How to boost your life science leads with educational content
Content marketing is an effective way for life science companies to generate leads without hard selling. Instead of reaching out to leads and pitching our offering directly, we let them discover us when they have a relevant need. In a skeptical industry where buyers generally complete the majority of the buying journey before reaching out to a salesperson, this is a solid strategy for growing inbound business.
Another reason content marketing is a great option for life science companies is that it can come in a wide range of formats and cover various topics. From one-person marketing teams to whole departments, content can be easily scaled depending on your bandwidth. Some content can even be co-created with your customers, taking pressure off your internal teams.
The problem with most content marketing strategies 🤑
Unfortunately, the pressure to generate leads means that marketers frequently neglect content that aims to provide value to their audience rather than sell their products. While product-focused content is great for customers who are looking to make a purchase, it isolates everyone else in your customer base who is not in a buying mindset. When you consider that only 10% of your audience is ready to purchase at any given time, this adds up to a huge number of unengaged contacts.
So, how do we engage these contacts more effectively?
The 3 types of content marketing 📚
There are 3 different types of content that can be used to market your life science products. Each has a different purpose and is suitable for different stages of the buying process.
1. Product-focused Content
This content describes a product’s use, features, and benefits. It is great for current customers or those who are ready to buy. Whitepapers, sales pitches, and brochures are common formats for this type of content. It is relevant to around 10% of those in the buying process.
2. Product-adjacent Content
This content aims to help your audience understand a topic relevant to your business. It usually mentions the product but is equally focused on the educational content. It is great for building trust with leads who are looking for a solution but aren’t yet ready to buy. It is relevant to around 30% of those in the buying process.
3. Agnostic Educational Content
This content aims to help your audience without fulfilling a commercial motivation. It respects contacts in your list who aren’t in a buying phase right now and provides value in exchange for their time. Due to its high reach, it can also help generate brand awareness from organic and referral traffic. It is relevant to around 60% of those in the buying process.
The importance of agnostic educational content 🍏
All types of content play a crucial role in fostering trust and generating leads. However, agnostic educational content is the most effective for building brand trust and awareness. It attracts new contacts who haven’t heard of your brand and also provides value to current customers.
- Building Credibility: By offering educational content that addresses your customers’ day-to-day challenges, you demonstrate expertise and establish your brand as a trustworthy source of information.
- Establishing a connection: Creating non-promotional content for your audience shows that you genuinely care about their challenges and are willing to help them outside of the marketer-customer dynamic. By providing genuine value, you can improve brand perception and drive a more human connection with them.
- Long-term Engagement: For the majority of your audience, non-promotional content will be more engaging than product-focused content. By consistently delivering high-quality educational content, you can build a community of engaged individuals who are excited to hear your social media and email updates.
Examples of educational agnostic content on Bitesize Bio
There are many examples of educational agnostic life science content on the Bitesize Bio website. We co-create this content with our audience to promote a culture of collaboration and knowledge-sharing in our community. These webinars, articles, and eBooks also prevent ad fatigue, provide value, and boost audience engagement.
📖 eBooks
Example: 10 Things Every Molecular Biologist Should Know
eBooks are excellent for sharing detailed knowledge of a technical subject. This eBook discusses the fundamentals of molecular biology. Many of the topics it covers are not relevant to a particular product but are important for scientists to understand.
🎓 Courses
Example: How to Critically Review a Scientific Manuscript
Courses are the ultimate non-promotional content, as they provide free learning to registrants. Critically evaluating scientific journals is an essential skill for any academic, so it is an excellent resource for members of the Bitesize Bio community.
📑Articles
Example: Performing Pipette Calibration Yourself
Articles that do not focus on a particular product or service but instead solve common challenges will have a high organic reach. Most researchers use pipettes, and this article would benefit those who cannot afford to have them calibrated regularly.
