Content strategy is creating content with a purpose. Its main objective is to support business-wide initiatives and drive meaningful results. Effective content builds trust with your audience, places your products and brand ahead of competitors, and ranks you high on search engines, converting prospects into customers and creating brand ambassadors.
Whether explaining how to use a product, providing resources to support a specific community, marketing a new service, or creating brand awareness, writing should reach someone important to your business and be connected to a set goal. People who find value in your content will continue building relationships with you and your company.
Content strategy for life sciences, however, is more complex than for many other industries. Google is stricter for medical and scientific websites, and content published in this field must be evidence-based and reviewed by qualified experts to be credible and authoritative. At the end of the day, we are dealing with a scientific audience, so knowing what data to provide (and how) is vital to building a trustworthy brand.
Content strategy for life-science companies
The life sciences industry depends heavily on reliable information. High-quality content and data are a scientist’s big part of their buying process and decision-making. A recent survey from Research Gate indicated that 89.6% of scientists’ lab equipment purchases use white papers in their pre-purchase research, while 81.4% use publications or other high-quality content sources.
Although there are some well-established best practices, there’s no one-size-fits-all. An effective content strategy must be tailored to the organisation’s unique circumstances, product, and brand guidelines. Content creation must be connected to quarter goals and brand guidelines and smartly address its niche audience.
Also, aligning content topics, subtopics, and formats to your audience’s buying stages is vital. Thus, to help content strategists create an effective plan, your R&D, Sales, Support, and Marketing teams must share customer questions and purchase information. Customer needs, pain points, and purchase preferences are the essence of content strategy.
But getting started in content strategy for the life-science sector is more complex than it sounds. Competition is high, and standing out among the crowd is not easy but crucial. There are creative ways to boost business growth through content, and designing a long-term content framework that works for your unique business is a good start.
Creating a long-term science content plan
Designing a long-term content strategy that works best for your organisation involves researching, understanding your audience, performing a robust content audit, and embracing the habit of consistently testing and optimising what you publish.
Content marketing isn’t a once-and-done task. It’s a regular work in progress, constantly evolving to support your content ecosystem, audience expectations, and business goals. So, build a guiding strategy that ensures all the pieces fit together cohesively, creating a unified brand identity that provides your audience with consistent and correct information delivered the right way and at the right time.
Professionals specialising in content for the life-science sector can help you organise the stages of content planning and what you need to keep in mind when designing a strategy. This approach will help you save time and money in the future.
From my experience – and by observing other content creators I trained – it is easy to side-track and miss the focus when writing a piece or defining topics. Thus, creating stages, templates, and listing vital information to build a solid strategy is necessary to keep your content project on track.
Below, I share an overview of the four basic steps that may help you get this party started:
1 – Set business goals
Each content piece should be tied to a goal. For example, if the goal is to reach 200 new customers in the quarter, you may need 500 website-generated leads from 3000 unique website visits during this period. Thus, clearly defining content topics for each buying stage, finding information gaps in your website, and defining a deadline to hit this number is critical. Use SMART goals to help you out on this task.
2 – Audit the company’s initiatives and assets
This step can be divided into two major parts:
- Content audit evaluates the current assets used to attract your target audience in the content you have produced (if any). This helps you find the gaps and opportunities to address and is the quickest and easiest way to boost your current content library. When auditing assets, keep in mind the buyer’s journey stages, content format, targeted buyer personas, topics addressed, and anything that may add value to your goal.
- Event-based audit focuses on upcoming events to attend and projects already running or planned to start for the company. Identify content that supports these initiatives, organise them according to monthly priorities, and connect to other departments’ goals and needs to support the overall company’s initiatives.
3 – Define your buyer’s personas
You will have nothing helpful to say if you do not know who you want to talk to. Thus, set some time aside to get to know your potential customers, questions, needs, buying journey, and pain points. Once you know what they ask, providing info ahead of time is even better. Find the challenges they may face when trying to understand the value of your product or technology and be one step forward in explaining the final benefits and problems it solves.
4 – Identify your buyer’s journey
Once you know your buyer’s personas, you must understand how they walk through their decision-making process. So, addressing every stage of this journey – awareness, consideration, and decision – will help you design content that fuels each step accordingly. So do NOT make a sales pitch during a webinar for the awareness phase, for example. This will not be well seen, especially in the scientific community.
Examples of helpful content for Scientists
A question I often hear is: “But we have such a high number of website visits; why don’t we get more leads?”
Increasing website visits should not be the goal when writing content. This thought may lead to writing anything to get anyone on your website which differs from what you want. It is not volume but quality that you are looking for: the right people finding answers to their questions and solutions to their challenges. Whoever visits your website must find the information there helpful and valuable. Remember: you are writing for humans, not (only) for search engines.
Explore the same topic in various content formats and multiple channels to fulfil different buying stages. This way, you guarantee more exposure to an important subject and answer your potential customers’ main questions.
The Table below gives examples of content formats designed for different stages of the buying journey. Remember that the same topic can be applied to various formats and explained at different levels, covering the multiple phases of the buying process.
Webinars, for example, are a cost-effective way to boost sales. With an average conversion rate of 55%, webinars are 10x more efficient on a cost-per-lead measure than physical trade shows in B2B marketing initiatives.
Another helpful tip is guides. Guides can result from several pieces published during a period, for example, and transformed into a single piece. By recycling old content and putting it together as a guide, you can explain how to use a product or complete a specific action from beginning to end.
But keep in mind that it is not enough to publish content often. It is necessary to measure its effectiveness and optimise your methodology constantly. Maintaining content hygiene can be as important – and often more effective – as creating new content pieces.
How to Maintain a Successful Content Strategy
Content strategy blends science, art, and technology – it must be a measurable and optimisable creative process. Thus, define KPIs for content monitoring through proper metrics and optimisation protocols.
Creating templates, metrics thresholds, and deadlines is critical to maintaining and guaranteeing a successful ongoing content plan. Also, repurposing and updating content is a good investment, saving time and keeping your audience hooked with fresh, well-designed, updated information. Remember that you are talking to scientists and engineers; they know good data when they see it.
Also, avoiding some mistakes at the beginning can save time and money, accelerating your product and brand exposure and saving future costs (fixing can be more complex and expensive than creating). So, make sure you have the right team to design your strategy.
I frequently notice a need for more clarity of strategy, goals, and objectives, as these definitions are often misunderstood and mixed up. A good strategy is hard work and, unfortunately, usually the exception, not the rule, especially for small and medium science-based companies. Talking to a content strategist could be a significant shortcut.
Content strategy makes your service and product known
You may develop the most extraordinary technology. If no one hears about or understands the problem it solves (and how), you reach no one. Knowing your audience’s questions, wishes, and challenges will help you provide the valuable information they seek.
A well-designed content strategy should tell the story of what your business does and why (the why is very important for the brand!). It is also essential that whoever designs the strategy understands science-based companies, the specific niche of experts (the potential customers), and the challenges of writing for this sector and audience.
Knowing the competition landscape – their weaknesses and strengths – is also important. But focusing and building on your strengths is the best option. Invest in communicating them effectively and clearly. Highlight the unique benefits of your product, service, or technology to those who need it, as this is the best way to connect to the right clientele, building trust and long-term relationships.
Talk to a science content strategist if you need help getting this party started. This will save you time and money and help you create a solid plan for long-term results.