Social media isn’t quite where anyone’s mind immediately leaps to when they think of life science marketing. After all, social media is meant for the latest fads and fashions, right?
No. Social media isn’t a monolithic body with a predetermined set of characteristics. Facebook is nothing like LinkedIn, and LinkedIn is nothing like TikTok. You obviously cannot box them all in one category and start thinking of social media marketing as a singularity.
First, let me ask you this: Why are you doing life science marketing anyway? What is your end goal?
Are you trying to sell a product? Or, are you a contract lab that’s looking for new clients? Or, are you, in an even more general sense, simply looking for brand visibility?
Before you delve into the depths of life science marketing, you have to determine your goal. Otherwise, achieving that particular goal won’t seem like a success.
Social media marketing is one of the avenues, which is extremely lucrative but also easy to mess up. Unless you have clear short-term goals in mind, you are likely to become obsessed with “Likes” and “Shares.”
Of course, Likes and Shares do matter. But organic engagement matters even more. Wondering what this means?
This means that you have to encourage your target audience to talk to you. This comes in the form of comments or direct messages. If you have questions about your life science brand flowing in every day, you can be assured that you’re doing social media marketing well.
Social Media Marketing Factors for Your Life Science Brand
Some factors will have a greater impact on your social media marketing efforts than all others. In this section, we will learn what these factors are and how you can best use them to your advantage.
What is the age range of your target customers? This is a very important piece of information that you have to glean from your surveys or analytics reports.
Different social media platforms attract people of different age ranges. LinkedIn is frequented by middle-aged people, whereas Youtube is popular among teenagers and young adults.
Now, if you are trying to appeal to the moneyed audience who can understand the nitty-gritty of your business, you have to go with LinkedIn. However, if you are trying to build a loyal and highly-engaged audience base for an educational life science brand, then there can be no better option than Youtube.
How long does one spend on a particular social media site? This is another metric that heavily varies. Let’s talk about LinkedIn and Youtube some more for this example. People don’t normally spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. They might log in once a week at the very most. People who already have steady jobs log in even less.
However, Youtube, as you might already know, has the highest audience retention time. It has consistently been the top social media platform for long-form video content. So, if you want to build a constant engagement, Youtube is your best choice. You must have seen how science channels like Vsauce have blossomed on YouTube in the past decade.
What kind of content can you produce? And also, do you have a dedicated content designing team? There are three separate categories of content that you can create – written content, image content, and video content.
However, hiring one content creator from each category isn’t enough. Each social media platform needs a specific type of content, even within the same category. For example, you cannot circulate the same kind of content on YouTube and Instagram even though both are multimedia-based platforms.
You should, in fact, not be trying to penetrate all social media platforms at once. You have to prioritize based on which platform your target audience most frequents and engages with.
Which Social Media Platform to Choose for Life Science Marketing?
As mentioned before, this depends on your particular product or goal. Facebook is one of the most frequented social media sites. Its user base is young working professionals from 25 to 34 years of age. If you’re selling a product that you can market as an exciting new thing, Facebook is the perfect platform for you.
However, if you try to offer a service that is more curated toward professionals possessing higher degrees in education, Twitter is your best bet. People don’t spend much time on Twitter, but it is the best platform for informational exchange.
Then comes LinkedIn, the chosen platform of senior working professionals. If you are looking for a sponsor or a company tie-up, you can trust LinkedIn completely. As mentioned before, people don’t spend much time on LinkedIn. But the time that they do spend is occupied with professional interactions, unlike platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
Speaking of Instagram, this is where you need to let your sense of aestheticism shine. If your life science company deals with chemicals and experimentation, you might consider getting those lab processes professionally photographed so that they can be uploaded on Instagram. You can also record short reels of a particular experiment you think your audience will find interesting.
If you want to put up your marketing content on Youtube, you have to stick with the video format, but you cannot jump into making sales right away. Youtube is a platform where people build up their engagement for several years. It is not where you sell stuff from the get-go, but rather build a steady and loyal subscriber base by steadily posting videos that are either informative or entertaining, but ideally both.
If you are trying to build brand recognition, you can go with any of these aforementioned social media platforms except Instagram. Instagram ads are incredibly effective, but it’s not great for engaging with an audience regularly.
Some Additional Tips
- Social proof is essential for any kind of digital marketing. Since potential customers have no other way of knowing whether you are trustworthy, they trust online comments and reviews. Unless your life science company has reliable reviews, you can wave goodbye to the possibility of obtaining customers or clients. Before you start marketing your services on social media, you have to ensure you have a collection of believable reviews.
- Set realistic goals and achieve them step by step. If you are a life science company that is located in New Hampshire, you have to first impress the customers of New Hampshire before you can move on to the wider national market. Jumping the gun is going to make your Customer Acquisition Cost skyrocket needlessly.
- Make sure you have separate teams that handle your SEO, content, and social media platforms, respectively. If you expect the same employee to be good at all of the above things, you are going to get mediocre content on all fronts.
- Have a clear Call-To-Action plan. All social media posts need a certain CTA that is, what action you are expecting from your consumers. CTA buttons convey messages like “Subscribe,” “Buy Now,” “Avail Free Trial,” etc. For a particular social media post, you can expect only one action. Providing multiple CTAs simply confuses the audience.
- Always perform A/B Testing. Facebook and Instagram ads take a lot of money. Don’t waste this without experimenting with different ad formats and figuring out which one works the best.
- And last but not least, don’t forget to include your site link and important contacts in your business profile. Unless people can find more information about you, they’ll have no reason to stick around.
Conclusion
Choose a social media platform that is best suited to the requirements of your business, instead of simply going with the ones that are currently the most popular. Also, be sure to create content tailored to that specific platform. And most importantly, remember that social media marketing might be the flashiest option now, but it works best when it is paired with traditional forms of marketing like email marketing.
