February 2008, Issue 1
Welcome to the latest issue of the G2D newsletter!
Newsletter Contents
• Social Media and the Life Science Opportunity: Results Available
• Upcoming Webinars: Reserve Your Space Now
• Report Spotlight: Advertising to Life Scientists: Resolving the Print vs. Online Dilemma
• Upcoming Reports: Marketing Resource Center
• Methodology Spotlight: Product Assessments
• Blog Spotlight: Exhibiting at Scientific Meetings
BioInformatics and PJA Advertising + Marketing, an award-winning business-to-business advertising and marketing agency, co-sponsored a survey of over 1,500 scientists to measure their use of and opinions toward social media. Increasingly, professionals in a variety of fields are using social media -- blogs, podcasts, online communities, Wikis, and social networking sites -- to share experiences, opinions and advice.
Social media appeals to the most fundamental values of science -- communicating, contributing and collaborating. Scientists do not need to be convinced of social media's utility, they are just waiting for the conversation with their suppliers to begin. So far, there are very few examples of suppliers incorporating social media into their marketing and customer relationship programs.
The New Collaboration: Social Media and the Life Science Opportunity features topline findings outlining how scientists think about and interact with social media. To provide further context for the findings, the results were cross-tabbed by region -- North American, European and Rest of World -- and additional analysis was conducted by level of media engagement for respondents who also participated in BioInformatics' 2006 Marketing to Life Scientists study. Additionally, the report provides a short list of 10 steps that vendors should consider taking to make their sites more social media-friendly experiences.
Download The New Collaboration: Social Media and the Life Science Opportunity.
Reserve Your Space NowBioInformatics is pleased to present our schedule of upcoming webinars.
Webinar: Conference & Exhibit Strategies in the Life Sciences: What's Working Now
New Date! Wednesday, February 20, 2008 at 1:00 PM EST (10:00 AM PST)
Knowing in advance what your customers expect and what motivates them to engage your brand's representatives at meetings are key building blocks to the success of your event's exhibiting strategy. Get a glimpse into the key findings of the report Conference & Exhibit Strategies in the Life Sciences: What's Working Now, which aimed to do just that. With this report, you will be better able to set expectations, plan, execute and measure your results. For more information or to register for this webinar please send an email with your contact information to webinars@gene2drug.com.
Webinar: Life Science Product Catalogs: Techniques to Increase Sales
Wednesday, March 12, 2008 at 1:00 PM EST (10:00 AM PST)
This webinar will present key findings from our report, Life Science Product Catalogs: Techniques to Increase Sales, which examines what attracts scientists to print and online catalogs, what information they need, their preferred formats, and what guides their buying decisions. If you plan to invest in a dual-channel sales strategy, knowing the interplay between print and electronic purchasing patterns of your customers will be critical to your success. For more information or to register for this webinar please send an email with your contact information to webinars@gene2drug.com.
For a complete listing of upcoming webinars, visit http://www.gene2drug.com/about/events.asp.
Advertising to Life Scientists: Resolving the Print vs. Online DilemmaAdvertising to Life Scientists: Resolving the Print vs. Online Dilemma uniquely compares the opinions and preferences of life science customers with those of industry executives responsible for advertising decisions. This integrative approach provides two different perspectives on which factors shape the accessibility, appeal and "call-to-action" of powerful advertising. Readers of the report benefit not only from knowing what elements of advertising scientists' find most attractive, but also how decision makers at other companies are grappling a fast changing media landscape.
To execute a successful advertising campaign, it is essential that life science vendors be discerning in their advertisement placements, regardless of whether they are with traditional print venues or via the Web. Scientific publishers are launching new titles both in print and online, adapting their content, and changing their format to attract a body of well-defined, loyal readers in an effort to attract advertising dollars. With this report, suppliers can assess the reach of leading life science publications and which are likely to be the most effective for ad placement.
With online advertising, many interactions with scientists are readily traceable; vendors who diligently track this information have the ability to connect with their customers on a more relevant and timely basis. Advertising to Life Scientists: Resolving the Print vs. Online Dilemma provides essential insights into the online activities of life scientists and how they view online advertising, allowing vendors to better tailor their online advertising efforts to the demands of the market.
In order to achieve greater success with their advertising strategies, vendors must place their print and online ads in channels that scientists perceive as trusted and welcome sources of information. This report is designed to help vendors critically examine their current print and online advertising initiatives. It will also help them to identify specific steps related to ad creation, design, placement, and tracking where optimization may help improve their return on investment -- based upon an understanding of how scientists are exposed to and react to life science ads.
For more information about Advertising to Life Scientists: Resolving the Print vs. Online Dilemma, visit http://www.gene2drug.com/report/188/.
Marketing Resource CenterThe 2008 series of reports from BioInformatics is designed to serve as a combined reference on managing customer relationships in the life sciences across multiple touchpoints.
