Our team have enjoyed partnering with life science organisations for a number of years. From smaller, exceptional start-ups through to some of the largest, established global names. Regardless of the organisation, our role is to bring clarity, engagement and creativity to life science marketing materials.
As with any form of marketing communications there are crucial strategies to implement in your creative but with Life Science brands (particularly those looking for investment or an increased profile in the sector) we have have found the following points crucial to a campaigns success:
• Concentrate your message down to the key benefits to your customer
Your product design team will no doubt will highly intelligent, sophisticated and knowledgable experts in your niche field. They could easily give a spotaneous 2 hour lecture on your products indepth workings. However, in a sales and marketing context, attention spans are VERY short. Drive home your benefits, activate your audience's curiousity, then you can expand on HOW you can achieve their goals.
• Bring clear in how your are differentiated
There are few products that are truly novel, unique or paradaigm breaking. Although... you may have one. If so, shout it from the rooftops!! Most products are brilliant adaptations, improvements, progressions or variations on others thta exist. Which is why it is CRITICAL that you are clear in how you are differentiated from your competitors. Otherwise, why choose you? This may be product efficacy, cost, customer support, innovation, your team, experience, your scale and reach. Understand what makes you different, in a valuable way to your customers, and promote that clearly.
• Be creative and innovative in your execution
Life Science and Health Tech are two of the most exciting and rapidly advancing sectors to be involved in. Innovation is demonstrably a core value, yet very often innovative products are not promoted or marketed in innovative ways. Wherever possible look for ways to present your product in new, creative formats using unique visuals and a fresh new approach to your marketing materials. Try NOT to use stock footage, stock imagery and the same ilustrative styles as your competitors, bringing in the same icon design and familiar colour pallettes. Think fresh, bold, creative and innovate!
• Carefully consider what tactics to use in your delivery
Once you have created your marketing materials and your campaign is taking shape, make sure you employ the right tactics in delivering your campaign. Dropping a video on to YouTube, sharing it on twitter and hoping for the best isn't going to cut it. Think about all the channels you can harness, consider all your stakeholders and how you can engage them and their networks. Think about PPC as well as organic traffic for your website and social channels. Consider complementary marketing activities that will drive traffic to your new promotion - press releases, PR, podcasts, speaking at events, webinars, ehots, industry publications. You will already know what will work best to support your campaign - the challenge is to get out there and make it happen!
The rest of this article details a recent video campaign we created to support the Alfa Aesar Named reaction campaign. Having recently worked with Thermo Fisher Scientific on a campaign to celebrate AcroSeal’s 25th anniversary, we were really pleased to have the opportunity to work with the team again on their latest thought leadership campaign.
Aimed at a wide audience from students through to industry professionals, Alfa Aesar (a division of Thermo Fisher Scientific) selected a suite of Named Reactions, including the Grignard reaction and the Suzuki cross-coupling reaction, and asked us to highlight their significance by bringing them to life through a series of animated videos.
When working on projects of this nature, it’s important to strike the balance between accurately communicating highly technical, scientific information alongside creating content that’s engaging, approachable and easy to digest in a short time frame. For this campaign, Thermo Fisher Scientific were keen to explore the use of video, and so our first phase of work began with defining how those videos would look and feel.
Our team always enjoy working in an array of animation styles including 3D animation, character-led animation and collage/mixed media approach to name a few.
Knowing that the animations would be viewed by a varied audience, we chose for the animations to be led by an animated scientist character to create a feeling of warmth and relatability, to narrate the Named Reaction stories - covering their histories, chemistry and importance to today’s world.
We also went through various design iterations to create a 'Named Reactions' visual identity. This design asset added greater campaign recognition and coherence across print, video and digital. Whilst also being fully brand-approved and making use of the corporate font and complementary color palette.
The character was voiced by a professional voiceover artist, Minji Chang (LA based VO artist) who was also a graduate in Molecular Biology, and injected a real confident and professional personality into the videos.
We always work closely with clients - especially during the beginning of projects when we’re honing the script and creating the storyboards, to ensure that they contain high quality, scientifically accurate content that will strike the right tone with the audience. When needed, we also bring in independent industry experts to work alongside us to review content and support with the process. For this project in particular, working in partnership with the Thermo Fisher Scientific team and their expert consultant Matt Ferris at Biocatalyst Consulting we worked through a number of revisions to the scripts, paying particular attention to how we communicated the chemistry of the Named Reaction. From a marketing and communications point of view it’s critical included the right amount of detail to ensure it was interesting to all audiences, whilst also making sure it was presented in a clear and engaging way.
Once the script and storyboard were in place, we began production. We always look for ways to provide time cost efficiencies where possible, and as this campaign was to include a series of 6x animations, we put together a project team that would tackle the illustration and animation head-on. This meant that the videos were not only created in a cost-efficient manner, but also that turnaround time was good – so Thermo Fisher Scientific could start releasing them as soon as possible. We continued to work closely with the team throughout the animation production, but generally found that as we’d nailed down the storyboards early on, the animations themselves came together really well – so we could really focus on and enjoy bringing them to life. Once we had initial drafts of each animation, we liaised with Thermo Fisher Scientific to fine-tune any areas that needed refinement.
As with any life science marketing campaign, the more channels you are able to deliver your message in, the better the ROI and greater the reach. We would always recommend our creative campaigns are rolled out across video platforms, targeted social media, print (where appropriate) and if budget allows, strategic PPC. Creating brilliant marketing materials is the start of the process and ensuring it reaches your audience is the next step.
An example of one of the finished animations can be found below. For more information on this campaign, visit the Alfa Aesar 'Named Reactions' page of their website here.
We work with life science brands to create marketing materials that develop increased customer loyalty, raise brand awareness, launch a product, establish authority in the marketplace, educate staff and customers or increase sales of a niche service.
We’re always excited to undertake new projects in this field, learn more from our clients and help them achieve their goals through a friendly, transparent, pragmatic and creative approach.
Got a project that you’d like to talk about? Drop us a line – we’re happy to help.
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