The Most Important Thing I Learned This Year
- Dec, 23 2010
- By Rusty
- Online Marketing, Science Sales
- 3 comments
by Rusty Bishop
Looking back, the most important thing I learned this year is to apply the 80/20 rule to everything.
If you aren’t familiar with it, the 80/20 rule states that 20% of inputs drive 80% of the outputs. To me thats a little esoteric and too scientific to apply to life and business though.
Here are some other ways to look at the 80/20 rule that make a lot more sense that I pulled directly from The 4hr Work Week by Tim Ferris -
- 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort and time
- 80% of the company profits come from 20% of the products and customers
The converse of course is that 80% of your effort and time only results in 20% of the good stuff (sales, leads, happiness, ideas).
Take a second and let that sink in please.
Once I internalized it, it hit me that I was wasting 80% of my effort. Gut punch.
Case Study – Conversions increase 5X for Assay Depot
- Nov, 11 2010
- By Rusty Bishop
- Lead Generation, Online Marketing, Science Sales
- 6 comments
This article is short case study about our successful project with AssayDepot.com which engaged Red Funnel to help diagnose and improve their website last spring. Working with their team has been a extremely enjoyable experience for Mark and I, we wish them continued success.
Case Study
Service: Full website and Analytics analysis using Red Funnel’s science SEO service.
Results: 5-fold increase in quote and info requests for Assay Depot’s clients.
Background: Assay Depot.com provides direct access to expert advice about scientific assays and contract research services (CROs) via their open web marketplace to scientists in Big Pharma, Biotech, and Academic research. The site is focused on 5 target assay and service areas- Biology, Chemistry, DMPK, Toxicology, and Pharmacology with several thousand webpages covering individual services. The business depends on scientists requesting information and quotes for research services through Assay Depot’s referral engine and expert scientific staff.
Assay Depot engaged Red Funnel improve the conversion rate of the quote request process.
The Engagement: Red Funnel identified the key causes of page abandonment based on traffic movement to the most popular assays and services using Google Analytics, science-based SEO, and User Interface (UI) testing.
We worked with the team at Assay Depot to improve these areas by adding Scientist-targeted SEO content and improving the UI to lead visitors to the assays they were seeking. Over the course of the improvments, we saw:
- Decreased Bounce Rate (10%)
- Increased Time on site (> 1min)
- Increased traffic to relevant assay pages
- 5-fold increase in conversions
The bottom line: Assay Depot is now capturing more traffic and converting more visitors; resulting in more quotes for their customers in the CRO and Life Science Service business from scientists in Pharma and Academia.
How to Sell More Products and Services to Pharmaceutical Scientists – Assay Depot’s Marketplace.
- Oct, 14 2010
- By Rusty Bishop
- Lead Generation, Online Marketing, Science Sales
- 3 comments
How to Sell More Products and Services to Pharmaceutical Scientists – Assay Depot’s Marketplace
by Rusty Bishop, PhD
One question we consistently get here at Red Funnel is, “How do we reach more scientists in Pharma/Biotech?”
It seems every sales representative or marketer we meet wants to penetrate that marketplace. And for good reason, there’s a lot of money there.
Big obstacles for marketers and sales reps are that the doors to labs are most definitely locked, emails are filtered, information restricted, and when they do order products, its often through complicated systems with major gatekeepers. So what to do?
There are companies that provide channels into specific marketplaces that you can use to your advantage. Similar to deciding whether to use a distributor to sell your products or not, do you spend your time and effort to penetrate a market yourself or do you work with other companies that have had more success in that effort? Finding complementary businesses or non-competitors that already have that channel is a great way of jumpstarting your efforts.
For the pharma market, enter Assay Depot.com.
What is Assay Depot?
Assay Depot is a marketplace for research services (assaydepot.com) that uniquely enables you to communicate directly with thousands of global research vendors to ask technical questions, create custom services, get price quotes and place orders through their public website. The site is broken down into 5 main stores:
I bet your products fit in one of these categories!
