture, inter-departmental differences, vested interests, and many more. Yet one of the most common resistances to change, be it in marketing, product development,...
Don’t Focus on the Brand?
Brian Millar of Sense Worldwide wrote an interesting article for Fast Company Design arguing that talking a lot about branding isn’t actually helping companies. It got a lot of criticism,...
End of Solution Sales
In our Marketing of Life Science Tools and Services group on LinkedIn, we recently discussed an article in the Harvard Business Review on “The End of Solution Sales.” While this...
Marketing & The Cost of Sales
Efficient life science sales operations require that opportunities are handed from marketing to sales at the correct point in the buying cycle. When there is a lack of proper marketing...
Strategy Before Action
At BioBM, we interact with a lot of start-ups. Most often these start-ups consist of a team of scientists and / or engineers, sometimes with little to no start-up experience...
Distributors: Not for Marketing
Many life science tools manufacturers, especially smaller companies, have a tendency to push a lot of marketing responsibility on to their distributors. In most such cases, the manufacturer often retains...
Creating Balance in Marketing
Life science marketing requires a degree of balance between two opposing factors: information (content) and simplicity. On one hand, life science marketers want the scientist-customer to be able to access...
State of LS Tools Survey Results
In mid-April, we discussed how despite the presence large amounts of negativity in the life science tools market, things actually appeared to be getting better. To follow that up, we...
Let The Scientists Decide
A common failure in life science marketing is being too pushy. Marketers frequently try to force scientists into accepting their viewpoints by making bold claims and attempting to force marketing...
Don’t Fail Because of Scale
We see it again and again, and it’s often the fault of investors. A promising technology, a talented team, and what would otherwise be a great young company fail. A...
Making Decisions Simple
This is the second part in a two-part post on the importance of simplicity to the decision to purchase. For the first post, which explains why simplicity is important, see...
Make Purchasing Decisions Simple
Researchers from the Corporate Executive Board analyzed results from multiple surveys that totaled over 7,000 consumers, as well as interview with hundreds of marketing experts and executives, trying to figure...
Life Sci Tools Market Outlook
There’s been a lot of negativity in the life science tools market recently, at least with regards to the economic outlook. European government austerity, a possible US sequester, and cooling...
Market Research Using AdWords?
Life science market research can be a tricky, and often expensive, endeavor. You need to find a suitable population that meets your study requirements, recruit individuals to actually participate in...
The Purpose of a Website
We work with all sorts of life science company websites for a multitude of purposes. One thing strikes us over and over and over again. A lot of life science...
Free Life Science Marketing
Need to do a product launch on a shoestring budget? Is your ad budget almost expended but you wish you could do more? Don’t start worrying quite yet… There’s a...
Website Entry Points & SEO
Somewhat recently, another life science marketing agency (who shall remain anonymous), wrote that “No one ‘peruses’ websites from the homepage anymore. Sites need to be optimized to have an infinite...
Products With Purpose
Life science companies, and indeed companies in many industries, often get caught up in thinking about their products or services in terms of their features and benefits. Customers are often...
The Power of Targeting
Consider this seemingly obvious statement: the reason your life science company can sell products or services to scientists is because they have needs. These needs, in turn, create demand for...
Don’t Sacrifice Relevance
I’ve heard a lot of talk among certain groups of life science marketers recently along the lines of rethinking who the scientist really is. Specifically, that scientists are complex people...
Customers of Content
Social media, blogs, social bookmarking, RSS, e-mail… There’s so much competing for scientists digital attention these days. When a scientist (or anyone) is in front of a computer they have...
Marketing: When & How
What I’m about to tell you isn’t anything groundbreaking. It’s not new, it’s not innovative, and you may even say that it’s obvious. It is, however, dramatically and consistently overlooked...
Market Where Others Aren’t
Consider this: the life science advertising market is similar in functionality to a stock market or the market for any good or service. People want to maximize the return on...
Product Lines: Breadth or Depth
Life science tools companies are constantly making important product development decisions, and almost all of these decisions involve making a tradeoff. Should your company focus its limited product development resources...
Building Online Communities
Perhaps inevitable given the popularity of content marketing, the long-established importance of branding in the life sciences, and the growing propensity of companies to look for novel ways to create...
Google Wants You To Plus
In what’s probably half designed to make search results more personalized and half an encouragement for people to use Google+, Google implemented changes to its search algorithms recently. Google+ users...
Cause Marketing: Underutilized?
