We talk a lot about social media on this blog, and are of course strong proponents of its utilization for life science and biotech companies. One of the aspects we like about it is that the basics of traditional marketing planning are also the cornerstones of social media planning. For this series of posts, we’ll go back to basics and explore traditional marketing plans–beginning with their ‘raison d’etre’ to the details of developing one. We see marketing plans as a journey in which you learn along the way, and we’ll provide one ‘piece’ of the map in each of these posts, helping you to see the big picture by the end of this series.

What is a marketing plan? Marketing plans can be centered around a product, product line, brand, or small company. My experience has been that they are developed early in the fourth quarter preceding the fiscal year they describe. While they can be discussed by a team, normally I’ve seen one person taking the lead in writing the document–of course this is dependent on the scope of the plan. Input can come from anywhere, but the marketing group and the management should own them and have the research to back up the marketing plan’s claims. They can take the form of a text document with figures (e.g., Microsoft Word) and usually include a summary presentation (e.g., Microsoft PowerPoint). In theory, they should be considered living documents which can be modified by the owners (in practice this often proves too difficult for the busy marketing professional).

What are the components? Of course you can find marketing plan templates online, and you can certainly customize them to fit your needs. Here are what we consider to be the basics:

1. Executive Summary
2. Situational Analysis
3. Sales History & Forecast
4. Market Research
5. Competitive Analysis
6. Strategy
1. Messaging & Positioning
2. Overall Plan
7. Tactical Plan
1. Events (Conferences, Ad planning, Product Launches)
2. Budget

You’ll often hear the components referred to more generally as strategic and tactical marketing. Overall strategy is determined by the careful analysis of components 2-5 above, and it guides the tactical plan. We’ll go through each of these in detail in subsequent posts.

Why do I need a marketing plan? We all understand that having a plan makes everything work better, but I’ve worked in smaller companies in which it has been very difficult to justify taking time off to write a formal document. Let me give you a few examples for why it is so important, and why it will actually make your work easier.

Consistency. Working through a marketing plan will help you to see your path clearly for your product or product line and to quickly communicate it to others. For example, let’s say your objective is to be the leading provider of fast, high performance protein chromatography, and your target customers work mostly in pharma companies. This is all part of defining your positioning in the market, and will guide all of your marketing materials and actions. Every time you or your colleagues communicate with a customer, write a marketing piece, etc. you’ll be guided by this principle. This will result in a consistent message which will improve your brand perception.

Better product development. Successful companies are driven by the market. In a smaller biotech or life science company, the products (at least initially) are by nature driven by the market, because the company was likely founded based on strong need. However, as companies grow, there is a tendency for scientific companies to produce what they ‘can’ rather than what they ‘should.’ Developing a yearly marketing plan is a great way to get a reality check and to define your product line’s direction and be ready to give solid reasons to back your decisions. Additionally, having a document that can be forwarded to the R&D team is a powerful way to help everyone brainstorm about product development.

Time savings. Your colleague comes to you with a great conference at Cold Spring Harbor which he says is PERFECT for your company to attend. Your answer? Thank him, but point to the marketing plan and indicate that your target market won’t be in attendance, so it doesn’t make sense. Quick decision, no feelings hurt (hopefully), and you’ve pointed him in the right direction as to what conferences he should be looking for.

More bang for your buck. The strength of a good marketing plan is in the power to see how tactics can work together to be more powerful than they are individually. The tactical plan normally takes the form of a spreadsheet or table which list the months of the year and every major planned event, such as product launches and conferences. These can also be cross-referenced with editorial calendars (see our 2010 planning guide). Example? Let’s say your big product is launching in August, but you see that a relevant conference and editorial piece are available in July. By planning ahead, you may be able to work with R&D for an earlier launch, and come out with a bang in month of July with news about your product at the conference and in the editorial.

