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