Corporate social responsibility has been all the rage for years now. Corporations in many fields are almost expected to prove that their interests are one with the common good and...
Microdata & SEO
As search engines try to provide ever more relevant results to searchers, they continuously change and update the way their crawlers view data as well as the way their search...
Don’t Just Tell, Show
In our last post, we discussed differentiating your life science marketing. In large part, we focused on the need to use unique marketing messages and make unique claims in order...
Differentiate Your Marketing
Your marketing message is what communicates the benefits of your products and services. It is the tool that life science companies must use to convey value. Just like you must...
Trust and Risk
Trust is extremely important in life science business relationships (and business relationships in general). I don’t have to ask you to take my word for it, though. According to the...
Your Slogan May Backfire
An article in the Journal of Consumer Research, recently discussed in the Harvard Business Review, found that while brands have priming effects slogans often have reverse priming effects. In other...
The Sequester & The Life Sciences
It’s no longer big news – the U.S. congressional “supercommittee” tasked with finding $1.2 trillion in federal spending cuts in the next 10 years has failed. On November 21st, the...
What Should We Call Ourselves?
I’ve heard our “sub-industry” called many things. So many, in fact, that it seems quite obvious that there isn’t a consensus. I think it’s time to end all that. What...
Contact Forms Affect Leads
Contact forms are increasingly being used by life science companies (and web development companies) as a lead collection tool, but despite this very important function companies often don’t think through...
What sells lab products?
Why do scientists buy any given laboratory products? How do they make their purchasing decisions? That’s the magic question that all of us seek to answer. While there is no...
Search for Distributors
I was having a conversation about web design and search engine optimization with a life science tools distributor recently, and he asked me how to target a website to a...
Serving the Underserved
As in most markets, players in the life science tools industry are always looking to get a squeeze a little more revenue out of their product lines. While price increases...
Attorneys vs. Business
Last week my father, who is a real estate broker and an attorney, was telling me about a real estate deal that he was working on. The buyer and seller...
America Invents Act: part 1
[info_box]This is an invited post from patent attorney Vadim Gordin of GordinIP, who is not affiliated with BioBM Consulting. This article is intended to be purely educational and cannot take...
Slowing Global Economy
You see it on the television, you read it in the newspapers – the global economy is slowing. The IMF has cut GDP estimates for the world as a whole...
Search Engine Optimization Tips
A 2011 survey performed by BioBM found that when looking for a new laboratory product, 90% of life scientists will first turn to one of two places. Half of that...
ROI: Marketing meets Sales
There is often a disconnect in communication and reporting among the marketing and sales / business development teams in life science companies that makes the calculation of ROI less relevant,...
Technology & Scientific Sales
Technology provides scientific salesmen with great tools. Perhaps the best example of this in recent history, at least in terms of visibility and adoption, are salesmen’s use of tablet devices...
Speaking to Inquisitiveness
Scientists are very analytical people, in general. This is not surprising and is an easy assumption to make, but many novice life science marketers over-interpret this analytical nature. They presume...
Life Science SMM: Forums
This post is the fifth and final post in a series of primers on various platforms available for life science social media marketing (SMM). The other primers are on Twitter,...
Life Science SMM: YouTube
This post is the fourth in a series of primers on various platforms available for life science social media marketing (SMM). The first SMM primer, about the use of Twitter,...
Search Engine Marketing Tips
There are many reasons why any life science tools company should be using search engine marketing (SEM), yet many do not. Scientists are frequently on search engines to look for...
Life Science SMM: LinkedIn
This post is the third in a series of primers on various platforms available for life science social media marketing (SMM). The first SMM primer, about the use of Twitter,...
Life Science SMM: Facebook
This post is the second in a series of primers on various platforms available for life science social media marketing (SMM). The first SMM primer, about the use of Twitter,...
Life Science SMM: Twitter
This post is the first in a series of primers on various platforms available for life science social media marketing (SMM). Check back for primers on the use of facebook,...
MarCom: Leads vs. Branding
Not all forms of life science marketing communications should be presumed to serve the same purpose and looked at in the same manner. Indeed, the audience themselves have a tendency...
Google+ for SMM: too early?
UPDATE (1/24/12): Google has made changes to its search algorithms that have caused us to change our position on Google+. For more recent information, please see our newer post: Google...
Scientists: Your Best Marketing
We have previously discussed how word-of-mouth marketing (also known as referrals) is limited in a life science environment because of the segregation of customer populations. That doesn’t mean that the...
