What Can Scientific Brands Learn From Commercial B2C Brands?
The life sciences can be an extremely insular field…
For many working within the industry, the pursuit of discovery is the sole concern, with commercial viability being something for others to consider. The goals are lofty, analytical, and often idealistic. There are problems to solve: what does it matter how much money can be made in the process?
What they tend to overlook, of course, is the fundamental necessity of revenue. Profit may not be the goal, but remaining in operation requires a steady income, and grants and donations are often inadequate for footing the bill. This pushes every scientific brand to keep searching for ways to translate their innovation into conventional business success.
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How can they improve their performance to better position whatever they offer? In this article, we’re going to consider what such companies can learn from looking at how commercial B2C brands operate. Let’s get started.
AUDIENCE TARGETING IMPROVES ROI
More than anything else, great marketing is about efficiency: making the best use of the resources available to you. Top B2C brands have mastered this, not only through increasing automation but also through optimizing their audience targeting. Whether they’re engaging in email marketing or concentrating on social media, they’re choosing niche parameters.
Targeting the right people (and only the right people) ensures that budgets are used well instead of being wasted. Before engaging in marketing, a scientific brand must think carefully about its prospective customers and partners. Who’s worth approaching, and who isn’t? If it keeps encountering people who aren’t receptive, it shouldn’t don’t put too much effort into winning them over — it can move on to others much more easily.
LANGUAGE MUST BE ACCESSIBLE
The scientific world is rich with complex terms that most people aren’t going to understand, so the idea of asking a scientist or an engineer to explain why their work is consequential is fundamentally flawed when you’re trying to reach a new audience. In fact, such people shouldn’t be given any direct involvement in the marketing process.
The best way to take advantage of their expertise is to have copywriters liaise with them and learn what they mean: they can then rewrite those thoughts and contentions to make them accessible to people without any scientific expertise. This alone can make the difference between a failed brand and a successful one.
VIDEO CONTENT GETS ATTENTION
As internet infrastructure, mobile data plans and recording devices have improved and become cheaper throughout the world, video content has become incredibly easy to produce and distribute. Consequently, huge merchants have adopted it for their product and brand marketing. Why? It gets noticed. We’re natural hunters, so we instinctively track unexpected motion.
Scientific brands can use video content to great effect. They can create animations to simply explain how their products and technologies work, making them even more accessible than text can alone. They can even produce character-driven skits to teach valuable lessons about the world — this requires research, of course (it’s hard to compose a good story or write decent dialogue without a strong understanding of how people think and speak), but it’s worth it.
BRAND REPUTATION IS IMPORTANT
When I talk about brand reputation here, I don’t just mean things like how good a company’s products are or how reliably it delivers results: I’m also factoring in elements that are rising in importance, such as corporate responsibility and community investment. If a business wants to make sales and pick up more financial support, it needs to be fundamentally likeable.
Consider the difference between “We work on cutting-edge microchip technology” and “We work on cutting-edge microchip technology to help people work faster and more efficiently” — simply adding a grander purpose to the company statement makes it feel more significant and more deserving of support. Scientific brands need to understand this.
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FIRST IMPRESSIONS REALLY MATTER
How many companies in the science world have bland corporate websites with uninspiring designs, limited imagery, and dry copy? Far too many. Perhaps they reason that their work is what matters, and having a nice website shouldn’t make a difference — but it does. This is why merchants invest so much in making their websites look appealing. Making a good first impression leaves the visitor inclined to view everything on offer more positively.
Consider the significance of micro-moments: brief periods during which someone is keenly interested in taking action and purchasing something. Someone might pick up their smartphone, visit a site, make a snap decision about it, and then either convert or leave — all within 30 seconds. Having substance to a website isn’t enough. It needs to catch the eye immediately.
WRAPPING UP
There are many things that scientific brands can learn from the world of B2C commerce, but these are the most impactful. It all comes down to smart distribution of effort and resources: scientists and engineers should be left to focus on what they do best, while marketers and content creators should be brought in to act as mediators of sorts.
The internal work gets done to a high standard, the mediators parse it and find ways to make it clear for a broad (but targeted) audience, and everyone wins. It’s a simple system, but one that every such business should be adopting.
Guest contributor: Kayleigh Alexandra
Alexandra Kayleigh is a part-time writer at Writerzone. Also, she helps startups and small businesses find success. She loves spreading the good word about hard-working entrepreneurs from around the world.