Life sciences marketing campaigns have to be engaging and relatable, but they often lack the human element. To truly humanize life sciences marketing campaigns, marketers need to create an emotional connection with their audience, while building trust at the same time. This is especially true and crucial for organizations in the life sciences industry due to the seriousness of the subject matter.
Science communication is crucial to position and differentiate yourself from your competitors, but more importantly to be able to disseminate complex information in a way that is accessible to the target audience.
In an effort to build relations and trust it’s important to highlight and communicate about the people behind the science. Informational and engagement of social content allow people to relate to content pieces far beyond just for consumption purposes.
People listen to people – it’s that simple. The focus of an organization that is marketing complex products needs to be on explaining what you offer but also the “Why” you do it and the people and processes of making it happen.
By taking these 5 steps to humanize their marketing efforts, marketers can create campaigns that foster meaningful connections with their consumers and ultimately drive results.
5 Steps To Humanizing a Marketing Campaign
1. Explain The Science As If You’Re Talking With Your Non-Scientist Best Friend
Life Sciences communication can often be too complex for people to understand and process clearly. Oftentimes, to the layman, it might seem overwhelming. It’s important that on the basis of the target audience i.e. patients, HCPs, caregivers etc, the communication is modified and molded in formats that they’d appreciate it in.
For eg: While HCP’s and life sciences professionals would be interested in understanding the nitty-gritty and the science behind your products, you might have to reach out to the end users or caregivers in a way that explains to them how the product would help them by giving examples of real life effects or other references.
2. Be Transparent In Sharing Your Story
There’s a reason why your organization came into existence and why it’s working to solve or develop products for specific problems, so share it! Transparency creates likeability and gives people a reason to want to keep following and supporting you. This can be deployed across different target audiences with the same impact. However, be sure to stay relevant and always come back to your “why”.
3. Employees – Ethos – Emotion- Use Scientists To Help People Understand The Process Of Science
When it comes to humanizing a marketing campaign, nothing is more human than…well, humans! So utilize the fact that you have loyal spokespersons who know the ins and outs of your organization and product. Use them to convey the brand philosophy, the story of why you are doing what you’re doing.
Even communicating something simple as employee journey and company ethos has been shown to impact brand recall and relatability in a positive way.
4. Focus On Building Relationships And a Community
Being approachable in your online communication and maintaining two-way communication between the brand and the end users is the perfect strategy for establishing that you’re here for the long run. It is crucial to use specific platforms for specific communication and/or for targeting specific target groups, however, the overall strategy really helps in keeping the brand recall alive and also helps in positively impacting the brand image in the eyes of the multiple stakeholders.
5. Create an Editorial Calendar Well In Advance
Time and time again, we’ve seen that most brands fall short in achieving their communication goal because the planning wasn’t in place. In order to humanize your content and make it relatable, it is imperative that you deploy consistency and planning to your communication activities. However, there are a couple of easy fixes that you can deploy i.e. automate your marketing, plan at least 4 weeks of content in advance and have someone take over the social listening and monitoring to respond to questions or leverage a spur-of-the-opportunity.
Final Thoughts
To sum up, the Content-Community-Commerce model is pivotal if you wish to humanize a marketing campaign and attain excellence in life sciences. As Dan Reich puts it in his Forbes article, “Content for inspiration and information; Community for social validation and recommendations; and Commerce for making the purchase.”
The question is, are you ready to take the plunge?
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