A marketing plan is a journey in which you step back and look at things more broadly, and spend the year prepared, making smarter decisions and being less reactionary. Of course, a marketing plan can be written any part of the year–there’s no time like the present. Next in our series will be The Elements of a Life Science Marketing Plan. Sign up for updates so you won’t miss anything, and see the whole series here.

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Seth Godin is a true thought leader in social media–he understood it years or maybe even a decade before many. Three of his books have literally changed the way I think about marketing and even the course of progress in many areas. Here is a short review of the books, and they’re all good and short reads, I suggest you pick them all up (each is linked to its Amazon page, and I swear I’m getting no kickbacks!).

Permission Marketing. This book was published in 1999 and truly shows that Godin was ahead of the curve, defining new media marketing strategies and tactics before the term ‘social media’ was even recognized. I call this the ‘newsletter book’ because it espouses getting permission to market to customers and uses newsletters as a prime example. In short, create marketing materials such as newsletters which provide value to your customers outside of your products, and they will give you permission to market to them. Need an example from life science? We worked with San Diego-based specialty chemicals and services provider BioBlocks to help them create a newsletter featuring the research behind their products–see an example here. As a result, they’ve increased their reach and actually gotten many compliments on their newsletter, no doubt improving the BioBlocks brand perception. In this book, Seth introduced us to the concept and benefits of engaging our customers rather than broadcasting to them using traditional marketing strategies such as print advertisements.

Meatball Sundae. In this book published in 2007, Godin expertly continues along the path he began with Permission Marketing and explains the new media world to us. He begins with the description of the impact of mass media in the 50′s and 60′s, where television allowed marketers for the first time to reach a broad audience quickly with messages about their product. He contrasts that with media today, where consumers have so many choices–for example, it is no longer a big ‘coup’ to get an article in Time Magazine, as it reaches a much smaller demographic. He points out the many media choices consumers have these days (e.g., cable, internet, youtube, blogs), and the dearth of time and attention they have. Concomitant with this is the continuing loss of the impact of entities which he calls ‘gatekeepers,’ which control the information the public receives (e.g., the editor at Time Magazine). With less control of information flow, there is a more level playing field for companies and individuals who want to get the word out via their own website, blog, YouTube channel, etc. The book describes how to succeed in this ‘new media world,’ and gives plenty of examples. If you have time only to read one of the three books in this post, choose this one. Relevance for biotech and life science? Small companies such as our client Assay Depot can reach more through tools such as blogs. The drug discovery 2.0 blog we developed with them is now the second result in Google searches for ‘drug discovery blog.’

Tribes. This 2008 book is what I consider to be the last piece of Godin’s social media trifecta, a natural progression from the two earlier books. In it, he describes the consequences of shifting media on a personal level–the full title of the book is ‘Tribes. We Need You to Lead Us.’ He describes that the internet has provided unlimited ways for groups of people to connect and affect change. No longer constrained by gatekeepers, a passionate leader can start a movement, finding others who share interests and who often have a natural affinity for the tribe they create together. He gives Barack Obama’s campaign as an example, where supporters were connected and engaged to help him win the presidential election in 2008. Can companies start tribes? Sure they can, look at Apple. Even before the internet, they created a group of loyal fans centered around their products. If you doubt that they are true fanatics, check out the movie MacHeads on Hulu. Tie in to life science companies? Many brands have special meaning to their customers, and they can be considered fans of them. The assurance of a cabinet stocked with Sigma chemicals. The trust placed in their antibody provider for reagents that will work the first time. The pervasive blue Qiagen boxes that appear in almost every shot of a lab shown on TV. As we’ve pointed out with our list of life science companies using social media, they’ve got a long way to go, but they also have a solid foundation to build upon. We think the possibilities for forming life science and biotech tribes is enormous, and have had much luck with the San Diego Biotechnology Network.

Still skeptical, or don’t feel like you have time to read these books? We’d love to give you a social media primer, and we’ll also include an analysis of your company–sign up for a free consultation. We strive to be the ‘tribe leaders’ of social media for biotech and life sciences, we certainly meet the ‘passionate’ qualification and would love to speak with you.

