One of the tenets of new media and marketing is a strategy called ‘Launch & Learn.’ It refers to executing marketing campaigns, launching products or websites quickly, setting up metrics to determine their success, and redefining as necessary. The benefit? Begin building brand loyalty and communicating with your customers early, rather than delaying launch, or waiting until your website or product has achieved perfection. The new paradigm has been driven by the growth of tools to create ‘web 2.0‘ websites, where users can interact and give feedback. This has accelerated the pace of business and the feedback loop cycle, and companies have quickly learned the benefit of launching campaigns and products sooner rather than later.

What about Biotech products? We all know that there are many factors that come into product development and doing business in Biotech. Our products are not T-shirts which we can design one day and toss out the next. So, the products we launch are unlikely to hit the market any more quickly. However, engaging customers through web 2.0 tools, and testing ideas or campaigns can surely benefit any product or company. In biotechnology, especially, where so many directions for products can be taken, from tools for studying drug targets to the latest in instrumentation, it seems imperative to get as much feedback as possible, especially since products often take a long time to be developed. If you work in a highly regulated area of Biotech, such as diagnostics, turn ‘launch and learn’ around and determine what things you can launch quickly to learn more about customer needs. Biotech can learn a lot from newcomers such as 23andMe, who have created blogs and communities, likely towards this goal.

Changing to a ‘launch and learn’ strategy involves a change in attitude towards a more facile development of applications, sometimes relying on open source software and outsourcing projects to smaller, specialized groups. I see many in Biotechnology and science being reluctant to embrace these new ideas, partially because of the age demographic (no offense–I’m describing myself too). We learned that big agencies do Ads and PR, professional website design is expensive and lengthy, and that large companies are the only ones that can ‘reach the masses.’ Additionally, Biotech has been a very slow adopter of social media, which bucks all of these trends.

Traditional marketing, as well, with ideas that brands should remain consistent, also stands in the way and leads to more ’staid’-fastness. I would argue that reaching your customers earlier by launching a website that may not yet have the perfect ‘look and feel’ you want, is more favorable than waiting and missing the opportunity to connect earlier and with more people. While new media moves quickly, building relationships with customers takes time, why miss out? Your Search Engine Optimization will thank you for launching early as well, because rankings improve the longer a website has been published. Launching early is exceedingly more important if your website embodies a new idea or product. According to Ries and Trout’s classic book The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, the first law states that ‘it’s better to be first than it is to be better,’ so it’s clear that launching and learning aligns with traditional marketing. This philosophy should be pervasive in your strategy and tactics–plan to use media which is amenable to determining your metrics and ROI quickly, and to revise your plans according to what you find.

Do I suggest that you put up a sloppy website rather than having none at all? Launch a product, either physical or virtual, before it’s ready? Not at all! Be proactive, and hire a team of professionals who adopt the ‘launch and learn’ philosophy. Be wary of those who present long time lines or large price tags. Don’t rush decisions, but don’t belabor them either. Want to learn more about it? I highly suggest reading Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae and Jeff Jarvis’ What Would Google Do. Also, of course, Comprendia can help you to implement ‘launch and learn’ strategies and tactics to help you become more market driven, contact us.

In our first Biotechnology Marketing 101 presentation, we discussed using the principles of marketing to help further your career. In our latest presentation, Biotechnology Marketing 101: Your Company (PDF), you’ll learn how promote your small or large company using tactics that all marketers use to promote any ‘product,’ be it a physical product, service, or organization. Learn about every day steps you can take to ensure that your company is positioned for success. The presentation includes strategies to make the most of your budget. Tips for everything from choosing a logo to leveraging PR is included here, and please contact us if you’d like to schedule a free, personalized Biotechnology Marketing 101 presentation and consultation with Comprendia.

We’ve recently put together a presentation that will help you to grow your biotechnology career: Marketing 101: You First. The presentation describes how to position and promote yourself to make the most out of your career, using marketing principles. The presentation is specific to biotechnology careers, and includes relevant information for resources specific for the industry. On the San Diego Biotechnology Network website, we’ve put together a listing of more than 300 San Diego biotechnology companies, to help you with your job search: http://sdbn.org/directory. Also, check the Comprendia career page often for updates: http://comprendia.com/career. Our next two Marketing 101 Series presentations follow:

1. Marketing Your Biotechnology Company: How to present an image for your company that will help you to gain funding and successfully launch.
2. Marketing Your Biotechnology Product: Developing and promoting products that will lead to short and long term revenue growth.

Stay tuned to the “Marketing 101 Channel” so that you can utilize marketing principles at every stage of your biotechnology career, and sign up for updates to get messages in your inbox.

