Tag Archives: digital marketing

Social Media Marketing Challenges in the Biotech Industry

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I once heard this line in a podcast, “Take what’s important and make it interesting.” It resonated with me immediately. If there was ever a direct call to action for all that we do in social media, particularly social media marketing in the biotech space, then that would be it.

I don’t see a lot of “how-to-do” social media marketing articles that focus on the biotechnology industry, and there’s probably a good reason for that. It’s hard. To counterbalance that, I thought this might be a good opportunity to talk about the challenges of navigating through it with a clear path and understanding of what it’s going to take to “win”.

I’ve been in the biotech space with Revvity, for the last three years. Overall, I’ve been in the social media “space” for over 15 years, so I’d like to think I’m fairly qualified to lean in on the topic of social. Depending on your background and experience, I may be preaching to the choir here, but the bottom line is this; The social media challenges that exist in biotech are no different than they are in retail, tech, finance, or sports.

It’s Always Going to be About Content.

Till the cows come home, it’s always going to revolve around content frequency, freshness, and the types of content that are created. At a high level, we can chisel that previous sentence into the side of a mountain. Factor in strict FDA and FTC guidelines and sprinkle in some HIPPA compliance for extra measure and your team has quite the mountain to scale. Fresh content or not, you’re probably asking yourself, how can I tell my company’s story if I’m not allowed to “really” tell my company’s story?

The challenges, however, are this, and I think this is applicable across all industries. Once you get past the creation of said content (including copy, image, and landing page), and of course making sure you’re coloring inside the lines of whatever industry you are in, you’re not done. The emphasis then shifts to the audience and the platform. Is your stuff being seen by the right people on the right platform?

In other words, you must ask yourself (and your internal teams) if creating a TikTok video on cell and gene therapy geared towards chief scientists is really going to have the same impact as a gated white paper on the same topic offered up on LinkedIn. For now, I think we can say with some confidence that at least from a chief scientist’s point of view, they are not gathering market intelligence on cell and gene therapy solutions from TikTok.

As if your content, audience, and platform selection aren’t enough to keep you up at night, let’s factor in the desired outcomes of your content? What is the desired outcome that you want from that content piece? What do you want the chief scientist to do? Let me just say, you don’t have much time to get them to the dance…on time..

The Right Content + The Right Audience = The Possibility of Some Type of Action

At its most basic, fundamental level, you must fish where the fish are. Are we trying to cast a wide net? Sure, we are. But we’re also looking for a specific type of fish that might be interested in our bait. For starters, and this may seem silly, but you must ask yourself another pointed question, and that is, is your audience online? Are your decision-makers online? If so, in what capacity? What do they do when they are online? What types of content are being consumed by them or offered up to them? Do they engage with the content?

All of these answers can be partly arrived at by setting up social listening posts, which is highly recommended. At a high level, your listening posts will tell you IF they are out there, what are the content types being offered up to them, what’s working, and what’s being said. Listening posts, done correctly can give you a lay of the land of what’s possible. I highly suggest that you set this up and you always leave it on. Those insights will fuel your content ideas and your messaging.

When I was with Accenture, we had internal discussions amongst ourselves and with stakeholders every day with the primary goal of trying to understand what content would resonate with our target audiences (white papers, infographics, industry data, videos, our latest thought leadership, etc., etc.), where did they want to consume it (usually LinkedIn but not always), and when did they consume it (on the way into work, at lunch or on the way home). If you and your teams are NOT having those types of conversations, then you’re just yelling into the void.

It’s imperative to dig into your audience personas. i.e., the who, what, why, when, where, and how that comprises your target audience. Your audience IS online, you just have to find the sandbox that they’re playing in. In the past, we have found that LinkedIn user groups have been mildly successful from a targeting standpoint but even that can sometimes be an inexact science as well-, but it is worth trying.

For the sake of this discussion, we must assume that your target audience is online and is impatiently waiting for your creative message/post. You must understand that not all audiences are like you. In other words, there’s a high likelihood that they are NOT in front of a machine from 9:00 to 5:00 like you. Thus, you have very little time to get their attention. The window is half closed already. Thus, you must put yourself in their shoes. Give them what they want, how they want it, and in a manner that doesn’t waste their time.

Picture yourself as the customer. Where do you go for your information? Where do you go for market intelligence? How do you like your content packaged and delivered?

And thus, assuming you have done the work, it comes full circle. You found your audience and now you have to give them what they want.

