Digital Marketing in the Life Sciences
How digital marketing, along with their types, can be deployed in the life sciences.
It’s hard to find new and innovative ways to market towards your audience in the life sciences sectors. Across the B2B and B2C sectors there are also a range of digital marketing methods that can be adopted.
It is important you find the right method of digital marketing which works and entices your audience on a regular basis.
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DIGITAL MARKETING IN THE LIFE SCIENCES
In this post, we will run through some digital marketing techniques which may work for you and your organisation.
1. SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media can be a great tool for marketing to the life science sector when used correctly. It is important to post what is relevant and not post too much content that your followers will end up missing. As a digital marketing method, it is a great way of reaching people and businesses who are interested in you and what you have to offer. Here, you can also share and re-post other accounts’ content which you may want your own followers to see.
Getting started with your social media can be quite overwhelming, therefore, you should set goals and come up with a social media plan to help, for example, a goal could be to increase website traffic from social platforms. To do this you could post relevant educational content or post consistently so you are always showing up on someone’s feed. You should set out a plan for this, a content calendar is a great way of planning social posts and the time they should go out.
Please see this post to learn of the big pharma organisations doing social media well.
2. PAY-PER-CLICK
Pay-per-clicks help boost traffic to your website and increase sales. It is a great way to get your business out there on a number of different platforms such as search engines and social media. These ads are easily targeted towards a specific audience and have guaranteed results. PPC also helps you to find where your audience is located, using this and analytics combined you learn more about who is clicking your ads.
It is also a great idea to use PPC with SEO as together they can help you to improve your organic search rankings. Using PPC and SEO together helps to ensure you reach all organisations searching for your service. PPC is a great tool in the life sciences as you can market directly to your target audience. The key is to look at keywords others may have overlooked and aren’t as obvious as these may be the keywords that set you apart from the rest and show you off as unique.
3. EMAIL MARKETING
Email marketing - perhaps the oldest digital marketing method in the life sciences - is a great way of promoting a specific product or service as well as building relationships with new potential clients in the life sciences sector. It is important to never spam someone’s inbox with email marketing, especially in the B2B life sciences. Also, before sending any emails to anyone you should ask for their consent to send them email marketing otherwise, this may cause irritation.
Once an email campaign has been sent you can then use KPIs to see how the campaign has performed. These can be open rates and click rates, to see the click rate it is a good idea to always provide a link in your email campaign, this way you can see who is opening the email and who is actually actioning the email. Email marketing can be so successful in the life sciences and so used correctly can have a big impact.
4. BLOGS
Blogs are a useful tool for helping your website appear higher in search results as well as keeping connected with your audience in the life science sector. Blogs help establish yourself to new visitors to your website. They help drive traffic to your website by adding more and more opportunities for you to show higher up in search results.
Blogs also help support SEO as the more blogs you post with these keywords, the more likely you are to rank higher in search results. Creating blogs on your website is also a great way of turning a ‘visitor’ of your website into a lead. A way of doing this is providing call-to-actions in all blog posts, if someone is interested in your content the likelihood is they will want to see what else you provide.
5. CONTENT MARKETING
Content marketing is a great way of increasing sales and help stimulate interest in your brand - and it is probably the most widely used digital marketing method in 2020. There are many forms of content marketing, some already mentioned, but others include podcasts, videos and infographic content marketing. Also building online communities can help you establish your brand and giving an online space for many to join and share interests can all be factors which help your business grow. Content marketing works well with SEO as it helps with keyword research.
For some examples of great content in pharma, please see this post.
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6. APPS
So much of our time is spent on apps and it can be very influential as a digital marketing method. Creating a virtual hub for your clients to come to could be a great way of engaging your audience in the life sciences. This could be something simple which could just involve chat rooms or ways of clients communicating with the business in an easy way which helps your business gain recognition and credibility as apps are the new up-and-coming way of marketing, so get your foot in the door.
7. SEO
Search engine optimisation is vital to every business that wants an online presence, especially in the life science industry. Some of the key things you should consider when trying to build your online presence should be; using a simple site design which is easy to navigate and find key information on. A customer may want to find the information they are looking for in one to two clicks therefore, don’t hide information and make them go looking, present it straight to them. Another thing to consider is to increase site speed. Your site speed may determine where you show in search results. Most importantly, know your keywords. Knowing what keywords your audience is searching for and incorporating these into your website will help you rank higher in search results. Lastly, post relevant, quality content.
For more info on SEO for 2020, please see this post.
8. ONLINE COMMUNITIES
Online communities is always an area of digital marketing that needs to be explored, as we touched upon the method/channel in this post.
Online communities and networks present the perfect setting for building relationships and brand awareness, with prospects, peers and patients. Don't neglect your social media platforms, forums and other online communities as they also provide the opportunity for organisations to communicate in trusted environments. Turn to your media partners and other industry influencers to help promote you and your brand so that your customers can see your popularity within your specific vertical and marketplace. The life science sectors are so large that there will always be digital communities where people will gather to find informative content - again, this is within the B2B and B2C sectors.
For more on strategic digital marketing approaches in the pharmaceutical sectors, and how we can help you, visit our section on web.