The Secret Product Your Customers Want

How?  They know their audience – really well.

Case Study – Conversions increase 5X for Assay Depot

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.

Learn to Speak “Scientist” in 5 Minutes or Less

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 -

1. What are the exact phrases scientists are using to describe my products (vernacular)? Ex - anti-actin or actin antibody?
2. What terms are associated with my products (context)? Ex – actin antibody + western blot
3. 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.

Every Page of Your Website is Your Face

Every Page of Your Website is Your Face

by Rusty Bishop

I previously wrote about how your website is like your face. It was a good article, but the statement was a little naive.

Now that we’ve reviewed over 30 websites with our QuickCheck Service, I’d like to modify that statement to more accurately reflect reality.

Every page of your website is your face

That’s right every page.

Think about the time you went to highly regarded restaurant with beautiful architecture, modern signs, and great food only to see tablecloths with food stains and frayed cloth napkins.  What did you remember?

The food stained cloth!

Why? Because it showed the restaurant didn’t care enough to clean the tablecloths or buy fresh ones. People notice when things are a bit out of place or don’t fit the picture. Its an intuitive response.

When you told your friends about the restaraunt, I bet you said, ” The food was great, but the tablecloths were dirty.”

Every page of your website speaks about how much your company cares in the same way.

In the modern web of Google, Bing, and Yahoo search, any page of your site can be directly landed on from the outside by a visitor looking for something they typed into the search bar. You need to be ready. From About Us, to Products, to Company Calendars, to Company News – the pages need to say,  ”Our service/product is the best and we love our customers. We want customers to love doing business with our company.”

Life science companies selling to scientists are a business-to-business dynamic. As such, the expectations are even higher for your products and website. A product purchase is an investment that has a direct impact on the success of a scientist’s research. Buying the wrong one from the wrong company can costs months of scientist’s life.

The reality is that most companies spend thousands of dollars on graphic design for their homepage, then neglect to update their calendar or their blog.  In fact, I’ve now seen 2 companies that haven’t updated their calendar of events since 2008! Its the dirty table cloth issue!

Scientists are just like everyone else.

We suffer the same biases as all humans.  Just like the dirty table cloth, no amount of product “data” makes up for the fact your site search engine doesn’t work properly and visitors can’t find your products easily.

We don’t remember your great graphics, your carefully crafted content, your sales offers.  Nope just that we couldn’t find your products on your website.  Case closed, Im moving on to a competitor’s site and products.

What you can do about it

Its time to take action. If your company’s website is getting complaints, take action yourself today.

Try one of these today:
1. Update your site with the right information. Whether it’s the latest trade show information, press releases or new product manuals, update them.

2. Solicit feedback from your customers about your site. Send them to your boss or post them by the water cooler late at night if you need to be anonymous.
 If your company won’t read them, send them to me and I will post them here anonymously for you. The internet gets the word out faster than you can imagine.

3. Get ideas – what consumer sites and business sites do you like? Pinpoint why you like them. Easy, fun, colorful, find-ability, clever, creative?
Take action and become indispensable! Your job depends on it.

Google is Your Homepage – Fix your Search Presentation

Google is your homepage.

by Rusty Bishop

Google is your homepage. Of that there is little doubt.

Mark and I have now analyzed over 20 life science websites from design to content to code to product search rank through our free QuickCheck Service.

Several companies have granted us full Analytics access in order to serve them better.  In every case, Google sends the most visitors to these sites. In fact, its not even close.

This means your customers are searching Google to find your products, not your homepage, not Science magazine’s full page ads.

If you want to prove it to yourself, just ask your webmaster to print out or show you the Traffic Sources Readout from your analytics program (I’m digging into Webtrends right now, crazy!). If I’m wrong then your company is named Facebook.com or something is really wrong, e.g. you have no traffic.

What Google Is Your Homepage Means

Most scientists are not familiar with all your products even if they are very familiar with your brand. Researchers ready to buy are searching for very specific products and services for a specific diagnostic or experiment.

If Google really is the vehicle by which >70% of site visits come from, you must carefully plan every page to present key information when a scientist see’s your offering in the organic results.

If they can’t determine from the presentation of your offering in Google’s Search Results, why would they click through to you?

What You Can Control

You absolutely have control over what Google and other search engines present to potential customers. Web marketers call this Search Presentation.

There are three elements that appear in Search Presentation. I’m sure your familiar with them, you just don’t know it.

1. Page Title

2. Snippet

3. URL (web address)

Each one of these are entirely within your control to dictate what is seen by searchers.

Take the example above, where I searched for “multiparametric immunoassays systems”.  Which gave me Biomerioux’s VIDAS instrument. Let’s break it down.

1. Page Title – “VIDAS/minVIDAS:Healthcare”.

The title tag helps searchers make a more informed decision about the results they click on. A descriptive title tag can help pop out a result better for searchers.