- Biology – from antibody conjugation to anti-microbial screening
- Chemistry – from compound libraries to API synthesis
- DMPK – from Caco 2 cells to rat PK/PD studies
- Pharmacology – pretty much any animal disease model you can think of
- Toxicology – from Comet Assays to In vivo Tox studies
Within each category are 1000′s of individual assays, services, and research materials for sale. Each one has its own description accompanied by a list of companies offering the product or service. The site also provides easy links in which to contact the company or request information from Assay Depot’s team of experts.
That’s right. I said easy links to companies. (Links equal good stuff for search engine optimization.)
The Ask an Expert feature on each page is one of my favorite parts of the site. All a scientist has to do is request information on a particular assay or service and the experts at Assay Depot will seek out companies to do the work for them. What I wouldn’t have given for that when I was in the lab.
According to Kevin Lustig, Founder and CEO, “Assay Depot gets hundreds of requests per month with most of them coming from pharmaceutical companies.” (emphasis is mine)
They pass along quotes and have contact information for these scientists to get their experiments done by companies just like yours. For example, you can read about the $80,000 antibody order from a mid-sized pharma.
Of course, you will never see this posted on the site because the Pharma scientists generally are restricted from posting research-related questions on the internet.
The Inside Scoop
Here’s an insider tip – Assay Depot has done a superb job of building SEO into their site to specifically target Pharma, Biotech, and CRO scientists. (Full disclosure, Assay Depot is a client – I admit that we helped them a little.)
Red Funnel spent the last 6 months buried deep inside the web analytics of Assay Depot. One of the things that jumped out to us was all the visits from domains like pfizer.com, gsk.com, and novartis.com. Yep, scientists at Pharma companies were discovering assays and services at Assay Depot.com. In fact, they were spending a lot of time on the site investigating the range of services.
Why? Because it saves them time and money. It’s much easier to search a single site then the entire web, the information about services is organized so you can scan and compare, and it’s simple to make a quote requests that are forwarded to multiple CROs.
For more information on how to get involved with Assay Depot, visit their BackOffice Website.
Red Funnel digs the Assay Depot and benefits from giving you the inside scoop. It’s hard to find those pesky pharma scientists who buy online!
Follow the Red Funnel on Twitter or subscribe to our newsletter for more.
Don’t Repeat My Google Adwords Mistake – A PhD Tells All
- Sep, 23 2010
- By Rusty
- Online Marketing
- 4 comments
Don’t Repeat My Google Adwords Mistake – A PhD Tells All.
by Rusty Bishop
This week I’m going to confess to you how I blew it the first time I used Google Adwords.
In the process, I hope you learn a valuable lesson about Pay Per Click Marketing and save yourself a lot of explaining… perhaps your job.
It’s not something I talk about much on this blog, but PPC is a powerful tool to use if you have the budget, and…
… A PLAN.
My Sad Story
During my first year at a certain life science company, I was given the task of taking over the Google PPC Campaign. The previous person had set everything up nicely with a great set of keywords and phrases, excluded sites, and was buying approximately 5-10,000 clicks per month.
Being the cool scientist that I was, I stepped in and added some hot new terms and made the decision to push our ads to some sites in foreign countries with up and coming science companies (read China).
The results were fabulous! We were buying an extra 20,000 “visits” per month for pennies each. Traffic is up, I told the bosses. Everyone was happy. Man, I’m awesome.
Unfortunately after a few months, someone pointed out to me that our online “conversions” were not going up. In fact, they were flat.
That resulted in our conversion rate actually decreasing! (conversions divided by visitors).
I quickly learned how to use Google Analytics and filtered the PPC traffic we were buying from regular organic traffic so we could analyze it (Yes, I can show you how to do this, just email me).
Bounce rate on the bought traffic – 95%!. The time on site was 10 seconds or less. They were clicking the ad and promptly leaving the site when they arrived.
Google loved me. I was embarrassed.
In essence, I was buying useless traffic- the equivalent of buying a huge mailing list and never sending an email offer.
The Lesson
The lesson I hope you take away from my tale is – haphazard keyword buying will get you traffic and NO conversions.
Have a PLAN established for EVERY campaign.
The key is to start with the goal of conversion first (what do you want me to do when I land on your site?), and work your way back up the sales funnel.