What is good content?

In our example above we mentioned chief scientists who hung out on LinkedIn. Why not Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter/X? Simply put, LinkedIn has the best distribution of executives, chief scientists, lab managers, and essentially all of the target audiences we are interested in as a biotech organization.  

So, if we’re now thinking about that particular piece of content that will resonate with our targeted audience on LinkedIn, then there are a couple things in play. Do we create long-form pieces of content? A video? An infographic? Or do we go with short-form, staccato-like pieces of content? What should the CTA or call to action be that can drive the user to a landing page? See, there are a lot of different variables there that can affect performance. But at the end of the day, let’s decide. Let’s commit to a strategy and consistently measure it. Let’s think about what we want to do here. We have a piece of content. We want to get the most eyeballs on it. We want to get the most qualified eyeballs on it, and we want them to act on it. Are these things possible? They are, but you have to put the work in to understand the lay of the land. It’s no different than scouting your opponent in sports, doing your homework so that you’re prepared the next day or practicing your scales in music.

The last that I’ll add is that you should “always be testing”. One thing that working in social media will always afford you is a front-row seat to people and organizations trying new things. You should do the same. Start with different types of creative, copy or calls to action. Test them against each other. See what resonates and what doesn’t. The proof will be in the metrics and the metrics will be your friend. Be data-driven. Cancel that, be data-obsessed. It will tell you whether you’re fishing where the fish are and whether the bait you have, is working. Now go forth and take what’s important and make it interesting, your chief scientists are waiting for you!

When was the Customer Experience ever NOT a Priority?

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I have a hard time processing statements like this:
“Meeting the expectations of today’s consumer is tricky business.” These are really common types of statements in today’s digital centric, retail world and I’ve been seeing them a lot over the last couple of years. It’s as if the retail customer experience has changed. I mean like really changed. Since the dawn of retail time, A product is sold and a product is bought. If the retailer was nice to you, it was a plus. If the retailer knew your name, even better. If the product was good, that’s great. If the product was great, even better. If the product is inferior, then all bets are off. If the retailer, could care less, then consumers spoke with their dollars and their feet.

That has not changed. Even today.

What has changed is the ability to learn more about the customer. What hasn’t changed is the way you’re supposed to treat the customer. What hasn’t changed is giving the customer a great product or service. Why is this any different today than it was a hundred years ago? Has technology caused a greater divide in the customer experience? Maybe. I thought it was to close the chasm that was brought on by competition and choices. The thinking was that because marketers were now armed with lots of data there would now be a more harmonious relationship. A better customer experience.

Marketers have become so obsessed with tools and resources that drive sales, that they have forgotten about, wait for it, the customer and the experience. This is not a difficult thing. Sometimes I think that marketing stacks get so high that marketers and retailers can’t see the customer that’s standing behind them. To hear companies state that they are now, more than ever, going to start focusing on the customer, just baffles me. When did this change and why did it ever? Why are we making it so difficult?

 

The Many Faces of Digital Influence

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I’ve been in the search and social media space long enough to know that without a doubt the two most vexing topics year in and year out are how best to leverage a brands presence in social media and how to engage with influencers. In my opinion, influence in social can have many faces. The face we see the most isn’t an influencer but what I like to call a “frequencer.” This person isn’t as much a thought leader as they are someone who pushes out content like they’re a bot. In fact, they just might be a bot, but what we need to stop doing is calling them an influencer and relying on their influence to help our brand. There’s a better way. You see at the end of the day, it’s all about eyeballs and traffic. If it’s “influence” that drives them, then so be it.

Look Beyond the Numbers

If we look at Twitter for example, what does 600,000 tweets mean to you? Does that mean influence? What are they influencing? How to schedule a post or a tweet 100x a day? They aren’t influencers, they’re conduits of someone else’s information. They’re facilitators of someone else’s thoughts. When do they have time to take a meeting? When do they have time to formulate their own POV?

A thought leader, in my opinion, is sharing their thoughts, their opinions, their fears, their predictions and their point of views on a topic or discipline that they’re deeply familiar with in a space that they’re deeply tethered to. These are people that drive traffic.

Recently Onalytica came out with their Top 100 Influencers in digital transformation, a space that I am deeply familiar with. I don’t necessarily consider myself an influencer in the space, but I am acutely aware of what is happening in the space, who the players are, who the companies are, and who the wannabe influencers are.