Constructing Great Title Tags

You have 60 characters to write a great title tag, that means you gotta seriously think about the keywords. Google suggests you imagine the Title tag is the only thing you have to tell searchers what the page is about.

So what’s this page about?  Vidas is an automated, multiparametric immunoassay system for clinical diagnostics.  That’s 83 characters with spaces so we’re close.

How about – “Vidas-Automated Mulitparametic Clinical Immunoassay System”

That’s a pretty solid page Title. It contains keywords that describe the product and it pre-qualifies searchers that are interested in Clinical products.

How do I change the Page Title?

This is a pretty common question from marketers and sales.  The page title is part of the code that underlies every page on your website.

To see the page title, you browse to your product page , then select View > Source from your browser’s tool bar.

The page title will be designated with the code <title>Your Title</title>.  If you’re having difficulty finding it just perform a find on the source code (Command F) and search “title” that should bring it up for you.

In the above example, Biomerioux’s title code is on line 154 – <title>VIDAS®/miniVIDAS®: Healthcare</title>.

To change, you need to add the new text you want into your source code via the backend or server and you’re done.  Or just ask your webmaster to take care of it, since that’s what you pay them for!

In the next article, I’ll dig into methodology for crafting the meta description for a scientist Searcher Presentation. So please bookmark us or subscribe to learn more.

A Scientific View of Alt Tags – Qualified Leads Up

By now you know exactly, why its critical to title images correctly online. In this article, Im going to help you supercharge your organic search engine clicks and qualify those searchers before they visit.

How?

Alt tags!

Is this some kind of black hat SEO?  Nope, its even recommended by the search engine wizard Google herself.

Thou shalt ….

…..Create great alt text

In all seriousness, if Google took the time to make an entire web page about image alt tags and a YouTube Video about how to write them, perhaps we should pay attention.

Here’s why.

Scientists use Search Engines to find exact reagents and equipment for experiments. For example, I would search “antibody human Akt1 Western blot” to find that antibody. In this example, I am an extremely qualified buyer. You’ll notice that I know exactly what I’m looking for an antibody for Akt1 that reacts to human samples by Western blot.

Scientists smart enough to know that more terms you add to your search string the better your chance of FAST success. Admittedly, this is due to Google’s indexing of scientific full-text and thereby the methods sections where reagents are discussed in context.  But companies can get in the game!

The reason I know not one single antibody company is using alt tags correctly is no images came up when I searched.

No Title + No Alt tags = No Clicks

Yet by clicking on the images link in the upper left shows me hundreds of Western blots on Antibody company’s websites like Cell Signaling, Abcam, Santa Cruz, etc.  Pretty much all the companies spending money on Google Adwords for Akt antibodies (green $ above).

Why didn’t they appear in the organic results above?  The answer is they lack alt tags and proper titles for Google to understand exactly what they are even though they know the images are on a webpage about Akt antibodies.

Don’t make Google guess! Improve those alt tags and get more qualified leads today by getting your product into the organic results.

Attracting qualified leads online requires constant vigil.  If you have questions about how to use alt tags, request a free consultation from Red Funnel. Our team is here to help.

Your Website as Field Sales Tool – Sightings at the AACR Meeting

by Rusty Bishop

One great tactic I saw while walking the Exhibit Booths of AACR this week was the display of company’s websites in the booth.  Mark has written about training your sales staff to use the website as selling tool and I’ve written about your web site being your public face. So I was excited to see these two concepts in action.

Website on chocolate = love!

For example, in Sigma’s booth the marketing, literature, in booth mini-talks and conference swag all prominently featured their new “Where Bio Begins” web portal. That’s branding and traffic pushing in one fell swoop!

And the kind ladies in the Affymetrix booth walked me through their new Gene Atlas desk top array on their website and used it to invite me to an awesome party!  In order to get the invite, I had to sign up on their website, so they captured my information and qualified me as a lead (albeit a poor one).

Here’s two ideas to that may help you decide if your website display in the booth is a good idea

In Person Feedback

One of the most difficult things about web design is getting a real read on your customer’s reactions. Let’s face it most feedback online is banal and friendly, because scientists are non-combative and shy and people don’t really have time to give you feedback.  However, making your website available in your booth with a mouse and keyboard is the perfect chance to watch them interact with it and great time to ask them questions about it.

For example,

• Are they easily finding products?
• Do they fret about the long lead registration form?
• Are you lacking key images that drive conversions?
• Did your Call to Action button get their attention or was it ignored?

Staff training in the Real World

Your website really is your face, but it can also be powerful sales tool in the field. Its not often that Sales Staff, Product Managers, Technical Support and Marketers get the chance to work together in front of customers.Why not use the meeting to perfect your sales pitch with the use of your website.