The following reports are included in the series.
Currently Available
There is still time to take advantage of the entire package! The Marketing Resource Center naturally includes the six reports and their data sets; in addition, a number of features are available only through the package.
For more information on the Marketing Resource Center and our upcoming reports, visit http://www.gene2drug.com/report/185/.
Product AssessmentsWhen launching a new product or optimizing an existing product, your choice of which features will be included and at which price point is challenging-but key to winning customers. What ends up in the final product offering often stems from discussions among executives internally; matching and exceeding what competitors are offering; and customer anecdotes.
Often, however, these sources lead to unbalanced information. Internal discussions among executives can involve personal rationalizations or groupthink instead of factual customer data. Anecdotal evidence and small focus groups can be case-specific, subjective, and unrepresentative of the diverse customer segments that purchase your products. Offering a better performing feature than a competitor's product may generate more sales, but only if customers in your targeted market segment value that product attribute with its associated package at that price point.
To make highly informed decisions, you also need a representative portion of your potential customers to tell you what product features are most important to them, at what prices, in an easily quantifiable way.
Using BioInformatics' solutions, you can make decisions based on your customers' satisfaction with detailed aspects of your products and services using Customer Satisfaction analysis. You can also identify which product features your customers consider necessary and which features make your product more attractive than competitors' using our Preferred Product Features analysis. Choose to provide your potential customers with the right package product features at the right price points using Product Feature / Price Tradeoffs analysis. Or, find the optimum market price for your products to maximize sales, profit, and customer value perception by leveraging our Pricing and Value Perception technique. Additionally, you can gauge loyalty to your brand and discover how your customers are promoting or detracting from your brand via our Net Promoter Score analysis tailored to life science suppliers.
For life science executives seeking a proven quantitative approach instead of focus groups and echoing debates among management, BioInformatics offers custom market research solutions that leverage the power of true customer analytics to give you product-specific insights for savvy life science business decisions.
For more information on Product Assessments from BioInformatics, visit http://www.gene2drug.com/bCustom/bProducts.asp.
Exhibiting at Scientific MeetingsThe researchers at BioInformatics, LLC peer through the Looking Glass to report and comment on trends in the life science tools industry. The following is excerpted from http://marketanalysts.lifescienceexec.com/.
Exhibiting at Scientific Meetings
Posted January 29, 2008 by Bill Kelly
Conferences play an essential role in fostering communication among life scientists. The most important role of conferences is to provide a forum for presenting cutting-edge research and important scientific developments. In addition, conferences offer scientists numerous opportunities for career advancement, networking, new collaborations and education.
The rapid advances in life science have led to an explosion in the number of conferences organized each year. Organizing such conferences can also be a lucrative business endeavor for professional societies and commercial companies alike-further contributing to the proliferation of conferences on virtually every topic imaginable. Conference attendees also represent an "affinity group" of potential customers who share similar needs for products and services. For this reason, suppliers of product and services consider conferences to be valuable opportunities to interact with prospective and current customers in specific markets.
Since it's neither physically or financially possible for a researcher or clinician to attend every conference held in his or her field, choices must be made. Similarly, the high cost of exhibiting at scientific conferences makes it impossible for vendors to attend every conference related to their target markets, and again, choices must be made.
We have recently completed extensive research that seeks to understand what researchers find most valuable in those conferences they choose to attend. This information can then be used by marketing executives to decide what role exhibiting should play in their marketing mix, where to exhibit and how to maximize the promotional impact of their presence at scientific and medical conferences.
Just a few years ago, some were predicting the demise of scientific conferences. The explosion of scientific and medical information available-particularly on the Web-seemed to make the idea of conferences as a communications medium a throwback to another era.
Both of these assumptions proved wrong. With at least 6,000 scientific scheduled for 2008, scientists still believe attending conferences is one of the best ways to increase their knowledge, obtain certifications and educational credits, meet with their colleagues and have the opportunity to meet face-to-face with their vendors.
The nature of conferences, however, has changed in at least one distinct way -- they are more serious than ever before. The notion of a scientific conference as an annual social event has been replaced by one of education and professionalism.
To read the rest of this entry or more thoughts from Bill Kelly, visit the blog at http://marketanalysts.lifescienceexec.com/.
Thank you for reading this issue of the G2D newsletter! As always, I welcome your feedback. Send me your complaints, comments, or compliments at a.donathen@gene2drug.com.
All the best,
Amanda
Amanda Donathen
Marketing Communications Manager
BioInformatics, LLC
2111 Wilson Boulevard
Suite 250
Arlington, VA 22201
TEL: (703) 778-3080 x 14
FAX: (703) 778-3081
a.donathen@gene2drug.com
http://www.gene2drug.com
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