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I’ve heard buzz for several different flavors of social networks (or more broadly, applications) for life scientists, and I’ve been curious as to which of them, if any, are gaining traction. I made a list of the ones that seem most popular and did a ‘quick and dirty’ calculation of the number of unique visitors to these sites. The results show that some sites are indeed gaining traction, and that they provide value based on primary and secondary scientific content, both traditional and online, to their visitors.

I measured the traffic from each social application using Compete.com data from September to December of 2009. The data from this site may be inaccurate, and traffic to some sites may be low because they are newer, or the number of visitors may be calculated differently. I excluded scienceblogs.com because they are known to be very popular already, and they cover more than just life science (which several of the others do, below, but I just wanted to get an idea.) I also did tag searches on Delicious to find which sites researchers are bookmarking, to be as inclusive as possible. Sites I have excluded in the graph likely had little traffic or did not meet my criteria (e.g., NextBio has good traffic, but isn’t a social application). Also missing are social applications which are not web-based, such as Mendeley. Please be sure to comment below if I missed any that you feel fit the criteria.

I tracked whether the sites required a login to obtain what I considered to be a reasonably ‘browsable’ amount of information. Most sites feature some sort of login, but offer information through, for example, forum browsing without requiring a login (e.g. network.nature.com), while others have virtually no information available until you log in (e.g. researchgate.net). I thought this might make a difference in the traffic, but it turned out not to have as much of an effect as I initially thought. I also recorded what I thought to be the key features of the site. Note that many of the sites offer more features than I’ve listed, but my quick overview deemed the other features to be secondary (for example, scientistsolutions.com offers a social network and blogs, but I think mostly it is used for the forums).

Summary of Scientific Social Media Traffic (click to see larger)

As I mentioned, this is a quick analysis, and I invite others to copy the data and add to it (here’s the Google Spreadsheet), but a clear trend emerged from this short study. The top site, biomedexperts.com, which has an estimated 128,000 visitors per month, utilizes scientific publications to connect and segment scientists based on interests or regions. The second most popular site, citeulike.org, is a social bookmarking site with about 100,000 visitors per month who use it to search for, store, and browse related peer-reviewed publications. What’s interesting is that these sites are based on completely different formats, but they both rely on scientific publications.

Is it surprising that scientific publications are the ‘glue’ that is connecting and attracting scientists? Not really–when I think back to my days in the 90′s as a bench scientist, PubMed and my many folders of papers were what helped me to connect with other scientists and learn who the thought leaders of my field were. In a sense, PubMed was scientists’ first ‘social network.’

Also, it is not surprising that scientists seemingly need to find immediate and differentiating value in order to sign up for a social web application, as evidenced by the clear leaders. Scientists can easily socialize with colleagues on Facebook, so this utility is superfluous for applications designed just for them.

Biomedexperts.com is powered by Collexis, a company that was founded in the 90′s based on a European research project centered around creating a network of health experts. The company presumably has impressive software and databases which provided an instant remedy to the ‘network effect‘ suffered by most social networks. They simply utilized the ‘network’ that already existed, buried in years of life science publications. Brilliant. In addition, the interface for Biomedexperts.com is excellent, which likely leads to quicker adoption. Some of the other applications offer similar functionality (e.g., SciLink) with less intuitive interfaces or higher barriers to entry (e.g., having to add publications manually).

I also find it very encouraging that researchblogging.org is in third place, as it is a ‘blogger-powered’ resource which does not rely solely on traditional peer-reviewed content. It does cover more than just life science, but the numbers are impressive, with 91,000 visits per month. To me, this signals that both the acceptance and desire to publish online scientific content is increasing. Most of the posts here represent reviews of literature published traditionally, or conference summaries, but likely more primary research will appear, if the popularity of the open access Public Library of Science (PLOS) is any indication.