Goal – Keywords – Ads – Budget – Track – Repeat and Refine
Here’s My Short Questionnaire for a PPC Plan that I start every campaign with
1. What result/conversion you want to achieve? low bounce rate, see other pages, buy something, etc.
2. What would I be searching for or reading about that would entice me to click on the PPC ad? experiments, assays, troubleshooting, reagents, manuscripts
3. Who would click on my PPC add? Scientists, MDs, CROs, Pharma?
4. Do I have analytics set up to track this campaign?
5. What is the benchmark for success? low bounce rate, conversions, email sign up
6. What am I willing to pay for it? (Hint, sometimes more costly clicks are more valuable)
Parting Shot
Track the results religiously on a schedule.
Please don’t make my mistake.
EMD’s Got a Cool New iPad App
- Sep, 16 2010
- By Rusty Bishop
- iPad, Online Marketing
- 5 comments
EMD’s Got a Cool New iPad App
by Rusty Bishop
There’s no secret about it, I love the iPad. Those that have seen me at life science trade shows in San Diego always want to check it out. I’m seeing more and more reps out there using it as a sales tool with interactive PDFs, web links, and CRM systems like SalesForce.
I was pretty jazzed to see that EMD Chemicals has new app for the Periodic Table of Elements available for free in the iTunes store. The app gets very solid reviews from users and students, so I decided to have a look.
Overall, the interface is very slick with a cool looking Periodic Table on a black background. Tapping any element will pop-up a large version with text-book type information like atomic radius, melting point, and boiling point. Further, each element contains a history complete with the discoverer! Pretty slick!
Love the interface on EMD's iPad Application
The app is intuitive and simple, yet deep enough that you can really drill down into details about a specific element.
Features
The app has a number of great features that are accessible from the tiny little M button on the top left.
Looking down the list you will see Classification, Atomic Properties, State at Room Temperature, Property Ranking, and Discovery. Tapping these allows you to learn about the elements that fit a given parameter by highlighting them in the big old table of elements.
Want to know what elements were discovered before Christ was born? 11 (How do they know that?)
How about elements that are gases at zero degrees Celcius? 11
I could geek out on this alone for hours.
How this App Sells to Scientists
The app is surprisingly unbranded, but that’s cool too. It says, “We just made for you school children of the world, when you grow up and become chemists you will think of EMD.” Love it!
There is some product ordering information buried deep within the individual elements that will lead you to the ordering page on the EMD-Merck Website. I’m sure that pleases the execs at EMD, but I doubt that it’s used very often. However, I did find some interesting detection kits that I didn’t know about. I hope they are tracking iPad links in their analytics program!
Summary
All in all, the EMD Periodic Table App is a great use of the iPad and I’m certain it will downloaded by a lot of students and chemists. Great job, EMD!
Red Funnel is hard at work on our first iPad app. Launching soon, FatStax is a sales productivity tool for the life sciences built by sales people for sales people. We hope you love it!
Site Optimization: It’s only the lack of profits that are expensive
- Sep, 08 2010
- By Rusty Bishop
- Lead Generation, Online Marketing, Science Sales, Science Web Design
- 2 comments
by Rusty Bishop
Do you sell reagents to scientists? Do you know that you need to do help your website show up higher in search results, but are afraid it will cost too much or be too hard? We think our new whitepaper can teach you a lot.
The bottom line is you must strengthen your website with the keywords scientists use to describe their needs and combine that with a solid site optimization strategy to keep up with the top suppliers.
In our recent whitepaper, we analyzed the web tactics of suppliers of pre-made antibodies based on their results in search engine (Google) presentation. (Grab a copy for free by subscribing to our newsletter.)
Here’s a bar graph directly from our white paper showing the percentage of times these companies ranked on page 1 of Google Search Results. To produce this figure, we searched for the top 44 antibodies exactly like scientists do in Google. Companies were not penalized for not selling one of the antibodies, so the percentages reflect rankings for antibodies they actually sold.
Figure 1 shows the companies that are succeeding in Google SERP
One of the parallels we drew was a comparison of this graph to the one produced by BioInformatics recently posted on their blog. We have reproduced the image here with a link back to their site for more information.
A couple of things jump out.
- Abcam, Santa Cruz, and Cell Signaling are all in the top 4 on both graphs. Although not definitive in a purely scientific manner, the correlation is compelling. Strengthen your website and you sell more.