You’ve surely noticed it in other areas–the news is chock full of stories about how businesses are using social media to get ahead. What about using social media in the biotechnology or life sciences industry to help your business to grow? Well, there is good news and bad news. The bad news is that Biotech’s presence is lagging behind other industries in most social media. Searching “biotech” in Facebook and Twitter gives a small number of results compared to other industries, and most of the bookmarking sites don’t even have a biotechnology category (we’ll define these media below). The good news is that now is the time to get active in this media, so that you can get traction now before the competition discovers how useful it is. Besides further engaging your customers (a la Web 2.0), you can also use it to increase your web traffic by improving your search engine ranking.

We plan to publish several blog articles in our Marketing 101™ series on using social media to grow your business. Social media can be described as split up into the 4 C’s: Context, Contacts, Communication, and Collaboration. There is a broad range of applications and a lot to cover, and things change literally daily. In this initial installment, I’m providing the following guide to social media get us started, and you can also check out the Wikipedia entry.

Comprendia has recently become active on Twitter, and we have found it to be a great way to keep in touch with the (small) biotech and drug discovery community presence there, and to get people to visit the site. We have also used LinkedIn and Ning to create the Biotech Marketing Group, which will facilitate networking and exchange of information between professionals in the area. The capabilities of the “out of the box” tools such as Ning are growing daily, so you don’t have to build them from scratch. In addition, there is a wealth of biotech news, reports and research available in myriad places, allowing you to leverage the information to create interest in your website and products.

In the coming installments, we will provide tips on using social media to build your biotech or life science business. Let us know if you have any specific questions you’d like us to address. Also, check out our full Marketing 101 series to learn more about leveraging marketing tactics and strategies for biotech or life science business growth. If you can’t wait to get started, contact us about integrating social media into your business and marketing strategy, and you’ll get a leg up on your competition!

When I first made the leap from academia to marketing in the life sciences, branding was a foreign concept to me, and I had a hard time relating it to biotechnology products. Wikipedia defines branding as “a symbolic embodiment of all the information connected to a company, product or service . . . which serves to create associations and expectations among products made by a producer.” Translation? The best example I can think of is from one of the world’s leading brands, Coca Cola. You see a can of Coke, with its red imagery and logo, and you know what to expect when you pop the top and take a drink. Can you imagine if tomorrow Coke cans came in yellow? Would you expect the same refreshing beverage as you placed the can to your mouth? Probably not, and that’s because you have “associations and expectations” with the Coca Cola branding, which you wouldn’t have with a new labeling of the product.

Why should you care? Branding can be used in a lot of different ways at any sized biotech or life science company. Most consider Invitrogen to be the first company that brought formalized marketing and branding to the life sciences, with a distinct “look and feel,” which was incorporated into their product packaging, newsletters, catalog, and clever, consistent Ads. All of these materials work together to evoke an overall opinion of the company in the mind of the customer. When a scientist opens a kit from a well-branded company, s/he already has an expectation as to how the product will work, and normally this is a good association, otherwise it would not have been purchased.

Large companies normally have a branding style guide which directs them on which colors and fonts to use, layouts for Ads and all communications with customers, and sometimes even a “voice” which describes the style of the verbiage used. These style guides are done by trained branding professionals, and can be expensive for smaller companies. However, smaller companies can take advantage of branding without this large expenditure, by keeping a few key concepts in mind.

Start with a web/graphic designer to design your logo, website, and brochures–there is no shortcut for this, and doing it yourself can be disastrous. While you are at it, have them design some key items that you know you’ll need in the next 6 months, which may include product inserts, fax cover page/letter head, business cards, email blast template, and newsletter. Getting these items now will save you time later, and may also give you a “head start” with other materials you’ll need. I once heard that there are three things that are needed for effective branding: consistency, consistency, and consistency. This rule may be even more important for a small company, as potential customers are looking for clues as to your company’s reliability in all of their communications with you. With some forethought, you can portray a consistent branding message to your customers. When consistency is paired with high quality products, researchers will associate your marketing materials and communications with your products, leading to increased loyalty and purchases. Here are some tips to help you to remain consistent:

1. Consider product packaging and inserts carefully. All should be consistent in content and with the brand.
2. Utilize a consistent font in all of your advertisements, and communications when it is feasible. This should be part of the package that the designers give you.
3. Ask employees to include a company-wide, consistent signature in emails, with all contact information.
4. Make sure the company letterhead and fax coversheet are easily accessible to everyone in the company, and utilized.
5. Make sure that your voicemail system is user friendly and consistent (you can even suggest a greeting for employees).
6. Consider a short training for all employees on the importance of company image and consistency of the brand. You’ll likely find that employees are proud of your products, and are eager to keep the branding consistent, once they understand the importance.