Try this at the next meeting,

• Train staff on the website features in a non-threatening environment
• Watch, listen, and give feedback on how your team uses the site tools and features in front of customers
• Try different entry points such as the search engine or catalog browsing to test effectiveness in sales

Sales tips for selling to scientists can be hard to find. Find more by following us on Twitter here. Also, become a fan of Red Funnel Consulting on Facebook today!

Scientists want to see what they are buying

In lab meeting yesterday and we had a 10 min conversation about a kit that came in the blue and purple box (some thought it was yellow). A few hours later, my labmate Jon starts laughing and points to the old Promega Wizard Prep box on top of the freezer. Classic!
 

Science products have complicated names often with made-up words in them. For example, on one page of the Bio-rad website I found iProof High Fidelity DNA Polymerase and iTaq DNA Polymerase. What the heck is iProof? I’ve used Taq, but iTaq? Luckily for me, I knew I used the kit with one red and one green tube that came in the green box with a yellow sticker on it.
 

 
Notice how Bio-Rad uses large images of the kit with the components displayed clearly on their product display pages.
 

Does Your Sales Team Know How to Use Your Website?

Let’s see a show of hands for how many companies have trained their sales representatives how to use their own companies’ website recently. C’mon, keep them up. Ok, there are a few but not many. Marketers are focused on developing, testing and tweaking their online presence and performance to satisfy their customers and attract prospective customers. There is no argument there but there might be a missed opportunity.

Your sales force is dealing with customer issues every day in the field and on the phone, answering questions about purchased products and potential product solutions. If your site is your digital face to customers, then the sales force is your eyes and ears and mouths. They need to work together or you run the risk of reproducing a badly dubbed Godzilla movie where the mouth doesn’t match the words.

Sales representatives are valuable and expensive interpreters of customer needs and translators of company offerings. You want them utilizing any tool at their disposal to help make your customers successful and close sales. So why don’t they know how to easily find a product on your website? Do they know how to download a product manual? Can they get a customer to an ordering page?

In sales management, I witnessed the sales force struggling with each of these issues, while in front of the customer. As you can imagine, it does not enhance their competence or your company’s reputation in the customer’s eyes. Stumbling through page clicks with the customer watching over their shoulder can be frustrating and produce comments like, “Why did they change this. Now its confusing?”, “I don’t know why they have it this way,” or “It’s so hard to find things on this site.” Ouch.

Instead imagine responses being something like, “Here, let me show you how to find that product on our site, its super easy” or “You will love this new tool we just added that lets you do xxxx.” When you solve one researcher’s issue, there is a good chance you have gained an advocate for your site in that lab.

More time for training usually means less field time so its critical to make sure it’s worth it. Can you speed up the sales cycle by helping researchers find your products faster, easily understand how they can solve their problem and how to order them? When your sales team knows how to appropriately utilize the web presence to help them build relationships and close sales, that is a payoff.

Here are some basic tasks your sales team should know.

How To:

• Search for a product via partial product name, full name, and catalog number

• Search for a list of products related to an area of research (PCR polymerase, RNAi)

• Find and download a specific product manual.

• Find a product and order it. Set up a test account and have them go through the process.

• Use the site’s scientific resources and tools and they can help research customers.

• Contact a live resource if they cant answer a customer question.

There are many ways to educate your sales force, whether face-to-face or digitally. The key is to create a way for them to practice these tasks and to monitor their performance. They not only will be more comfortable but you might be able to identify some site navigation issues, without paying for an expensive consultant.

Ideally, your site would be so intuitive that customers and sales force both would be able to find what they needed fast and easy. In the meantime, help your sales force figure out how to leverage your website. Your customers will thank you.

Mark Walker

Search Engines on Life Science Websites

For the past six months, I have been building my new website gatcat.com. During that process, I have surfed and analyzed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Life Science Vendors’ websites looking for product information. Some are great, but the sad truth is most are ridiculously bad. As a part of this column, I plan to review some specific sites on a regular basis and to try and offer some suggestions for those looking to improve things.
 

For this article, I want to focus on your internal search engine. The internal search engine is a critical tool for your company and you as a sales person. Why? Because when you get a scientist to your website, you want them to easily find the right product for the right experiment. The one you just worked so hard to tell them a story about.
 

Its such a simple tool. You might get a minute or less of our attention span at a conference or in the lab. If you can say, “We have a great deal going on this kit, just go to our website and type this in the search box.” Then you have a good chance that a week or month later, I might do so.
 

It must work though! It must return exactly the results needed to go to the product page or sale information.
 

So I challenge you, stop reading this article and go to your company’s website. Search for five products you sell, not the exact product name of course. Search like a customer, the way you do on Amazon.com or other product websites. Better still, ask a colleague or your significant other to perform the same search.
 

Are the returned results correct? Is it easy to figure out what is returned? Is there way to much clutter to easily see where to click through to the product?
 

If not, change it. You are losing business. The vast majority of sites have searched fail this test.
 

Happy Holidays.