Companies in science-based industries, like pharma, diagnostics, materials science, and technology, have deep wells of expertise. Specialized know-how underpins the entire business enterprise.
When you’re a business-to-business (B2B) marketer, this valuable, and sometimes exclusive, scientific knowledge is a critical resource for connecting with prospects and moving buyers to the next step. As marketers, we are charged with getting prospects through the beginning of the sales cycle of “Aware, Consider, Buy” and supporting the journey as they become Sales Qualified Leads (SQL).
But how can you effectively harness all that knowledge to meet your marketing goals?
Translate the Scientific Expertise
Scientific and technical prospects crave useful information, credible perspectives, and insights into the challenges they face. The good news is that your in-house subject-matter experts (SMEs) and trusted external key opinion leaders (scientists, engineers, clinicians, researchers, technical teams, and business development teams) understand your prospects’ challenges, and how to address them.
Our thought leadership development portfolio demonstrates how your organization’s scientific insights can become:
- Bylined articles
- Video interviews and podcasts
- Q&As
- Trend pieces
- Insights from executives
Lifting the Burden Off the Experts
You might think your SMEs are too busy to produce thought leadership pieces. But they don’t have to do the heavy lifting. By combining an SME interview with a bit of information-gathering, a specialist writer with the relevant scientific and industry background can turn your SME’s insights into a carefully crafted byline article.
A skilled public relations (PR) team can also foster media relationships that lead to additional thought leadership opportunities by using a question-and-answer format. For those, your experts only have to answer a few questions — in writing or on a call — about topics that they already think about every day. If in writing, the PR team can help run reviews and finalize responses for submission.
If even these opportunities feel like too much of a strain for your internal experts, there are other sources for great scientific content. Third party publications and media partners can create a custom scientific research survey for you, for example, as part of your ad plan. As a sponsor, your brand gets noticed in your industry’s space and the study results become content you can repurpose throughout your campaigns and across all channels.
What Good Thought Leadership Looks Like
Good thought leadership content presents technical non-promotional knowledge as clear, relevant information for a defined audience. In scientific markets, that usually means focusing on an industry challenge or trend, clinical question, lab or other workflow issue, or technology shift that matters to the audience. A well-developed piece should help readers understand what is being addressed, why it matters, and what they should ultimately take away from the insights.
Content like this works because it helps buyers learn something useful. This is material that doesn’t serve as a direct promotion of your company: It instead positions your expert as a thought leader — as an industry resource who is knowledgeable and approachable. Seeing where that leader works is the next logical step for a prospect who becomes curious about the material.
Turning Expertise into Leads
The benefits of educational information are not limited to thought leadership opportunities in earned media, however. In paid media programs, non-promotional information can be very effective for drawing in your audience, demonstrating credibility, and building trust. When accompanied by a lead-nurturing plan, the effort can have a big impact.
For example, our client, Fujirebio Diagnostics, hosted an educational webinar on research supporting the clinical use of procalcitonin testing for sepsis detection. It featured three experts who interpreted the research involved. We collaborated with a third-party publisher to present this research to lab directors, then extended that targeting further through the publisher’s invitations to infectious disease doctors and clinical pharmacists. A post-event nurture plan followed the live event, offering registrants access to an executive summary, a white paper, and an FAQ sheet.
This project started with education, then shifted toward selling through additional content in the nurture stream, with earned media serving as a valuable asset.
When marketing teams connect expert content to a practical conversion path, your organization’s knowledge builds your reputation and becomes part of demand generation.
Repurpose, Repurpose, Repurpose
In some cases, there may be more scientific content on hand than you realize. American Pharmaceutical Review housed a bank of 12 recorded webinars they had produced. We brought the knowledge in those webinars out of the recordings and repurposed it into a dozen white papers.
White papers can also be developed from your thought leadership material, extending the value of the time and effort invested in creating the original content. Sought-after scientific expertise can also be buried within slide decks, internal records, conference talks, or product documentation. With the help of skilled writers, that information can often be shaped into educational material for your prospects.
Any content that showcases your capabilities can also be repurposed into a social media campaign through boosted posts or paid ads to drive more brand awareness and traffic to your website. Your spend of time and costs grows in value by extending the content’s reach to targeted audiences.
An integrated marketing team can help you streamline your content into a strategic plan that brings the most value in aligning your assets with your marketing plan.
Tapping into Your Gold Mine
Scientific expertise has real commercial value. It builds credibility, earns trust, shapes audience perceptions, and creates a path to deeper engagement with your organization.
Technical knowledge from your organization’s experts is a marketing gold mine; the key is knowing how to get the most value out of it.
For help creating a scientific thought leadership plan that turns expertise into content buyers can act on, contact our team.