5 Lessons I Learned from Working 24/7 With the Top Life Science Companies in 2017

At least 70% of our AdWords accounts are now competing with ThermoFisher and other large companies like Bio-Rad.

The big question: WHY the huge investment in AdWords by major life science players?

Well, obviously it is because they are making a tremendous amount of money.

Also, it is easier than ever before to make money on AdWords with up to 55% of organic traffic shifting to paid traffic and paid ads looking almost indistinguishable from organic results.

Most importantly, these companies understand that it’s okay that they are spending over $3 million per year on AdWords because they generating 2x-4x that amount in revenue.

You would give me $1 if I gave you $3 back, wouldn’t you?

But what does this mean for you and your AdWords campaigns?

Here is how you can start acquiring new customers through AdWords today:

1.  Get Started – If you’re not spending now, then start spending. The space is only going to get more crowded as time goes on.
2. Set Up Proper Conversion Tracking – I know this takes time, but, in order to be able to confidently scale campaigns, you need to make sure you are getting a clear ROI. The only way to do this is through proper conversion tracking on your AdWords campaigns.
3. Don’t Worry About 1st Place – Be okay with being the 2nd or 3rd position for a search term. Your monthly budget will go 2x-4x as far.
4. Write Great Ad Copy – ThermoFisher is casting a SUPER wide net. They are targeting over 55,000 keywords. They don’t have time to write 55,000 ads, or over 110,000 if they are properly split testing. The big guys will outbid you and you can’t control that. But you can beat them with higher quality ads that better speak to your audience.
5. Determine ROI 1st. Scale 2nd. – Scale up your campaigns once you determine an ROI. We always start by defining how much a new customer is worth to us. We then start small and scale accordingly once we see leads are backing out for our clients.

If you have any questions about AdWords, reach out to me. We have 3 in-house Google Certified Advanced AdWords specialists who can help you set up your first campaign for free. (Note: We cannot provide any services to companies who are directly competing for the same keywords as our clients.)

Lesson 2: The Big Guys Have NOT Cracked the Code on Facebook, GDN, or LinkedIn… Yet

As far as we can tell, the big companies are pretty exclusively bidding on AdWords.

Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Display Network (GDN) are still low competition and are huge opportunities for smaller life science companies.

Here is how you can start acquiring customers outside of AdWords:

• Facebook
  • Define Your Audience – Facebook is all about the right audience. If you can find an audience that matches your target customer, you can get a great cost per lead of highly targeted prospects. (We are currently getting them for about $10-$35 per lead.)
  • Use Facebook’s Lead Gen Functionality – No landing page? No problem with Facebook’s new lead gen functionality. We have had tons of success with this!
  • If You Are Doing This… Stop. – Do NOT confuse paid lead generation campaigns on Facebook with posting updates on your Facebook page with 57 followers. Likes on Facebook are a vanity metric and in general are an awful use of time and company resources.
• LinkedIn
  • Not For B2C Companies – LinkedIn is only for B2B life science companies. Clicks are a minimum of $5. It’s just too expensive for companies with small deal sizes.
  • Define Your Audience – Before starting LinkedIn campaigns, be sure to ask yourself, “Is my audience on LinkedIn and how would I target them?”  Note – most researchers are not on LinkedIn but many CEOs and CMOs are. If you are providing a solution for corporations, then it’s a great place to advertise. If you are targeting researchers, stick to Google and Facebook.
  • #1 in Account-Based Marketing – LinkedIn is great if you already know exactly which companies you want to target. It allows Account-Based Marketing, aka ABM, so you can target specific companies to show your ads.
  • Use Sponsored Content – We have found the most ROI with the “Sponsored Content” type of ads.
• Google Display Network (GDN)
  • Retargeting: Retargeting is possible through GDN. We recommend starting with your email list or site visitors and retargeting them on the display network. Just be sure you set a frequency cap so you are not following them around the internet for months.
  • Display Network: We have also found for some of our B2C clients that the Display Network can be super effective if you can find placements that are relevant to the product or service you are selling.

Lesson 3: Content Is Still King

I follow and trade cryptocurrency as a hobby.

We have a motto in the crypto community that we all follow, which is “Bitcoin is king.”

This means that unless you are extremely lucky, you will never find a coin that outperforms Bitcoin long-term.

In regard to SEO and digital marketing, the motto we follow is “Content is king.”

This means you can do everything right from an SEO perspective, like title tags, fixing crawl errors, metatags, backlinking, etc. etc., but if your content is bad, your rankings will be bad.

In fact, in a recent SEMRush study, the difference between a top-3 ranking website and a top-20 website was a 40% difference in content length.

So what does this mean for you?

This means that the single most important thing you can do as a company is create great content.

If you can create great content on your website, then you will be rewarded with free prospective customers.

I know what you may be thinking…

“Sheldon, I don’t have any content and I don’t know the first thing about creating content. Plus we don’t have the budget to invest in a content writer…”

I hear this a few times a month and 9 times out of 10, they do have content they can use, they just don’t know it!

Here are places you can draw content from:

• White papers
• Powerpoints
• Publications
• How-to guides
• Protocols
• Videos (you can have them transcribed and turned into text)
• Emails
• Presentations
• PDFs

The list goes on and on.

I would dig deep and even send out a company-wide or department-wide email.

Trust me what I tell you this…

You have content, you just don’t know where it is yet!

Even if you still don’t have any content, then just let us help you figure out what the most impactful content to create will be. Once you know that, you’ll be creating content that drives traffic and conversions and you’ll be ahead of the 99% of other people that just create content for content’s sake.

We get 60% of our business through SEO, 20% through paid traffic and 20% through referrals.

We like SEO best because it is free and also it leads to more referrals ???? … so technically SEO is closer to 85% of our business.

If you couldn’t tell, we are extremely biased towards SEO.

Our agency is purely built from SEO. 95% of our early growth can be attributed to two weeks of content writing and keyword research which is the reason we have outranked all of our competitors for the past 3 years.

Start finding some content and contact us if you want me to help you find which keywords are in the “Goldilocks Zone” — aka low competition and high search volume.

Lesson 4: Conversion Optimization

In lessons 1 and 3 we saw that the top life science companies have heavily invested in both their paid and organic traffic strategies in 2017.

But what happens after all these new visitors land on the website?

In 2017, we are also seeing seeing the top life science companies invest into conversion optimization on their website.

So, what exactly is conversion optimization?

Simply put, conversion optimization a way to turn more website visitors into customers or leads.

While conversion optimization has gone ignored in the life science industry for a very long time, many life science companies are starting to take it more seriously.

Here is ThermoFisher’s home page today (as of January 2018)