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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Carlton Hoyt Discusses Decision Engines on Life Science Marketing Radio
Principal Consultant Carlton Hoyt recently sat down with Chris Conner for the Life Science Marketing Radio podcast to talk about decision engines, how they are transforming purchasing decisions, and what...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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)...
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...
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...
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...
Case: Content at a Small CRO
It feels like every week I see or learn something that reinforces just how valuable content is to life science companies. For instance, I was recently discussing some sales dilemmas...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