- Several companies in the BioInformatics survey hardly sell antibodies. For example, Molecular Probes ranks 5th, but I can’t find a single antibody in their catalog (they do make antibody labeling kits). Promega and GE Healthcare only sell a handful, mostly for protein purification (Anti-His tag). Perhaps this illustrates a caveat of an online scientist survey.
- Conspicuously absent from our list is R&D, EMD and Millipore. These companies sell 95% of the antibodies we included in our study. One could argue that traditional marketing still works in life science. Why take that chance?
What correlations do you see? Leave any observations or comment below.
To learn more about how the top companies are fighting this battle, take a minute to register and grab a copy of our article.
How to Get a Copy
The article is available to our subscribers for free download. Just follow a few simple steps to confirm your email address so our email provider knows that you requested it and it’s not spam. Once you confirm, you will receive an email with a link to download your free copy.
If you are already a subscriber, check your inbox for the download link in our latest newsletter or fill in your name and email and you will automatically be redirected to the download page.
Web Tactics That Propel Antibody Suppliers to the Top, a study by Red Funnel
- Sep, 01 2010
- By Rusty
- Lead Generation, Online Marketing
- 7 comments
Web Tactics of the Top Antibody Suppliers
by Rusty Bishop
A few weeks back, I wrote an article about the “Top Antibody Supplier” study that was released by BioInformatics, LLC. I got some great comments from readers Jack and Mark about Abcam, one of the top suppliers. Everyone seemed to be in awe of Abcam’s web presence. It was noted that they do an excellent job of appearing in the top Google Search Results.
We decided to use our knowledge and tool set to determine whether there was a correlation between the Top Companies in the Bioinformatics survey and those that appeared most often in Google Search Results (SERP) when scientists searched.
Correlation
After just a few searches for common gene-specific antibodies like actin, p53, and caspases, we began to see a trend that certain companies (Abcam, Santa Cruz, Cell Signaling) were almost always on the first page. The very same companies that were on top of the Bioinformatics survey.
So we decided to put the Red Funnel research team into action to dig deeper and determine what separates these few companies consistently from the rest from a search/optimization perspective.
Results
The result is our first white paper – Web Tactics That Propel Antibody Vendors to the Top. Which is available for free to our subscribers.
Here’s some examples of the results in the report
- 385,000 annual searches for the top 44 gene specific antibodies entered into Google last year.
- 19 suppliers appeared on the first page of Google results in total for the top 44 antibodies.
- 4 important site code optimizations of the top ranking suppliers were uncovered.
- 100% correlation to page one ranking for one of the factors we examined.
Although the results are directed to marketers for antibodies, we believe they are applicable to those marketing any life science products online to scientists. These principles hold true whether you are selling kits, antibodies, or microscopes.
How the study was conducted
Red Funnel used tools freely available to the public online and…
- Determined the most searched specific antibodies by scientists in Google.
- Determined the “best phrase” used by scientists most often in their Google Search bars. For example – “actin antibody” vs “anti-actin”. For more on this see ‘Learning to Speak Scientist.‘.
- Determined which companies rank on the first page of Google for the top antibodies.
- Examined 30 different suppliers to determine whether they sold the top 44 antibodies.
- Ranked suppliers by percentage of products appearing on page 1 based solely on the products they sold.
- Compared the web tactics of the companies that appeared often to those that rarely or never appeared to determine why.
How to Get a Copy
The article is available to our subscribers for free download. Just follow a few simple steps to confirm your email address so our email provider knows that you requested it and it’s not spam. Once you confirm, you will receive an email with a link to download your free copy.
If you are already a subscriber, check your inbox for the download link in our latest newsletter or fill in your name and email and you will automatically be redirected to the download page.
Advertising Directly on Journal PDF Printouts = Branding
- Aug, 25 2010
- By Rusty
- Lead Generation, Online Marketing
- 3 comments
Advertising Directly on Scientific Journal PDF Printouts
by Rusty Bishop
As you all know, I’m always on the look out for new and interesting ways to inform scientists about products, be it Jove, tradeshows, or web tactics. In this week’s article, let’s see why advertising directly on scientific journal PDF article downloads is a great way to target and brand products for life science marketers.
