In today's ever-changing digital landscape, professionals in life science marketing must constantly adapt to stay ahead of the competition. A strong digital presence is now essential to attract and retain customers and communicate effectively with both internal and external stakeholders.
Let’s explore the power of digital communication and five ways it can be harnessed for effective life science marketing.
First and foremost, understanding your audience is key to creating effective digital marketing campaigns.
In the life science industry, your audience is likely to be highly educated with specific needs and interests. Like any other market segment, it's important to know where they spend their time online and tailor your message to suit their preferences. Social media, email marketing, and short message service (SMS) marketing are all effective channels, but using them in the right way is key.
For example, SMS open rates can be as high as 98%—vastly higher than the 22% average that email marketing boasts. However, that doesn’t mean email marketing is less effective—it simply requires more finesse.
While someone will open a text message to see what it’s about, people feel less pressure to open an email. To compel people to open an email, an eye-catching subject line is critical, and then once they’ve opened the email, they want to see personalization. A 2021 report found that 80% of customers were more likely to purchase when their experience was personalized.
While it’s rather easy to create content that incorporates a person’s first name (i.e. “Don’t miss out on this deal, Susan!”), that’s not the level of personalization that converted. People are looking for emails that show them content relevant to their customer journey.
On a very broad level, retailers do this with customers who’ve viewed webpages, but didn’t make a purchase. A clothing store may feature sweaters someone viewed within the last 24 hours, and even promote a sale on those very garments.
For companies in life sciences, this might look like emailing people who have recently shown interest in—or previously attended—an event. Rather than emailing thousands of people in your database about the event, you’re targeting people who you already know have a level of interest.
Pro tip: This is where HubSpot’s smart content can give you a competitive advantage.
With so much content available online, it can be challenging to stand out from the crowd. However, by creating compelling and informative content, you can attract and retain customers and build strong relationships.
How do you create this compelling content? Remember the acronym E-A-T, or more recently, E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
Finding subjects that you can speak to as a trustworthy authority who has experience and expertise in a particular subject matter is the best way to create compelling content.
For example, let’s say you’re a digital marketing firm that has a number of healthcare clients you’ve been working with over the years. This experience has earned you a significant amount of trust in the industry and positioned your firm as having relevant expertise. This is where your content should focus. Ignore the trends and hone in on what will be helpful for your target audience.
Remember that content can take many forms, including blog posts, white papers, webinars, and videos. Whatever format you choose, make sure it is relevant, useful, and engaging.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). By using relevant keywords (words people type into Google or Yahoo search), optimizing your content, and ensuring your website is mobile-friendly, you can improve your visibility and attract more traffic.
The best part about working your way up the SERPs is that those pages continue to work for you when you’re not. It’s an investment upfront, but after that, you don’t have to pay for those pages to perform—it’s not like ads that need a consistent investment to perform.
SEO is particularly important in life science marketing, where customers are actively searching for specific products and services on a daily basis.
There are a number of SEO experts out there (including Raka Health) if you’re not confident in your ability to write content this way. However, you can also use WordPress plugins or HubSpot’s built-in optimization tools to determine how well you’re doing on your own.
Whether we like it or not social media is an essential part of any digital marketing strategy, and life science marketing is no exception.
Social media allows you to connect with customers, build relationships, and promote your brand in a cost-effective and engaging way. In the life science industry, LinkedIn is a particularly useful channel for connecting with professionals and sharing industry news and insights.
If you’re limited in your ability to pay attention to so many platforms, try to focus on the one that performs the best for you, but don’t neglect the rest of the platforms. You can use the scheduling tool in HubSpot (or other social media management platforms) to make your life a little bit easier.
Finally, to ensure your digital marketing campaigns are effective, it's important to track and analyze your results. This can be done through HubSpot or tools such as Google Analytics. Both allow you to monitor traffic, engagement, and conversion rates.
By measuring your results, you can identify what's working well and what needs to be improved, and then adjust your strategy accordingly. Pay particular attention to email open rates and what makes people react to posts on social media.
