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....
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