If we are going to determine influence by frequency and ‘hashtagery’, then the Onalytica lists are spot on. If we were going to base it on thought leadership and actual engagement, then you’d have to pare the lists down by half, maybe more. This isn’t an indictment on Onalytica or those that are on the list as much as it is a suggestion to brands and those that manage social media at the highest levels, to understand more of what and who you’re measuring. Or better yet, what the end game is.

Brands and orgs can not get caught up in an equation that looks something like this:

Visibility x Frequency = Authority

Readers have to take the content that is pushed out on all social platforms and do the following: Consider the source, consider why it’s being shared, consider what the end game might be, and then determine its value to you and your org. At the end of the day, give me the thought leader, not the influencer.

Ashley Madison and the Case for In the Moment Marketing

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Sh*t is getting ready to hit the fan again. Just now on Twitter I was curious about the Ashley Madison scandal. So I did a trending hashtag search on the topic. I found it fascinating how it kind of exposed sunlight to the other side of or the ugly side of the web where people like to play, preferrably in the dark. Pun intended.

Think Bitcoins and Silk Road but in the name of cheating…

For those in the know, this is just another notch in the belt of just how “nonprivate” your privacy is and how your data is, for wont of a better analogy, nothing more than sargassum seaweed. It’s there, there’s a lot of it and it can be found by anyone virtually anywhere at any time.

Except this time, the hack is different because it involves sex and outing some people who might have preferred to have had their dark digital selves kept just that, in the dark. For the uninitiated, you’re thinking might be, Ashley Madison is a website for what? People who want to cheat? Seriously?

At which point, your initial reaction might be:

  • You mean there’s a website for something like that?
  • It’s user base is how many?
  • These people actually thought their data would be safe?

Yea, I’m with you on all accounts. That’s today’s web. There’s a tribe and a site for everyone. Those that play on this side of the tracks and yes those that prefer to play on the other side of the tracks. The digital underbelly.

Meanwhile, what struck me as interesting about all of this, was the usage of in the moment marketing. Particularly, it was a paid search placement on Twitter on behalf of crisis management.

See Below:

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So what was it? Smart marketing PR? Or a troll like activity? A good usage of social media monitoring your key words? Or is it digital ambulance chasing? I haven’t decided yet what it was. Maybe all of the above.

What’s the Sweet Spot for Content Marketing?

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It’s true, the internet has shortened our attention spans. We’d rather watch a video than have to read 400 words or more. As a digital marketer one of the great challenges is to figure out what your audience wants and then to package that into something that’s measurable and moves the needle.

It’s getting harder.

You’d think that with the advent of all the new data tools and analytics packages on the market, that we would know exactly what the customer wants. We don’t really. We have an idea but as the sophistication of our digital world becomes more personalized so does the demands and expectations of the consumers swimming in it.

What I do know is that the content marketing game is drastically shifting. We get our information from so many sources nowadays. It’s insane. Think about it though, each of those sources “needs” content as well as content creators. That content? It could be hit and miss.  We choose to consume it and marketers “hope” you consume it. The latter is a beast. Why? Because consumers are fickle. They’re bored and they have zero attention spans.

We’ve become dependent on digital to entertain us, inform us and babysit us.

Because our devices are always on. Our demand for content, our blood lust for digital content to consume, is all encompassing. Because of this, the challenge for the digital marketer is apparent. Whether the content is educational or is pushing a product or service, how it is created, packaged and pushed out, now matters more than ever. Marketers can’t rely on the “long form” writtern word anymore.

We don’t have time for it. You don’t have time for it.

I don’t see this changing any time soon.

Don’t Mistake Activity for Effectiveness in Social Media

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The world of the content marketer/social media marketer is changing. I had mentioned in a previous post how it resets every day. When it does reset, we no longer are responding to what our readers, followers and fan say as much as we’re responding to what the analytics tell us in regards to consumption habits and trends from the previous day. What that tells us and what a lot of old school social media marketers will tell you (old school being about eight years… ) is that the art of engagement has now become a science. The conversations, have been lost.

How do we get back to our roots, to that happy place, to that place where social is social again?

Mack Collier talked recently about how Twitter just isn’t the same anymore and blames it on a lack of conversation and in a recent New York Times piece on specializing to survive this quote jumped out at me:

“It’s becoming harder and harder to separate the wheat from the digital chaff. The problem with the Internet is anyone can post, so it’s hard to know whether you are looking at a fact or pseudofact, science or pseudoscience.”