It will be interesting to see how the NIH’s $15M project to connect researchers will overcome the network effect and attract scientists to participate. Cameron Neylon has published his criteria for social software for scientists, it is a very thoughtful list on the ‘stickiness’ and utility of such applications. He also plans to evaluate the top sites, which will be of interest vis a vis these results on the popularity of the sites. Popular doesn’t always mean better, but the first law of marketing is ‘it’s better to be first than it is to be better,’ which means that the sites getting the most visitors now will likely be the leaders for some time.

What also interests me is the world beyond scientific publications. Biotech professionals could benefit greatly from being able to search for and license technologies seamlessly. We’re thinking along these lines for connecting scientists in San Diego Biotechnology Network, stay tuned.

These results are also of interest to those of you trying to reach scientists, or creating a resource for them. Purchases of banner Ads, etc. on these sites are obviously more impactful on the larger sites. Supporting sites with less traffic is certainly OK, but consider their potential for ‘stickiness’ before committing to a long contract. This study surprised me in that hype definitely did not translate to web traffic. Compete.com is a good tool, in general, for planning online advertising placements.

Note: Apologies to those who are digging out on the East coast after another round of Snowmageddon, for the image. At least it’s something you can relate to!

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The 110th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) will be held in San Diego, CA from Sunday, May 23 to Thursday, May 27, 2010.

[[Click here for more information.]]

American Association for the Advancement of Science 2010 meeting, Feb. 18-22 in San Diego.

[[Click here for more information.]]

At least four times this week I’ve been asked by someone for help and I’ve politely declined. It’s true that I have a large network and knowledge that comes from years of experience in the industry, and do help people quite a bit. However, I see many people who don’t realize how much they can achieve on their own these days, and think that in some cases it’s better in the long run to show them how and why they should take more initiative. Here’s a short list of the benefits of ‘helping yourself,’ with examples of the many ways we are all more empowered now.

Notoriety. Often people ask ‘can you post this news on your LinkedIn group,’ not realizing that they can post it themselves. What’s the benefit for them to post it? If the news is interesting and relevant to the group, they’ll get some ‘good karma’ from group members for pointing out something useful, and expand their reach. Regardless of your motives, being more well known is a benefit (with the exception of those in the witness protecion program ;).

Opportunity. Together with Notoriety, much opportunity comes when you help yourself. Take the example of posting items to LinkedIn groups–let’s say you post an article about stem cells. You’re automatically letting people know that you’re interested in stem cells. Perhaps someone in the field will look at your profile and offer to connect. The possibilities for receiving highly relevant opportunities are endless when you help yourself in this way.

Knowledge. I am often asked to meet people who want me to tell them what I know about San Diego Biotech. Yes, I do ‘get around’ and may have knowledge, some anecdotal, that others don’t, but I am a function of what I read and do. We set up the San Diego Biotechnology Network website with news and information that helps anyone come up to speed quickly. In fact, I know of three reports that just came out over the past few weeks about California Biotech. Other resources are Xconomy, RSS feeds, Twitter… You may say that you don’t understand these new tools, I would argue that they will become as important as radio, TV, and the internet, so buck up and learn them ;) Today, you really have the opportunity to become an expert in a wide variety of fields, for free.

Control. Sometimes people want to post irrelevant items to the LinkedIn groups I manage. Because they are irrelevant, members get irritated and feel as though they’re being spammed, and I have to delete the posting and potentially remove the member. When this happens, I tell the person that it is much more effective to start their own interest group, something we covered more generally earlier. By starting a group, rather than always trying to find one that fits, you have much more control. The topic needs to be chosen carefully, but we all have valuable offerings for others. (Note: this may seem to conflict with what I said in the ‘Opportunity’ section–however, I always tell people if they question whether a posting is appropriate, they can always ask me.)

Almost on cue, Amy Winehouse’s ‘Help Yourself‘ started playing in the background as I wrote this post…corroborating an earlier post. I hope that these examples inspire you to think about more ways you can help yourself and ultimately achieve more of your goals. Also, if I tell you to ‘help yourself,’ that you’ll understand why.

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