Life Science Content Marketing: A Step-By-Step Strategy

Most life science industry buyers want to educate themselves before making a purchase. In fact, 80% aren’t ready for the sales discussion right off the bat and need to be educated and nurtured before they feel comfortable buying. 

Content marketing is a proven way to do just that. In order to succeed, you need a concrete life science content marketing strategy built on what gets proven results. 

Here’s the step-by-step strategy we personally use for our clients.

1. Identify Your True Goals

Every company is a little different. A critical precursor to developing a personalized content marketing strategy is figuring out your true goals. 

This starts by developing a buyer psychology model and buyer journey maps so you’ll clearly understand who you’re trying to reach, what they’re looking for in content, and the best way to move them through your marketing funnel. For example, you’ll want to know your audience’s underlying emotions, motivators, questions, and concerns so you can address them when creating your content. 

Also, you’ll need to identify KPIs, such as impressions, clicks, user behavior, and conversions. Not only will this show you what to measure, it will guide the overall direction of your campaign.

2. Create a Game Plan

Next, you’ll want to examine what your key competitors are doing and develop a definitive game plan to best position your campaign for success. Say, for instance, you notice several competitors are offering free calculators and apps to website visitors like global life science brand MilliporeSigma does on its site. 

Or, maybe you notice multiple competitors are using case studies to educate their customer base like genome engineering solutions company Synthego does.  

These could potentially be mediums you could also use. After all, if it’s clearly working for other companies in the life science industry, it could work for you as well. 

After surveying the competitive landscape, identify which types of content to use, offers to include, calls to action, and so on. Over time you’ll refine your approach and make improvements, but your initial game plan will highlight a general workflow. 

3. Develop the Right Content

This is perhaps the most important stage in a life science content marketing strategy. It’s where you masterfully create content and visuals to educate, compel, and wow your audience, ultimately nudging them toward a sale. This may not result in a sale right away (in fact, content marketing rarely does). Rather, you’re playing the long game where you build rapport and establish trust, ideally gathering a lead’s contact information so you can continue the conversation with the aim of converting them later on. 

Again, build your content around your true goals in order to measure KPIs. 

We just mentioned a couple of content mediums that work well for life science companies, including free calculators, apps, and case studies. But here are a few more options to give you some additional ideas. 

One is simply blog posts. While blogging isn’t necessarily the newest or most innovative medium, it’s still usually worth using because it gets results. In fact, blogging when used in conjunction with SEO practices like keyword targeting, on-page optimization, and link building has greatly helped one of our life science clients increase their rankings and visibility, which has had very positive results. 

This is another thing Synthego does well on their blog called The Bench. Here visitors can find insightful blog posts about biotechnology, gene-based medical treatments, and more. And notice how the content is neatly organized based on different topics, helping each reader find exactly what they’re looking for. 

Another popular content medium is video. This is something Seeding Labs, a life science company that empowers talented scientists in developing companies, does flawlessly with videos like this one that offers an intro to sterile sampling. 

How-to content such as this is great for providing practical advice and establishing thought leadership. This, in turn, can get visitors more interested in your brand, thus setting the stage for an eventual sale. 

Beyond that, other content mediums that tend to work well in the life science industry include:

• Whitepapers
• eBooks
• Podcasts
• Webinars 
• Presentation slides

4. Analyze

There’s a clear correlation between an in-depth analysis of a life science content marketing campaign and success. According to a study by the Content Marketing Institute, 72% of the most-successful companies measure their content marketing results, compared to 22% of the least-successful companies that don’t. 

Studying the data helps you objectively determine what’s working, what’s not, and specific ways to improve. Analysis is an integral part of the content marketing strategy we use with our clients, and we can’t stress enough how important it is to use it in your own strategy. 

Here are some particular KPIs we look at:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• User behavior
• Conversions

As you gather more data, patterns and trends inevitably emerge. This tells you how big of an impact the content you’re producing is having. From there, you can make adjustments to get the absolute most from your campaign, which brings us to our final step.

5. Optimize

Regardless of how savvy a marketer you are and how well you run your life science content campaign, you’ll seldom reach maximum performance the first time around. Like any other area of business and marketing, true success requires iterations where you pinpoint areas that need improving and fix them. Then, you repeat the process looking for ways to improve even more and make the appropriate corrections. 

This is what allows you to continuously optimize your decisions and improve KPIs. The basic formula works like this:

1. Create a hypothesis
2. Perform split (A/B) testing
3. Record the results
4. Share your findings with your team
5. Apply those findings

Say, for example, you wanted to see if visitors were more receptive to case studies or webinars. Your hypothesis may be that you expect to get better results using case studies. So, you then split test by displaying a link to case studies above-the-fold on your homepage for a certain period of time and follow it by displaying a link to webinars for the same length of time. 

From there, you would record the results by counting impressions, clicks, conversions, and so on. Then you would share your findings across your organization and act accordingly. 

So if pointing visitors to case studies did in fact get better results than webinars, you would want to focus more of your attention on case studies moving forward. 

Crafting a Personalized Life Science Content Marketing Strategy

Every business is a little different, with different goals, audiences, and KPIs. That’s why it’s so important to come up with a personalized content marketing strategy. 

Following the five steps outlined above is a great starting point, and you can apply this formula to nearly every campaign. But to get the absolute most out of it, many companies in the life science industry can benefit by partnering with a professional inbound marketing agency that knows how to build a winning content marketing strategy from the ground up. 

At 3.7 Designs, we have extensive experience with the life science industry and have helped numerous clients get serious results. We used a proven, systematized process and focus heavily on client discovery to reveal true goals and determine the optimal approach. 

If you’d feel more comfortable working with an experienced agency rather than handling content marketing yourself, we’d love to talk and learn more about your project. You can reach us through our online contact form, and we’ll get back to you shortly.