Avoid Cheap Catch Phrases
I just was on a life science tools company’s website (not a clients’, and the company will remain anonymous) and this company seemed to describe every one of their products...
Replacing Distributors
In this edition of our blog mini-series on life science distribution, we’ll be discussing the use of contractual terms to help motivate distributors. Previous posts were on improving the performance...
Acquisition vs. R&D
There is a recent article in Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News discussing large life science tool companies and how recent growth (and by “recent” I mean the past half decade...
Why Are You Marketing?
One of the worst things that you can do in life science marketing is not fully understand why you’re marketing. In other words, each time you publish an advertisement, change...
Distributors & Contract Terms
In this edition of our blog mini-series on life science distribution, we’ll be discussing the use of contractual terms to help motivate distributors. Previous posts were on improving the performance...
SMM Isn’t Free
There is a common misconception, and not just in life science but in many industries, that social media marketing is free. This misconception arises because the platforms that social media...
Using a Website to Engage
A website can be an exceptionally powerful tool. It is, in essence, a block of clay – massively flexible and limited only by your creativity. For life science companies this...
Biocompare Survey Results
A little under two weeks ago, we held a survey to gather life science manufacturer’s opinions of Biocompare as an advertising platform. We didn’t get a ton of feedback, but...
Distributor Selection
As promised in our post two weeks ago on improving distributor performance, we wanted to provide some information on life science distributor selection. After all, part of getting the best...
Comment on Webinars
I saw a post on one of the LinkedIn groups I’m a member of for a webinar that was of interest to me. Long story short: it was terrible. So...
Opinions of Biocompare
There was a bit of a heated discussion going on in one of the LinkedIn groups that I’m a part of where people, including a Biocompare founder, were debating the...
Supreme Court: Bayh-Dole Act
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Stanford vs. Roche Molecular Systems, which has implications for academic inventors who receive federal funding for their research. Stanford was...
Improving Distributor Performance
Any bioscience company that sells through distributors is familiar with the problem: some distributors just don’t pull their weight. I spoke with a global laboratory equipment company recently that has...
Use Google Alerts
I’m guessing most companies do, but I’ve ran into a few that aren’t so I feel the need to say it here: use Google Alerts. For any small company, life...
Business Plans for Scientists
If you have a great biotechnology innovation and you want to start a company to commercialize it, you’re almost certainly going to have to write a business plan. Even if...
Misconceptions About SMM
There are a lot of misconceptions about social media marketing out there. I was recently reminded of it by a tweet from a company which will remain nameless. This company...
Presenting your Marketing
Life science marketing is an interesting thing. It is most often supported by a wide breadth of technical information, and scientists often want a lot of information, but at the...
Online Leads: It’s All About Speed
Almost all life science companies market via the internet these days. Of those, a vast majority have a method of capturing leads online – be it a contact form, an...
Site Metrics: Where to Focus?
Website analytics can provide very useful information to bioscience companies. It can be used to assess the effectiveness of your marketing messages, optimize your site navigation, and track external marketing...
What Inventors Don’t Think Of
Most great life science inventions come straight from the bench. That also means that most great life science inventions come from career scientists, who are most often inexperienced in commercialization....
The Limitations of Referrals
While less common in highly technical industries such as life science tools and services, it’s not wholly uncommon for entrepreneurs to “boot-strap” their start-up companies (try to start without external...
Success in Product Development
For companies, success in life science product development does not mean completed development of a single product, or even successful commercialization of a product. Likewise, triage of one product development...
Encouraging Action
Life science marketing often involves an abundance of technical information. This is often for good reason – scientists are inquisitive and want to know what they are potentially buying. What...
Leveraging a Weak Dollar
In one of the first posts on our new site we discussed some ways in which life science tools companies can take advantage of a weak dollar, but with a...
A Note on Off-Site Blogs
Going somewhat in step with our previous post on projecting expertise, I’ve noticed a recent trend of life science companies starting or sponsoring unbranded, off-site blogs. I have no problem...
Be The Expert
The life sciences are, almost by definition in being a science, a highly technical field. Most life science products, and certainly life science services, are of a similarly highly technical...
The Lost Art of Go / Kill
Great ideas are precious things. They are the fuel driving innovation, the sustenance of progress, the energy that powers success. Not all great ideas are so great in practice, however....
