Stop Annoying the Scientists
That itself isn’t the key, but it’s a good start. Let’s face it. Life scientists don’t like banner ads, direct mail, cold calls, e-mail blasts, or any other form of promotion that tries to snag their attention while they’re doing something else.
Ever hear of the Adblock extension for Firefox? It works really well! Scientists and others who do not want to be bothered have and use effective mechanisms to insulate their thoughts from commercial interruptions. They don’t see your ads. They don’t read the e-mails you send them. Your postcards go straight into the bin and your calls ring through to voice mail.
What do they do with the time they save by not reading your junk mail? They seek and consume hordes of information! That’s why, if you want life scientists to know about and care about your product or service, you must be discoverable.
Here’s the Key: Be Discoverable
If you supply useful information about your product or application that is relevant to a scientist’s interests at the exact moment he or she is seeking such information, it will be considered without attitude or prejudice. It will be appreciated. And it will affect the scientist’s future thought and behavior. This, presumably, is exactly the outcome you want from your marketing efforts.
How to Be Discoverable
1) Produce lots of original, frequently updated, and useful information about your product and its applications.
2) Distribute this information widely in multiple formats. Use your web site, your blogs, other people’s blogs, seminars, posters, journal articles, YouTube, SlideShare, Facebook, Twitter, and everything else you can think of. But do not pay for placement! The idea is not to be up in the faces of scientists, interrupting their work with an advertisement that consumes your budget and disappears as soon as your time is up. The idea instead is to have information in place, wherever your prospects might look for it, all the time, including the moment it is sought.
3) Apply SEO best practices.
Winning Means Being More Discoverable Than Your Competitors
If you follow the three steps above, you will out-market all of your competitors, including the 1600 or 2400 lb merger-gorillas presently crashing around in the life science products industry. And note that when you adopt discoverability as your marketing objective, you can actually see how your marketing efforts are working! Just Google some likely queries, or try your hand at some Spyfu Kombat.
How to Convert Discoverability into Sales Leads
1) Produce some even better follow-on information than the information you created for your prospects to discover in the first place.
2) Set up an autoresponder or a similar gating mechanisms that will allow you to trade the new information you created for an e-mail address.
3) Ask the scientist to complete the exchange.
How to Fail
Hire an agency to blow your budget on a multiple-media campaign centered around a clever or humorous theme. Bombard the force-fields around your prospects with print ads, mailers, phone calls, e-mail blasts, and flash animations. When it’s all over, you won’t be any more discoverable than you were before you launched the campaign.
What About the Unused Advertising Budget?
If you choose to become discoverable, you’ll find that it isn’t nearly as expensive as becoming obnoxious. Use the extra money to create opportunities to talk with your customers. Visit them at meetings and in their labs. Ask them what they really think about your products and your competitors. Invite them in to meet your engineers and manufacturing people. Let them tell your whole company about their technical problems and how they solve them. When your employees meet the people who actually use your products, you’ll boost quality, morale, and creativity. You’ll have better ideas for your next product, and you’ll have more interesting information to use to become more discoverable.
Do you want life scientists to discover information about your product and its applications? Contact Matthew Wygant by calling (408) 905-7630 or by sending e-mail to matthew@wygant.net.
