The latest news, tips and insights from science and marketing

When it comes to influencing prospective customers in the life science sector, outbound marketing approaches such as cold calling, banner ads and unsolicited emails are no longer delivering a return on investment like they used to. Poorly targeted and relatively expensive, these once tried-and-tested tactics are increasingly delivering disappointing results. As marketers, if we want to continue to engage with modern scientific audiences, it’s vital that we adapt to be successful. Here, we look at how buyer behaviour has evolved, and why updating your marketing strategy using an inbound approach could deliver better results.

As a marketing agency specialising in the life science sector, we’re often asked how much companies in the industry should be spending on marketing and sales. Although the answer often depends on a number of factors, we’ve done our very best to provide some supporting information in this blog post to help you plan your budget, and ultimately achieve your marketing and sales goals!

PRESS RELEASE: BioStrata, a specialist life science marketing agency, has today announced senior promotions to two new leadership roles at the company. Helen Stewart-Miller takes up the newly formed Director of PR Services role, while Craig Townsend will become BioStrata’s first Director of Sales and Marketing Services. This comes in addition to a number of promotions and key senior hires across the team within the last six months, each designed to support the company’s ongoing growth and success.

“The old marketing playbook is broken,” claims Chris Rooney from HubSpot, while speaking at the recent Evolution of Life Science Marketing (ELSM) event in Cambridge, UK. We agree (and provide more insights into why in this blog and video on the inconvenient truths of modern life science marketing). The interruptive marketing of yesterday is failing in today’s customer-centric, information-rich world. To survive, it is evolving into a content-driven, inbound marketing approach, which was the focus of Chris’s talk at the ELSM event.

In his presentation, Chris introduced the concept of inbound marketing, provided some expert tips on how to approach it, and explored the many benefits it can bring to companies looking to boost lead generation and sales conversions. His talk is summarized here, but you can also learn more by watching the full video of his presentation below, which forms part of our educational webinar series on how to execute inbound marketing for life science companies.

As you may have guessed, I’ve been working at BioStrata for twelve weeks now, and boy has it gone fast! Five years ago, I got my PhD in genetics at the University of Kent and was preparing for a move back up to Cambridge to start my new role as a technical sales rep (I knew halfway into my PhD that a life at the bench wasn’t for me). 

I then became a headhunter at a life sciences recruitment agency (a bit of a random move I know) but I got to have some really interesting conversations with people in the biotech and med-tech communities about the cutting-edge research they were involved with.

Knowing I wanted to really maximise my passion for science communication I moved into medical communications, developing a whole host of materials for pharmaceutical companies. After two and a half years, I started to miss the life science industry—and that’s when I came across BioStrata.

The static popularity of many scientific meetings won’t be news to you: whatever sector of the life sciences we work in, we can probably all recall meetings that may have started to drop off in terms of size and quality, or even disappeared from the calendar completely. At the same time, the importance of effective digital marketing has grown massively.

However, we shouldn’t be too quick to brush traditional meetings aside. Maybe we can even learn from successful conferences and use these insights to enhance our digital programs. Based on recent conferences that I’ve experienced, there are two main areas where marketing professionals can incorporate ideas inspired by successful scientific meetings (many of which are growing in popularity, not declining). These revolve around the importance of memorable content, and the need to build powerful one-to-one connections with customers. Read on to learn more.

There are not many areas of business strategy and execution that are currently changing as fast as marketing. Buyer behaviour continues to evolve rapidly while ubiquitous access to the internet, the rise of social media, and the ‘always connected’ lifestyle afforded by mobile technology are all shaping how we find, research and buy products. This means that life science marketers must rapidly adapt if they are to stay ahead of these trends and effectively reach and influence their target audiences. To help, our team recently put together an educational symposium to discuss the ‘Evolution of Life Science Marketing’, where we discussed how these trends are changing the way we effectively market and sell to scientific professionals. In this blog, we provide a quick summary of the event. 

The life science market is extremely diverse, stretching across a wide range of sector areas, from drug discovery and pharmaceutical manufacturing, to microscopy and lab equipment. Given this, the idea of being able to source a marketing agency that is going to understand your specific niche or the vast range of application areas you cover, may simply seem unfeasible. However, the target audiences within these sectors often have a lot in common when it comes to evaluating, selecting and purchasing solutions. As such, a specialist agency with experience working in the life science sector may have just the expertise you need.

Even so, finding an agency that can understand and share your company’s goals and ethos, and support you in achieving success, isn’t easy. To help, we’ve summarised 10 questions you should keep top-of-mind when looking for a specialist life science marketing agency who truly understands your needs, and can ultimately offer a seamless extension of your internal team.

Here at BioStrata, we live and breathe marketing. As such, we are always keeping abreast of the latest trends and developments in the ever-evolving marketing world. As any modern marketeer would probably agree, in this dynamic industry, there is never a dull moment and it can sometimes be tricky to keep on top of what’s hot (and what’s not).

But don’t worry, that’s why we’re here. We’ve scoured the web over the past month to bring you a digest of the top five marketing blogs from April. Read on to find out what everyone’s talking about this month.

When your company is doing well, it’s always tempting to take your eye off of sales and marketing. Often this is so you can effectively service (and potentially grow) your current customer base, focus on hiring new talent or double-down on product development. While this is tempting, and makes intuitive sense as it may allow you to ensure you provide quality to your current customers, it is also dangerous. For a number of reasons, it is important to always keep on top of your sales and marketing activities, in particular the activity of creating demand and capturing new sales leads. This is especially true in the life science market, where sales cycles are often long and complex and it’s important to always be nurturing your sales pipeline should sales start to slow down or dip.