Clearly, we are all suffering from a need for speed. A rush to crank the content out. We’re so enamored with the platforms that allow us to say something quickly, or publish or push out a piece of content in just 2-3 clicks, that we have lost our way. We have lost our ability to have conversations and in our desire to want conversations. In fact brands and the companies that monitor brands have even redefined engagement.  Just go look up the definition.

The definition of engagement is that … there is no definition!

We can fix this though. It’s simple and it’s in the title of this post. Don’t mistake your social media activity for social media effectiveness. Measure your effectivensss in connections made and conversations had and realtionships created; and not on the quantity of what your pushing out and the number of places that you’re pushing it out on. All that does is dilute the message.

The One Mistake Every Marketer Makes with Social Media Every Day

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I promise you that what I’m about to say is worth reading. Before I elaborate though, let me stress that I am qualified to post something so link-baitish as this. I’ve been knee deep in social for the better part of 8 years. So much so, that it seems that not a year goes by now where I either hear or read about how social media doesn’t work or is useless or is dying. Let me put that notion to bed quickly. It does work, it is not useless and it is not dying any time soon. If anything, social media might be the Benjamin Button of digital these days.

But I digress. You’re not here to read about my justifications of all things social, you’re here to learn one thing, so let’s do it.

If you work in social media for either a small org or the largest of the large, chances are, your work life revolves primarily around content. You have tools to discover it and you have platforms to schedule it within and you have ways you can automate it. It’s tailored to your company and it speaks to your audience. You may set it and forget it and then move on to the next task on your social media to-do list.

Additionally, part of your social media manager duties may include looking at the data, i.e. looking at the numbers. What was the reach? How many impressions? How many likes or shares? How many retweets and how many mentions? Yes they are soft metrics, but they still do matter. It’s how you measure the effectiveness of your content, right? They may even be part of your KPI’s. If you are seriously managing a social media campaign, then you may be looking at CTR’s to a specifically tailored page to grab data, to allow downloads, signups and registrations; stuff that actually moves the needle. Or as a lot of CMO’s are looking for these days: Business Outcomes.

The key being that all of your social media activity above, is just that,  it’s ACTIVITY.

But is that enough? Let me ask you a simple question. If I asked you to engage with the people, the followers, the brand champions of your product or your brand, could you do it? If I asked you to be the subject matter expert for your company, product and industry for the social media handles that you manage, could you do it? Can you represent your brand via social without sounding like a novice? Can you hold your own, representing the company, in a space that YOUR company is supposed to own? Do you see what I’m getting at?

The biggest mistake that I see a lot of brands and companies making is discounting the notion that social media activity is not a front-line activity for the brand. Forgetting that sometimes for potential customers, buyers, partners and vendors, their first encounter or engagement with a brand, might be… wait for it… via social.

If you manage a social media team or if you’re the director of marketing or even the CDO or CMO, let’s make sure that some of your most knowledgable people of the brand are doing social; instead of the person who has platform experience but no real world brand experience. Don’t make the mistake of undervaluing the power of educated engagement in social media. It’s tough to influence the influencers if you don’t know what you’re talking about. 🙂

How do you Measure Success?

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I save way more than I need to. I’ll admit I do have a bit of a hoarder in me, not to the extremes that you see on TV, but only in the sense that the things that I save have a) some sort of lifetime business value or b) a sentimental family value. So, needless to say, there is a bit of an accumulation.

That means not only do I occasionally print things out, but I also bookmark a lot of sites and I also write stuff down on anything and everything. Translation-stacks of paper, folders, random scraps of paper, bar napkins and the backs of envelopes are not an uncommon sight on my desk. For me, when the thought or idea hits I reach for whatever is around to get it down on paper before it flies away!

The takeaway is that I realize that I save stuff, so I’m always trying to weed through and see what I can save and what I can throw away, which leads me to what I found written on a the back of an unopened envelope this past weekend. It simply said:

How do you measure success?

It’s weird but when I wrote it down it didn’t have the same impact as it did at that moment. Maybe it’s the timing of words. The moment has to be right for them to have the greatest effect. Regardless, they were powerful words, if not a powerful question.

I immediately sat down and just started to noodle on it. Maybe it should be your success? How are you measuring your success? My success? Some might tell you that success is relative. And it is. As singer songwriter Paul Simon once sang, “One Man’s Ceiling Is Another Man’s Floor.” We all can measure success either incrementally or micro-incrementally. The point being that we can measure it no matter how large or how small.