Can this help me generate leads? 🧲
While product-adjacent and educational content might not lead to immediate sales, it contributes to the wider picture of lead generation in the following ways:
Increase reach
Without the usual resistance that sales messages receive, educational content is shared more widely, reaching more of your target audience through organic and referral traffic. While this might not lead to immediate sales, it can increase brand recall and keep your company top-of-mind when these customers have a buying need.
Grow subscribers
While around 90% of the people who read your article won’t be ready to buy, they might be willing to subscribe to marketing communications if they find your content useful. By optimizing your article to drive a particular conversion (e.g., an eBook download) you can capture these contacts in your subscriber list and continue to nurture them until they are ready to purchase.
Build trust
Educational content showcases your expertise, builds trust, and positions you as a subject expert in your audience’s mind.
Market research
By encouraging existing customers to engage with educational content, businesses can gather data on their audience’s interests and preferences, which can inform future marketing strategies.
Case study: Generating 5,000 leads with content marketing ✍️
At Bitesize Bio, we co-create agnostic educational content with our audience of 1M+ researchers. We also allow scientific vendors to create and promote sponsored content on our website.
For one of our sponsors, we generated 5,000+ leads from the Bitesize Bio community using a combined content marketing campaign. This campaign used 13 different pieces of product content, including articles, eBooks, and webinars, to drive lead generation.* We have included an outline of the campaign below.
Step 1: Lead Generation
Each piece of lead gen content received a 6-8 week promotional campaign across our digital marketing channels, including the Bitesize Bio website, newsletter, and social media.
- Articles: Six product-adjacent articles were used in this campaign. Each article was optimized for relevant keywords to maximize organic traffic.
- Webinars: Six educational and product-focused webinars were used. Our professional production team organized the promotion, recording, and editing of each episode. These webinars generated leads for the Sponsor, who were entered into a nurturing email sequence.
- eBook: One educational eBook was created for this campaign. Our editorial and design team helped ensure this eBook provided good value to the target audience. As before, this eBook generated leads for the Sponsor, who were entered into a nurturing email sequence.
Step 2: Lead Nurturing
Any opt-in leads from Step 1 were enrolled in a nurturing email sequence. For this section, our editorial team created seven emails that were delivered one week apart. Each email was product-adjacent, with one link to an educational resource and one link to a product page or CTA.
Based on their interaction with these emails, each contact was assigned a lead score that the Sponsor could use to qualify their leads. On average, this second step generated an additional 4.9 touchpoints per lead.
Life science content marketing services at Bitesize Bio
At Bitesize Bio, our mission is to foster a research community for knowledge sharing and
collaboration. As part of this mission, we offer content marketing services rooted in a deep understanding of our scientific community and their educational needs.
We create educational agnostic content so that life science companies can generate leads using product-focused content. You can find out more about our range of marketing services here.
Who is Bitesize Bio?
Nick Oswald began Bitesize Bio in 2007 as a scientific blog. He noticed an opportunity for mentorship and collaboration in science and wanted to create a place for researchers seeking information on lab techniques, troubleshooting, and organization.
Over time, Bitesize Bio evolved into a business with a mission to support scientists across multiple areas, including personal development, technical skills, mentoring, careers, funding, and mental health. The community has grown to over 500 researchers contributing content, with a reach of 1M+ researchers annually and approximately 65,000 people on the email list. We also collaborate with commercial companies to provide product marketing and educational content to the nurtured community of researchers.
Key takeaways 🥡
Using content to build brand trust and generate leads is a long-term and long-tail strategy that offers substantial rewards. Agnostic educational content focuses on providing value to readers without the hard-sell, but it is often neglected in content marketing strategies. At Bitesize Bio, we have shown that moderating your commercial needs means you can experience growth in both brand reputation and lead generation.
Further resources 🎓
Nick Oswald (2023). Bitesize Bio’s Blueprint for 5000 Leads. Bitesize Bio Content Marketing.
*Note: Most of these leads came from our Bitesize Bio audience: a community of over 1M+ researchers who are attracted to our platform through our catalog of agnostic educational content. If you would like to harness our research community for your own product campaign, please get in touch with us for a 1-2-1 consultation.