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4 Vital Tips Your Company Needs To Win In Life Science Content Marketing

Highlights

  • Use content marketing strategies based on the position of your consumer in their buyer’s journey 
  • Content volume and variation will capture a larger audience 
  • You can repackage your content into gated and non-gated formats 
  • Employ SEO and keyword optimization tactics for organic discovery of your content

Life science content marketing is an integral part of inbound marketing strategies. While outbound sales initiatives and direct product advertisements still have specific use cases, content marketing is a complementary method to attract and engage consumers. Content marketing is based on providing a consumer with something of inherent value to grab their attention and lets your company become a trusted resource.

Biotech and life science companies especially benefit from content marketing; it augments existing marketing approaches of direct product or service ads. Starting or maintaining content marketing practices can be daunting. With suggestions from Samba Scientific’s Director of Science Marketing Jenna Gallegos, we’ve broken down some key elements to focus on.

Know when to use content marketing strategies for your life science company

Content marketing is most effective depending on where your consumer is in during the buyer’s journey. The three broad stages of the buyer’s journey consist of awareness, consideration, and decision. Content marketing is ideal for consumers in the awareness stage and some consumers early in the consideration stage.

These consumers are identifying their problem and beginning to research solutions. It would be inappropriate to provide product or service information to them at this point – if they are still identifying their problem then they may not have a defined what they need in a solution. Instead, it’s more beneficial to provide educational content regarding their problem. This establishes trust in your expertise in the field and the consumer will likely turn to you again when they decide on a solution. The goal is to provide the right messaging at the right time. 

Content Awareness Funnel At the decision stage, content marketing shifts from providing information about a problem to explaining why you are the solution. People at this stage are existing customers or highly qualified prospects that need help in the decision process. Building your content strategy with the buyer’s journey in mind is a great way to prioritize your execution plan.  

Determine what life science content to publish 

Content is almost anything consumable from blogs and white papers to videos and social media posts. Producing content can be time intensive, so when starting out it could be better to pick a limited number of content types and expand later. For instance, you could start producing blogs, newsletters, and social media posts and later expand into resource-heavy educational videos and webinars.  

An important part of content creation is quantity. “Companies can get caught up in wanting to perfect a blog post, when really volume is more important. You’re only going to get so many eyes on every piece of content, so the more the better,” explains Gallegos. Publishing and updating content on a regular basis put you in good favor with Google.  

Content variation is also worth consideration. Content type preference will vary between consumers and their situations. Gallegos elaborates that “you may love watching videos with sound on when they pop on social media at home, but you may be more likely to read something when you’re riding on a bus.” Even having the same content presented in multiple ways can capture a larger audience. This also helps with your visibility in Google’s search results pages. The more ways a consumer can digest your content bodes well with your SERP rankings. 

Decide what life science content to gate 

Now that you’ve created content, you need to decide what to gate for lead generation and what to make freely accessible. For example, a freely accessible blog attracts the consumer to your content and entices them to engage further by providing their information in exchange for access to a webinar. Almost all content can be repackaged between gated and non-gated content. 

Newsletters are a unique case. Subscription access is gated, but not all content in the newsletter needs to or should be gated. It may link to freely accessible recent blogs or offer access to a webinar recording. This recording may be gated with a progressive profiling system to further score and segment leads. This system provides your company more information about a consumer with each form filled and the consumer moves closer to becoming a qualified lead. 

Attract consumers to your life science content 

You’ve created your content and chosen whether to gate it. Now it’s time to attract consumers to it. Your strategy depends on how your consumers tend to find information. Do they use keywords in a search engine? Do they turn to peers on social media? 

Attract your consumers through organic and paid avenues. Consumers organically search for answers to their problem using keywords and may come across your content. Search engine optimization (SEO) gets your content ranked highly for consumers to see in organic searches. It is important to note that gated content does not contribute to SEO. However, SEO helps to build trust with your desired consumer before they trade their information for your high-value gated content. 

Recently, Samba helped our client iRepertoire increase their SEO to get their content ranked at the top of search results pages. We created content that employed keyword optimization tactics, all hosted topic clusters under their pillar Learning Center page. By providing a large volume of freely accessible resources, search engines can crawl the pages for keywords and serve the content to the consumer based on the keyword ranking for the entered search terms. We also repackaged some of the free content into gated assets, like a blog post linked to a data-heavy white paper. This all offers iRepertoire ample opportunity to establish expertise and brand recognition without relying heavily on paid advertisements. 

iRepertoire Camilla Webinar Campaign

 

Your potential customers may also interact with you organically on social media. This is a free and easy way to test what attracts consumers to your content. Again, variation and quantity are more important than perfection. Once you understand what kind of posts resonate with your consumers, you can refine your social media strategy. 

Paid search and display ads are an alternative way to attract and engage consumers. “At Samba, we generally have one of two goals when we advertise: awareness or conversions. Awareness is increasing brand recognition and is harder to measure, but it’s important that people see your name and associate you with expertise,” Gallegos says. Awareness ads are more likely to use display ads. “When you want to drive conversions, search ads are better because the consumer is already exhibiting intent to convert by searching using keywords,” Gallegos expands. It’s key to perform A/B testing with your ads to determine what drives the most traffic to your content. With Google Ads, A/B testing is built into the system, but third-party providers may not offer testing. Once you have enough data to determine what ads perform best for your goal, you can emphasize what ads you want to be served most often for a given scenario. 

Conclusion

Overall, content marketing has many different moving pieces that all contribute to your overarching inbound marketing strategy. Attracting, engaging, and delighting your consumers with high-quality valuable content is crucial for your company to build expertise and brand recognition.  

At Samba Scientific, our expertise in life sciences content marketing allows us to create and advertise content for you. We also monitor their performance to determine what content is attracting the most attention and how your audience is engaging with you in order to identify qualified leads. Click here to schedule your free consultation and let us help you start implementing your life science content marketing strategies today. 

Written by:

Sydney Wyatt is an Associate Account Manager at Samba Scientific. With her Ph.D. in Integrative Genetics and Genomics from University of California, Davis, and training in science communication, she ensures that her clients’ content is engaging and scientifically accurate. As a former target audience member, she brings a unique perspective to marketing strategies. Learn more about her on LinkedIn.

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