Do you want to learn more about how you can leverage effective branding for increasing market share for your biotech and life sciences products or services? Comprendia can help, contact us to schedule a free one-on-one or web-based presentation, and ask about our Marketing 101™ workshop. This post is part of Comprendia’s Marketing 101 Blog Series, designed to help you grow your business by developing marketing strategies and tactics that work for biotechnology.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is vital for any company, and biotech companies are often very fluid and must keep their sites optimized to reach their target audience. Researchers rely heavily on search engines such as Google to quickly find information and products, and having your site at the top of the list makes them more likely to visit it. There are several tricks of the trade to improving your ranking, including using keywords on your page, simplifying your design by omitting extras like Flash, and cozying up to the search engines by using their web tracking and advertising applications. However, the single most important thing you can do is to add useful content to your site. In other words, make your site a place where your customers would want to come, not just for your products, and they will.

In Biotechnology and the Life Sciences, we are lucky in that there is usually a wealth of scientific research behind the products, so creating content around them simply takes time to put articles together. Consider writing application notes or newsletters that will not only put your products in the context of your customers’ research, but will increase your search engine indexing. Another idea is to include an application that many of your customers will find useful. Do your customers need to make certain calculations repeatedly, or would they benefit from a listing of references on a particular topic? Often, these resources can be integrated into your product listing. Thus, they will not only provide researchers with useful information, but they will be linked to your products and increase your search engine indexing because they will contain words that your customers are already searching for.

Some biotech companies have broken basic SEO rules. A few years ago, several companies got the idea to link their signal transduction products from graphical pathway maps. Thus, researchers searching for anything from “ras protein” to “map kinase” will find these applications and the products related to them. Great idea, but two of the companies used Flash animation for their applications, which are almost invisible to the search engines. Currently, the one company that chose not to do this, EMD Biosciences, still shows up fairly prominently in the search engines, while the others don’t.

Getting your site recognized by search engines is best done by professionals that understand your science, your target audience, and how to implement a strategy that will meet your goals for growing your biotech or life science business. Whether you need to redesign your website completely, or just need the “extra minds” to write engaging content, Comprendia can help. Contact us today to schedule a free consultation and Marketing 101™ seminar, which will include hints for optimizing your website today. This post is part of Comprendia’s Marketing 101 Blog Series, designed to help you grow your business by developing marketing strategies and tactics that work for biotechnology.

One of the things I have heard from people in bioscience companies is this: “OK, we’ve got the product developed and ready to launch. Now, we need marketing.” This is a misconception about marketing held by people in different departments at almost any sized company. Marketing does not equal advertising. According to wikipedia, marketing is defined as “the process of creating or directing an organization to be successful in selling a product or service that people not only desire, but are willing to buy.”

In truly market driven companies, marketing comes in at the very beginning of product development, and very little R&D effort is done towards projects that marketing has not been involved with. The “formality” of who does the marketing differs in many companies (and may differ in an individual company at any given time). Product ideas can (and should) come from anywhere, but the key is determining whether there are customers that will buy it.

It is easy to understand how biotechnology companies often find themselves in a situation where marketing is misunderstood. The evolution of a bioscience company, and marketing within it, often happens like this:

1. A scientist or entrepreneur has an idea for a product, or group of products, and decides to form a company. This person is likely someone who could have used this product, and thus s/he knows what potential customers want.
2. The company hires a handful of employees who all “buy into” the proposed product, sometimes relying on scientists who just came from the academic bench (after all, who else would get so excited about stock options?).
3. The product(s) launch and the market responds, and if positively, the company is still afloat!
4. The company gets mired in the details of producing a product, responding to customers, and eventually dealing with competition for the product. The company grows and starts hiring R&D specialists, etc., to grow the product line. Bioscience products are highly technical, so the company is likely still highly technology-driven at this point.
5. The company needs to decide what the next product or product line should be . . . but most of the staff is no longer familiar with the research customers, as they haven’t been one for a few years.

This is a critical point in the growth of a company, where marketing should be brought in to develop new products and ensure that existing products are managed properly. There will likely be tension between R&D and marketing, as a good marketing department will push R&D out of its “comfort zone” to produce innovative products. This is a good thing! The challenge in the bioscience industry is having people in your marketing group that understand the science enough to drive product development. Also, the management must ensure everybody buys into the market-driven model, where time is not spent on products that the marketing group does not approve of. There can be finger pointing and blame, as to whether the problem is with the product itself or the marketing being done for it, but ultimately the marketing group should bear the burden of both driving the process and taking responsibility when sales are down.

How do you use marketing to drive your bioscience business towards continued growth? That’s what we can help you with, both in our Marketing 101™ series and by working with you. Stay tuned, sign up for updates, and contact us for a free consultation and a Marketing 101™ seminar. This post is part of Comprendia’s Marketing 101 Blog Series, designed to help you grow your business by developing marketing strategies and tactics that work for biotechnology.