Pittconn (Pittsburgh Conference) 2010 Conference & Expo, February 28-March 5, 2010, Orlando, FL, USA

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How can life science and biotechnology companies leverage social media to increase visibility, generate more leads, and ultimately improve sales or the value of the company? Comprendia is the recognized leader in understanding how to develop and implement social media strategies tailored to life science and biotechnology companies. Check out our Biotechnology Marketing 101 Blog for more details. There are myriad online social media resources and agencies, but this workshop is the only resource that will provide you with strategies backed by real examples and designed to help you launch campaigns that will work with your life science customers.

In this 4 hour hands-on workshop we’ll answer these questions, giving real examples and materials to help you jump start social media campaigns for your company:

• Which applications and themes work with scientists or biotech professionals?
• How do I integrate social media with existing marketing strategies and tactics?
• What is the return on investment (ROI) for social media, and how do I maximize it?
• How do I get buy-in from the management and motivate my team to participate?

We’ll have wifi so you can bring your computer, ask lots of questions, and head back to the office ready to get started.

Who Should Attend: Business Development and Marketing professionals who provide products or services in a non-regulated environment and are interested in using social media to increase sales, leads, or visibility. Examples: companies who sell research-only products or services to scientists or small to mid-size biotechnology companies that need more visibility. Contact us if you have questions.

As a Participant You Will Receive:

1. Printed workshop materials
2. A highly interactive presentation session from Mary Canady, customized to your needs and using real examples from life science and biotechnology
3. Worksheets designed to help you get social media launched at your company
4. Hands-on, online training and feedback from Comprendia during the session
5. Free follow-on session with Comprendia
1. Review of workshop ‘homework’
2. Guidance for next steps

This is our first in a series of quarterly Social Media for Life Science and Biotechnology Workshops. Sign up for updates to our blog and you’ll be the first to hear. We’re also considering ‘virtual’ workshops or roadshows–let us know if you’re interested.

Check out our Workshops and Training page to see when this workshop is offered next.

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US HUPO (Human Proteome Organization) 6th Annual Conference, March 7-10, Denver

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Each post in our Life Science Marketing Plan series will help you piece together a ‘map’ that is representative of the analyses and learning process that will help you define your marketing strategies and tactics for the year. In the first part of this series, we provided and outline and described why marketing plans are needed for life science companies of all sizes to meet their goals. In this post, we’ll define the first half of the components in detail. Let’s get started!

1. Executive Summary. Even though this part of the marketing plan is at the beginning, it is written at the end. Writing a marketing plan is like a journey, and at the end of it you will have learned a lot and have a clear understanding of the strategies and tactics needed to help you reach your goals. Keep in mind that several people, especially senior management, will read only this part of your marketing plan, so summarize the report here and don’t worry about being a bit redundant. Feel free to reference figures and tables in the report for easy and quick analysis. Also, if there’s a point you’d like to make to senior management (e.g., I need a bigger marketing budget to meet my numbers!) this is a good place to make your case.
2. Situational Analysis. Before getting started on an in-depth analysis, you need to provide details about your products, internal factors, and external trends which will help explain where you’re starting from. Remember that the marketing plan is a tool to help you communicate to others, so this is a good place to step back and set the stage so that anyone in your company who reads the plan will understand it clearly. Be very literal and don’t worry about explaining things you think everyone knows, such as defining the products included in the marketing plan and that big acquisition that occurred 3 months ago (a safe bet you’ll need to include that these days). In this section you will describe broader issues such as the life cycle stage of your products and any history that is relevant such as trends in the industry and current attitudes about your company’s brand.
3. Sales History and Forecast. This is fairly self-explanatory, but sometimes a bit tricky depending on when you are writing your plan. Because you normally need to start your plan well before the year ends, having a full year of sales history is difficult. In my experience, projections are normally used to estimate sales for the current year, and remember that sales fluctuate from month to month (e.g., December is usually lower) so base the remaining months’ sales based on these changes. Sales forecasts for the year that the marketing plan describes may need to be done at the end of the report, as the complete analysis may be needed to make predictions. Consideration of the historical sales growth, the size of the marketing budget in comparison to yearly revenue, and other factors will be important. In addition, my experience has been that ‘top down’ forecasts are sometimes given to marketing and product managers, indicating the revenue growth they must achieve in the coming year. While this is sometimes disheartening, the marketing plan can be used to explain why a higher budget is needed if these growth figures are too ambitious. A general rule of thumb is that the marketing budget should be at least 10% of the annual sales for the products it supports. In practice, I’ve seen the budgets run much lower than this, perhaps because marketing is sometimes under-appreciated in life science companies. However, it’s a good number to shoot for, and a strong marketing plan will provide confidence to the management that you will meet your goals if given the appropriate budget (and be prepared to work hard to reach them if your wishes are granted!).
4. Market Research. One of the objectives of a marketing plan is to ensure that your company continues to be driven by the market. In other words, you need to know about your customers’ needs and about factors that are driving their purchases, and there is no substitute for getting this information straight from them. Market research can be done many ways–you can buy off-the-shelf reports (Price $3-10K), hire a company (broad price range, $5K minimally), or conduct research yourself (price varies greatly). The scale can be large or small, from online surveys of hundreds to phone interviews of 10. Larger and purchased surveys will give you estimates on the size and growth of the market and each company’s share of it, while smaller surveys help you understand your customers more on a personal level (which is very important as we’ve discussed). Another consideration is whether you want the survey to be blind, and whether it should focus on only your customers or more broadly. One of my fantastic mentors Michael Gonzales told me once at the start of a market research project to define very specifically what internal decisions you need to address before you begin, and write each question to definitively provide answers to them. There is no point in posing a question unless it will have an unambiguous effect on a decision that you will make. It is easy to get carried away designing questions related to your company or products, as you’re curious about so many aspects, but keeping your objectives clear helps to focus the effort. Questions should center around the customers’ needs and habits and how they relate to your product development and tactics. What are their daily struggles or ‘pains’ in the broad area of your products? What conferences are they attending this year, and which publications do they read? Perhaps most importantly, you should give customers a chance to give you any feedback they have for you in an open-ended format, as they’ll often have great ideas and opinions and appreciate being heard. Even with a focused effort, you’ll learn a lot about your customers and their needs, and can use the information all year for many different purposes.