We can call them baby steps. We can call it growth, maturity, experience, whatever. The bottom line is that we can associate success with the smallest of things or the largest. All you have to do is “define” it. Define your success and define it in terms that make sense. I think sometimes we believe that we have failed because we have not succeeded. Perhaps it’s because we failed at looking at success in the right way?

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Noted scholar and teacher, W. Edwards Deming, is incorrectly attributed to a quote that gets used each and every day. It’s as follows: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Most people have the quote wrong and yet it continues to be an extremely popular saying. In its present form, it fits for the sake of this discussion. However, what Dr. Deming really said was that one of the seven deadly diseases of western management is “Running a company on visible figures alone.” This makes complete sense and yet runs counter to the quote, but is a perfect segue’ into how we all measure success in digital and social marketing.

I read Dr. Deming’s “real” quote to say that you need to trust your gut and trust your instincts. In other words, know that though the numbers may say that you have a “successful” company, if everyone is miserable and everyone hates you? Is that success? Is that a visible figure?

For a lot of large companies and even the small ones, it’s all about measuring the impact of their efforts, right? Whether it is sales, leads, deals closed, online orders or prospects identified etc., companies can’t really keep the lights on without this type of quantifiable data. Some will call this ROI and still others will simply break down these efforts as, “Here’s the money coming in, here’s the money going out and here are the expenses.”

However, the bottom line is that in business or in life, what we all do, whether we realize it or not, is we measure the outcomes. Maybe not so much in an analytical way but we do measure our daily outcomes. Was it fun? Did we lose? Was it worth it? Did you have a bad experience? Did they like you? Was it your fault? Did you win? Did you buy it? Did you get the promotion? Lose your job? Did you diet? How was your workout? Are these successes? Sure they are!

Yes, like it or not, it would seem that we do measure all of our engagements and experiences. Things that we manage it would seem, Dr. Deming notwithstanding, can be measured. We are indeed, measuring our success.
But maybe we’re missing the big picture? Maybe, just maybe, we’re getting the definition of success wrong? Or maybe we’re just not defining it properly? Perhaps if we realign our definition of success, we can achieve more?

Two questions that I always ask of every friend or client who either wants to get themselves or their company in to the digital game, whether it’s social media, mobile marketing, web design, search engine optimization or otherwise:

What do you want to do and why do you want to do it?

Be clear on those 2 objectives and then be clear on how you’re going to measure your success. Little wins are just as important as the big ones!

How Digital is Changing the Consumer Experience

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Let me give you a few real world examples that happen every day.  You’re at a stop light for all of 30 seconds and you start to get antsy because the light hasn’t changed.  You are going to make a right on red and there is someone in front of you who does not turn right away, and you lay on the horn.  You’re in line at the store waiting to check out and it’s taking forever.  Forever being about 3-4 minutes.

Why are we so impatient?

Maybe these examples will help. You’re surfing the web and a page doesn’t load quick enough so you try another website.  You want to buy a product online so you do a search and you click on the first result and it doesn’t load quick enough, so you go to the second result.   You load an app and it takes forever (10 minutes) and you immediately start thinking of your next computer purchase with more memory and more processor speed (whatever that means).

What’s happening here?

The web has conditioned us to want everything quicker and faster.  We are become a bi-product of always on.  Meaning that when we are on the web, we expect the delivery of the experience to match the level of our expectation.  The result?  That expectation starts to bleed into our offline universe.  Our consumer experience is on hyper please

The result?

Everyone suffers.  Think about it like this. The more it takes to satisfy us, the more we need- and the less it satisfies.  In a sense we’re becoming junkies for a good web experience which again as I said earlier is starting to bleed into our personal offline lives.  Is that a good thing?  In a sense it is but it’s also unrealistic to think that waiting at a light for a whole 1-2 minutes is unacceptable.  Just as it is unreasonable to think that just because it took 15 seconds for a page to load-is a bad user experience.  The web experience, and I’ll include mobile in this, is now as much about the pulleys and levers as it is about the finished product.  So how do people respond to a bad online customer experience?  They click and go somewhere else.

Too bad for the visually appealing site that is hampered by it not possessing what the user wants- Be it access to the proper social channels, free stuff, or the right check out page, or access to a contact page that provides a direct link to customer service.  If you don’t have that, you’ve crashed and burned before you’ve even taken off!  Consumers indeed.