Strong communication keeps life science enterprises running.
It keeps internal teams aligned on their company’s direction and where their technology stands. It also convinces more scientists to try inventive approaches to solving a roadblock in their research workflows. And it encourages investors to fund your research.
Each of these audiences has varying needs and doubts. Other executives and teams need easy workflow integration and enhanced revenue generation. Scientists search for precedence obtained from empirically backed datasets, protocols, and publications. Investors are looking for companies that can walk through their business roadmap and highlight a path to strong investment returns.
Although each audience has vastly different priorities, we’re all the same; we’re only human after all. And human beings have similar ways to express disinterest in something.
Some of these symptoms you may have felt recently. You might have even seen it when a new acquaintance asks what you do for a living. But when you’re absorbed in the novelty of your research findings and technological features, you might not notice that your potential customers are doing the same thing.
So, in this blog, we’ll walk you through five signs that your content isn’t landing with your audience like you hoped. These signs apply to any audience you’re trying to connect with, including investors and scientists.
The five signs
I’ve been talking with scientists and other audiences about their feelings toward marketing and sales assets. Along the way, I gathered five signs that you can track to see whether your life sciences content isn’t reaching your audience the way you hoped. You’ll probably have encountered whenever you’ve talked about your research at some point.
Sign 1: Uninterested or vague responses
When I was growing up, I came across a phrase that changed how I saw relationships: “the opposite of love isn’t hate; it’s indifference”. Even when you hate something, you’re expressing a specific feeling towards it. In contrast, indifference is the absence of feeling. It comes with disinterest and disengagement.
Uninterested or vague responses are a common symptom of a target audience’s disinterest. Most commonly, the people you’re talking to will be polite enough, but they’ll also signal the lack of a strong commitment. Phrases like, “Thanks for sharing”, “We’ll get back to you”, and “Interesting work, best of luck,” are just a few examples of these.
Sign 2: Your audience ghosts you
Picture this. You felt like you had a great conversation with your target audience. They understand the science behind your technology, see the benefits of implementing your products, and even signalled interest in a downstream conversation.
Then, when you send follow-up emails, you notice a lack of response. Days pass. Still no response. You send follow-up email after follow-up email, but the silence is deafening.
Long story short, you’ve been ghosted. Evidently, your customer doesn’t see implementing your technology as a priority despite the strong conversations. Somewhere along the way, they failed to see the urgency and value of adopting the solutions you’re offering.
Sign 3: Audiences can't define what you offer when asked
Educational and sales assets inform your audience about what you offer and where your technology applies. Ranging from blogs to application notes and white papers, they’re supposed to help you establish your product differentiators, such as specific research applications or pain points being addressed. If even after creating these documents your target audience continues to ask the same questions repeatedly, your audience isn’t capturing the value of what you’re offering.
Sign 4: Your audience engages with the topic, but not your offer
As stated before, great conversations don’t always lead to downstream commercial partnerships, investments, or deals. It also applies even when audiences understand the novelty behind your insights. They might resonate with the need to improve tissue dissociation protocols for single-cell profiling assays or consider implementing automation into protein synthesis workflows. But if they don’t see how you can offer that solution for them, your content’s missing the final punch at the tail end of the sales cycle.
Sign 5: Your content is attracting the wrong audience
The key to driving business conversations is to find the audience who most needs your product and feels enough of the pain to buy a new solution. There are several points of failure when it comes to engaging with the wrong audience. See if you’ve encountered some of these examples:
- More leads are coming in, but many of them are graduate or post-doc students who are looking for a new position. Even if they were interested in using your technology, they’re not key decision makers within their organization.
- You’re attracting research organizations and companies in your target audience, but their problems differ from what you can offer.
- You’re connecting with companies who feel the pains that you can solve, but they’re not in a commercial position to take up your solution.
Why these signs emerge even with a strong product
By now, you might be noticing a common refrain with each of these five signs. They all stem from the same underlying issue within life science marketing efforts:
Your technology may be sound, but if you can’t make it matter to your audience, your content will continue failing to engage with your audience.
In many cases, a lot startups and established firms have prepared life-changing therapeutics and technologies that improve patient well-being and enhance research workflows. But if readers can’t contextualize it within their roles, workflows, or commercial goals, they won’t adopt a new technology. This is true when money’s flowing, but is especially true when budgets are tight.
This is also why producing more content won’t always fix the issue. If your underlying message doesn’t connect with your customers’ pain points, they won’t see the urgency or worth in investing with your technology. If you don’t know your message, it would be better to research what kinds of problems your audience is facing and how you can fix it.
Build your ICPs with GenoWrite
If your audience is not connecting with your content, your message may not be aligned with the people you need to connect with.
GenoWrite helps life science companies define the narratives, buyer questions, and sales assets that matter most to each ICP, so your content can support clearer conversations and stronger commercial outcomes.
Contact GenoWrite to build a content strategy around the audiences that matter most.
