The online opportunity to reach more people and make more impact with your innovation is tremendous. Small businesses and start-ups can punch well above their weight and quickly build a reputation as a thought leader in their specific field.
But...
Only if you have the right marketing capabilities to translate your knowledge into activities that generate traction.
Whether you hire a junior marketing exec, outsource to an agency or upskill your team, here are the core competencies a life sciences enterprise needs to drive that daily implementation that is essential to an effective marketing effort.
Creation of Technical Content
In our sector, this is the game changer.
Content is critical to really grasp the online opportunity. Without it you will not be able to generate the traction and reputation that you could. That’s because over half of a business’s decision-making process to buy from or outsource to a supplier is spent engaging with content – and I don’t mean content about your product or service. They are looking for insight and education about the problem or circumstances they are facing before they go on to shortlist potential suppliers.
Technical content creation, therefore, underpins all activities and if your marketer needs to come to you and your team for every piece of content or social post, it is going to have a significant impact on delivery and limit their long-term role in the company.
Excellent Project Management
Marketers need to be highly organised. They also need to have a strong discipline in keeping to deadlines (including those they made up themselves) in order to generate momentum. They’ll have lots of projects and activities running in parallel and it’s all about actually doing the ideas to get results – that creativity must be matched by action. The best project managers know that this level organisation doesn’t happen by chance; they create systems and adopt tools that enable them to stay in control and they are accurate about time and how much of it tasks take.
Management of Digital Platforms and Tools
One of the reasons the opportunity to punch well above your weight online is so great is because of the creation of off-the-shelf, user-friendly digital tools. We no longer need software engineers or techies to create the mechanisms required to build a presence in the market. Marketers are now liberated to publish content when they want, create mechanisms for capturing leads and capture the right data to analyse the response.
...if they embrace the technology and all the problem-solving that comes with it.
From content management systems that support your website to customer relationship management systems that capture interest and enable engagement with potential customers, there needs to be a basic level of competency and a can-do attitude.
Empathy for the Customer
The best marketers have the ability to put themselves in the shoes of the customer and proactively connect with them in a way that empathises with their situation and builds rapport. Presenting content in the context of the reader increases the value delivered and helps stand out from the online noise.
This also applies to their relationship with you...
A great marketer will be able to identify the personality and values of company and will be able to adapt their voice to align with this so that content and social posts read like they come from the founders themselves.
Strong, Objective Analytical Skills
Excellent marketing is as much about objective analysis as it is about creativity. Anyone can be creative but the real skill in marketing is to be creative in the right direction with the right sorts of people in the right place at the right time. This requires objective analysis of the customer and their behaviours and capturing the data in the first place to do this.
One last thought...
I believe strongly that many of these competencies can be trained. But you can’t train the science. You can’t replicate the interest and passion for the science that drives people to pick those subjects at school and go on to study them further in higher education. You can’t force someone’s energy for the science and understanding of the relevance of it.
So, my advice for getting a marketer that is operational from day one with long term potential in the organisation?
Start with the science.