Why PDFs matter to scientists
In the world of iPads and personal laptops, it may be hard to imagine that people still print PDFs and read them offline. However, it is extremely common for scientists to print journal articles and read them at the coffee shop, take methods sections to their bench as marked-up protocols, and pass along to other scientists.
Consider the ubiquitous Journal Clubs that are present in every academic science department (sometimes with multiple focuses – Genetics, Immunology, Parasitology). Scientists are required to participate by reading the article and discussing it in a round table format or in large auditoriums. If you were to visit one, you’d see scientists with dog-eared copies of articles they printed from PDF files.
Many older articles are only available as PDFs, so when a scientist browses to their webpage the PDF automatically downloads. You could put all the banners on the page you like, but no one would see it once printed.
So the bottom line is scientists download PDF files of journal articles to read and often print them.
Advertising Directly on Scientific Article PDFs
One of the things Red Funnel does for clients is help uncover interesting citations and methods using their products published in the scientific literature to post on their websites or include in marketing material. (See the comments on Digging into Scientists and Social Media for some thoughts on this)
Last week, I downloaded a PDF from the Journal of Immunology to review and noticed a banner ad on the cover page for the antibody company, BioLegend.
Red Arrow Shows the Biolegend Ad on My PDF
I thought, “Man, that is clever. An antibody company that focuses on Immunology inserting their product advertisement directly onto a PDF article about Immunology!”
That is targeting at its finest.
Think about all those immunologists downloading Journal of Immunology PDFs and seeing the BioLegend banner. Even if they don’t buy the product, branding is accomplished.
BioLegend = Immunology Antibodies.
Who else might benefit? ELISA companies, recombinant cytokine manufacturers, FACs companies, animal suppliers to name a few.
Furthermore, when I scrolled over the banner, I noticed you could even click through to the BioLegend website. Of course, this does nothing when you print the PDF, but what if I emailed the article out to the 30 scientists in my Immunology Journal Club? One ad view becomes 30! I like that math, don’t you?
I downloaded the Journal of Immunology 2010 Media Kit to try and figure out what “on-PDF advertising” costs. Oddly, this type of advertising is buried deep on page 8 of the kit and says “call to inquire.”
Regardless, “on-PDF advertising” is a pretty interesting tactic for life science marketers. I’d be curious to hear from the readers if you’ve had successes or failures with this type of branding. Also, any other Journals that offer “on-PDF advertising” and a cost estimate.
Rusty is not an immunologist, but he does know a pack of them. Red Funnel is not associated with the Journal of Immunology and doesn’t receive any payments or kickbacks from the publisher. We DO get paid to help life science companies DISTINGUISH their products from the competition!
Want more marketing tips? Subscribe to our newsletter or Follow the Red Funnel on Twitter.
Digging into Scientists and Social Media
- Aug, 18 2010
- By Rusty
- Online Marketing, Science Sales
- 8 comments
The Language of Science for Marketers and Sales – Part 2
by Rusty Bishop
Last week, I explained how you can use online tools to carefully dissect what products scientists are searching for online and determine the exact phrases they are using. If you haven’t read the post, have a look now. I’ll be right here waiting on you with part 2.
Discover what scientists want by speaking the language
Now that we are armed with the knowledge that the majority of Google searchers call a pcr machine a “Thermal Cycler” and we have developed a nice list of popular secondary search terms (real time, troubleshooting, gradient, multiplex), it’s time to get into some real conversations.
Here’s what you are listening for:
Social Media
- What type of content are scientists seeking (protocols, specs, technical resources, reviews)?
- What is the context of the conversation about my products? experiments vs purchase decisions
- What is the general sentiment about my products? positive? negative?
- Where is the conversation happening? Facebook? Twitter? Discussion Boards?
Armed with this information, marketers can make informed decisions about the type of content that needs to be created and where to place the messages outside of your website. For example, maybe your audience would value a scientific publication review of your key products for your blog and Facebook page.
The 5 Minute Exercise! – Part 2
So let’s take the above guidelines and see what we can learn in 5 minutes.
- Open up your favorite Social Media Search Tool. Don’t have one? Try ours for free. It searches many sites that scientists visit online to talk to one another. (Shameless self-promotion). Other examples might include Facebook, Twitter, etc. I don’t normally find many scientists discussing products on those popular sites however.
