Looking at a big hole in your marketing plan where advertising used to be? Traditional advertising performed poorly this year for most makers of biotech lab systems, and content marketing is moving in to take its place. With respect to your budget, the “insertion” costs of content marketing are close to zero, versus tens-to-hundreds of thousands for traditional advertising. But you do need to budget time, money, or both for the development of the engaging content that makes content marketing work.
Every biotech lab systems company has useful, interesting ideas and information in-house that can be developed into the finished material of a content marketing program. Consider whether you want to do that content development yourself, assign staff, or hire a consultant. Here are some typical elements of a content marketing plan:
Your Company’s Weblog
Update your blog frequently to keep customers, investors, and other visitors coming back to your web site, help potential buyers get to know you, and seriously improve your web site’s search engine visibility.
Destination Site Weblogs
These unbranded, non-promotional secondary sites, hosted under a non-corporate URL, focus on an application, technology, or common concern of interest to your target market. For instance, if you have a new super-low volume HPLC system, or a non-solvent replacement technology, you might start up a site about minimal waste-stream biotech research. Your sponsorship is very low-key, but not hidden or disguised. These sites are very powerful for establishing awareness, likeability, and trust with your audience — the key pre-requisites to the success of any product requiring a consultative sales approach.
Your E-mail Newsletter
Make your open-rate and click-through charts prettier by sending your e-mail newsletter only to people who opt-in personally and explicitly. Clean up your existing list before the new year with a resubscribe-or-drop program for chronic non-openers. Look at click-through activity from previous issues, and your web sites’ page hit and search term stats, to help you identify features and topics of interest to your audience. You may find, for instance, that they love to download posters. Give them more of what they want.
Webinars and Videos
Keep them short. Few scientists at the decision-making level have time for a long program. Upload recordings to your YouTube channel. If you’ve got a real hit, put it behind a registration form.
Twitter and Facebook
To get an idea of what you might be missing, create a dummy account and run your sales database against it to see how many of your customers and prospects have accounts. Then take a sample of those, and see whether they’ve been active recently. If you come up with an insignificant number of active participants, just record your findings and make a note in your calendar to check again in Q2, etc.
If on the other hand you find a needle-moving number of customers and potential customers, or even one eminent scientist who can make your product successful, you need to consider whether you’re going make social media part of your marketing plan. As you decide, remember that any channel you choose, whether it’s Twitter or trade shows, will require continuous participation over time to become effective. With social media, you have the opportunity to collapse the time required to establish awareness, likeability, and trust with individuals in your market by engaging them far more frequently and personally than you would otherwise.
The minimum effective frequency of participating and posting new content on Twitter or Facebook is daily. If daily microblogging doesn’t sound appealing to you, or if you think Twitter and Facebook are for punks, leave social media out of your plan for oh-ten.
For help with your content marketing strategy, contact Matthew Wygant at matthew@wygant.net.
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