Ion Torrent’s Apple Spoof
So I ran across Ion Torrent’s / Life Technologies’ spoof of Apple’s “I’m a Mac” commercials, where Ion Torrent rips into the Illumina MiSeq a bit … okay, more than...
Send the Right Message
Life science marketing can be a difficult task, especially because scientists often don’t like to be marketed to. They are particularly adept at identifying marketing and ignoring it. With the...
Managing a Product Portfolio
All companies making and / or selling life science tools and services have a product portfolio, but often these portfolios are not viewed in a strategic manner. While aligning current...
Lowering Barriers
Life scientists are busy people. Between bench work, meetings, writing, presentations, seminars, and everything else they may have to do in their day, their time is limited. As such, they...
Creating Brand Champions
Branding is an important part of marketing in the life sciences, as we’ve previously discussed in this blog. The ability to shape and manage the perceptions of your company in...
Fix the Cause, Not the Effect
In business, problems are an inevitability. No company ever sails completely smoothly to success. In the life sciences and elsewhere, companies often fail to step back to understand their own...
Driving Innovation
What was once “out-of-the-box” is no longer out of the box. As time goes on and progress is made, your company must continuously progress in order to remain competitive. In...
Acting With Confidence
Small life science companies are surrounded by uncertainty. How can we improve our service to customers? What new product would be of greatest interest to scientists? How can we be...
From Site to Sale
Many companies under-utilize their website, and life science companies are no exception. There is often a lot of marketing going on, and that’s good, but most websites seem to stop...
Establishing a U.S. Subsidiary
If you are reading this post you are probably deserving of some congratulations. Your life science tools company has grown sufficiently to consider starting a subsidiary in the world’s largest...
Building a Brand
Life science companies frequently underestimate the value of building a strong brand. This is perfectly understandable – very often these companies are started by scientists or engineers and simply don’t...
Selling to Pharma / Biotech
A lot of small life science companies, including those manufacturing products or offering services but especially small distributors, are unsatisfied by their penetration of the pharma / biotech markets. While...
New Product? Aim for a Niche.
Small companies often have trouble with gaining traction for their new products. Researchers in the life sciences are notoriously hesitant to change brands or adopt new technologies. Once a lab...
Where Is Your Web Content?
When viewing the websites of companies selling life science tools or services, I frequently notice that many companies have problems with online content. Whether it is a general lack of...
Private Labeling / OEM
Private labeling presents a lucrative opportunity for many life science businesses. It can rapidly and dramatically increase market access and also transfer marketing, sales, support, and other costs outside your...
Value of Social Media Marketing
Social media is all the rage – it has been for almost a decade now. From the generation Y-ers who initially picked up on the pioneering social network Friendster back...
Can Distribution be Optimized?
A key to the success of many small bioscience products companies is the creation and maintenance of an effective global network of distributors (or dealers / resellers). Ensuring that you...
CRM: Challenges and Benefits
A challenge for any company is properly managing customer interactions. Sometimes overlooked in a small-company environment, customer relationship management should be an important process within any company in the life...
Defend Against Commoditization
Commoditization – the transformation of goods and services into a commodity – is a major problem when it threatens to rear it’s head. As technologies age, lose patent protection and...
Creating Value w/ Cross-Promotions
Cross-promotions are a valuable and highly focused marketing tool to drive additional sales. By promoting products to a customer who has purchased a related product, you help ensure that your...
Distribution & Opportunity Cost
Everything has an opportunity cost. For those not familiar with the concept of opportunity cost, it basically means the cost of not making a given decision (see a more detailed...
The Power of Remarketing
It’s the season where all retailers start to think about how to spike their sales as much as possible, and while there is a lot of marketing information and tactics...
Improve Your Online Presence
I don’t think anyone will dispute the power and influence of the internet. According to data from the International Telecommunications Union (a United Nations agency), internet penetration in the developed...
Prepare for the holidays!
November is already underway and if your company sells products or services to academic researchers then you should already be preparing to double down on your marketing efforts and start...
Change is Permanent
I was speaking with someone the other day about the general state of things (not just the industry or the economy but everything, really) when I remembered and used a...
Leveraging a Weak Dollar
[one_half]Small or start-up businesses are rarely sitting on stockpiles of cash reserves. Quite the opposite, cash is usually a bit tight, so if you are running a small life science...
Don’t Get Left Behind
Taking a pragmatic view on the state of the economy, it’s fairly easy to see that the road to recovery will very likely be a long one. Governments are in...