- Enter your product terms, with modifiers from your secondary search terms. I’m entering - “thermal cycler real time”.
- Scan the results and click on those that seem interesting. The objective is to gather sentiment and learn how scientists are talking about your products.
- Content – I see words like – ”protocol“, “demo“, “shopping“, “program“.
- Context – The conversation seems to be around both purchase decisions (Ebay) and experiments (degenerate primers).
- Sentiment- That PCR machine from Perkin Elmer is actually a really good deal.” Why is it a good deal? What do these scientists like about the product?
- Where – Science Blogs, Biotechniques, Protocol Online.
- Finally, take a look at the Pay Per Click ads Google is serving up. Who is competing for the same terms as your product? What terms are they adding to their PPC campaigns? Look at the landing pages for each of the ads.
The author apologies for the shameless self-promotion, but he doesn’t know another way to search for scientists in Social Media.
Follow the Red Funnel on Twitter or subscribe to our newsletter for more posts like this one.
Learn to Speak “Scientist” in 5 Minutes or Less
- Aug, 11 2010
- By Rusty Bishop
- Online Marketing, Science Web Design
- 4 comments
The Language of Science for Marketers and Sales Staff
by Rusty Bishop
Scientists are a pesky lot. We come from all parts of the world and focus on the tiniest minutia for years on end. We sleep in the lab and generally ignore everyone around us. We’ll come to your booth and stand there idly touching your brochures, when what we really want is a very specific product. We’ll agonize over spending a nickel on an antibody that works and drop thousands to fly to a “meeting” in Hawaii.
Most important for the life science Marketer, scientists have a language all to our own. Unfortunately, the language carries a lot of redundant terms and abbreviations.
Consider “protease” or “proteinase”?
Is it “anti-actin” or “actin antibody”?
How about “ChiP” vs “chromatin precipitation”?
“DMPK” or “drug metabolism pharmacokinetics” – It’s endless…
..and the way we use that language is the way you have to market your products, especially online.
How Do You Figure Out the Words Scientists Use to Describe your Products?
Just like a new language – you listen! Or more specifically, you search for the most relevant words online. Through their search inquiries for products, protocols, publications, and conversations about experiments, scientists are telling you what they want online -in real time and, most important, in large enough volume to be relevant. All you need is a simple keyword search tool and access to a Social Media Monitoring tool to “listen” and improve your marketing message.
Here’s what you are listening for:
Keywords -
- What are the exact phrases scientists are using to describe my products (vernacular)? Ex - anti-actin or actin antibody?
- What terms are associated with my products (context)? Ex – actin antibody + western blot
- What volume (focus)? 10 searches per month or 1o,000?
The 5 Minute Exercise!
So let’s take the above and see what we can learn in 5 minutes.
1. Open up a Google Search Bar. Enter your product term – I’m entering “PCR machine”. (Total time - 15 secs)
2. Note what Google returns for results. You’re looking for synonyms. Hmm, Thermal Cycler is the first hit. Jot that down. (Total time - 45 secs)
3. Open your favorite Keyword Search Tool. Mine happens to be Google’s. (Total time – 55 secs)
4. Enter your product term – “PCR machine”. Analyze the data to see how many searches are conducted using the phrase – Google tells me there are 9,900 global monthly searches for “PCR machine”. (Total time - 1:30 minutes)
5. Enter the other term “Thermal Cycler” – 22,900 global monthly searches. Not sure about you, but I like to fish in a pond that has more fish. I now know that the majority of scientists online call a PCR machine a Thermal Cycler. (Total time - 2:00 minutes)
6. Analyze associated words in the list and build context - gradient, troubleshooting, mulitplex, quantitative, buffer, etc. Note how the terms are used – “pcr troubleshooting” (Total time - 3:00 minutes).
7. Finally, compile the list into an excel sheet with primary terms and second terms. (Total time - 5:00 minutes).
Armed with this information you are ready for Step 2 – Discover what scientists want by speaking the language…
… and that’s the topic of our next post.
The author doesn’t do PCR anymore, but he sure did use a lot of Thermal Cyclers in the lab! You can catch the next article by following the Red Funnel on Twitter or by subscribing to our newsletter.