   After you’ve completed these tasks, you’re well on your way towards completing your ‘journey’ towards defining your marketing strategy and tactics. The way the pieces fit together will become even more clear after the next post in our series, The Life Science Marketing Plan, Part 3: Components (Second Half). Sign up for updates so you won’t miss anything, and see the whole series here.

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XGen Congress, March 15-19, San Diego, California USA

Applying NeXt GENeration Genomic Technologies for Now Generation Discoveries

Welcome to the Decade of the Genomics Revolution! Technological advances are now enabling faster and cheaper mapping of DNA/RNA allowing genomic comparisons and accelerating genomic discoveries. Cambridge Healthtech Institute is proud to launch The XGEN Congress to enable this genomic revolution. This five conference week-long event will demonstrate the unique cross fertilization of established genomic technologies with Now-Generation Sequencing and Quantitative PCR along with exciting applications of Copy Number Variation and Epigenetics. In addition, you will learn why data is the driving force that enables discovery at Sequencing Data Storage and Analysis.

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Association of Biomolecular Research Facilities (ABRF) 2010: “Translating Basic Research with Advances in Biomolecular Technology”
March 20-23, 2010 • Sacramento, California

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American Chemical Society (ACS) Spring 2010 National Meeting & Exposition

March 21 – 25, 2010
San Francisco, California, USA

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This is the third post in our Life Science Marketing Plan series, where we will describe the second half of the components. In the last post, we described the first half of the components, which are the Executive Summary, Situational Analysis, Sales History and Forecast, and Market Research. While this sounds like a weighty list already, it represents only the first half. Here, we describe the second half of the components, which will round out your plan and give you the perspective you need to define your life science marketing strategy and tactics.

Competitive Analysis. This is my favorite part of the marketing plan, finding out what the competition is up to! You likely have some ideas, as you should be following them all year, but this is a good time to take a hard look at them. You likely know who your competitors are, but keep an open mind and ear during your market research, do some internet research to see if any newcomers have emerged, and talk to others in your company, especially those who are customer-facing such as sales or customer service. As with other areas we’ve discussed, this exercise can be simple or elaborate, and the amount of complexity normally scales with the size of your company. Regardless of the scale, I always include a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis to put the competition in perspective. Basically, this involves an analysis of the situation from both internal (Strengths and Weaknesses) and external (Opportunities and Threats) perspectives. In addition, it is also useful to make a table which lists each of your competitors in rows, with two columns for each indicating their products’ strengths and weaknesses. The purpose of this table is to determine what advantage your products have compared to your competition, if any. As with the rest of the marketing plan, which we describe as a journey, this part can be a bit of a soul searching exercise, as you may find that your products are poorly positioned. Better to find this out now and to develop an action plan involving focusing more time on product development, rather than miss your competitive edge and miss revenue targets.

Strategy. At this point in your ‘journey,’ you’ll have learned a lot about your customers, the competitive landscape, and the challenges you face in reaching your goals. It is here that you need to define your position and messaging, as these items will guide the strategy you will employ. Your position is a description of the unique benefit that your products provide, and the messaging is how you communicate it. For example, your position may be to provide ‘the fastest protein chromatography method for membrane proteins.’ This statement must be based on reality, not just hopes and dreams, as it will be apparent to everyone, most notably the customer, if you are not being honest with yourself. As you know, being market driven means identifying these issues and bringing them to everyone’s attention sooner rather than later, so that products that are positioned well can be developed. In this case, your strategy will involve more time in product development rather than advertising. If your positioning is on target, your messaging will focus on the benefits that your product’s positioning will provide to your customers, and will speak to what you know is important to them, or their ‘pain.’ Because you’ve spent time getting to know your customers in the market research area, you’ll know this. Following the example earlier, your messaging could focus on the benefits of publishing faster. You’ll also want to include a broad overview of your tactical plan in this section, backed by your strategy. For example, if your overall strategy is to reach out to more protein purification researchers through the internet, then your tactical plan will be focused on improving your website and online advertising.

Tactical Plan. This is where you outline your advertising activities by date and predicted expense. An excel spreadsheet works well, with months as columns and tactics as rows. Include advertisements, conferences, and note when product launches or other major events will occur. Of course, coinciding product launches with conferences and relevant articles in editorial calendars will help you to maximize your resources, as is a marketing mix which will expose customers to your message multiple times in a short period of time. In order to estimate the expenses, you’ll want to start at least a month before contacting media account managers to get their media kits and perhaps hear from them as to what’s new with their publication (see our 2010 planning guide for help). Your tactical plan is very important, as it will determine many of your deadlines throughout the year, so consider it very carefully.

A well written marketing plan serves many purposes, from giving you the necessary perspective on your products to communicating your strategy to others in your company. In the last post of this series, we’ll talk more about the big picture for the life science marketing plan, implementing it as well as changes you’ll need to plan for today’s new media. Check out the whole series here and sign up for updates so you don’t miss anything!

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