From stealth to spotlight: Marketing strategies to begin

Despite what many may think, the notion of “the product sells itself” is misguided. Unfortunately, this holds especially true for biotech and pharmaceutical companies emerging from stealth mode, who feel that their science alone will carry them to their end goals.

In my experience working with emerging biotechs on marketing, these goals tend to centre around raising capital, partnering, or commercialising products. For all of these goals, marketing can be the cornerstone of getting the exposure you need to wow investors, gain the trust of the population you’re trying to help, or ensuring there are enough funds to continue the long road to commercialisation paved with R&D.

If you are an emerging biotech looking at marketing, or starting to consider how it can help, let’s look at three areas to focus your efforts on as you emerge from stealth.

Understand the audience you are marketing to

As mentioned, your goals as a company drive the positioning of your company. This is why it is important to develop a communication strategy around the specific audience you are targeting.

This audience makes up your buyer persona(s). This is important because the approach you take to marketing may be different if you are looking for exposure to investors, as opposed to looking to drive more patients to clinical trials.

For example, if you are targeting investors, you might create a buyer persona that includes marketing messages around the return on investment, commercial viability, or novelty of your science. As you evolve your buyer persona, the end consideration of who they are, what their goals are, and where they glean information from is related to the channels you market to them.

Marketing focus areas for emerging biotechs

If you are coming out of stealth mode, you have intentionally kept your company, and its science, close to the chest. Depending on your buyer persona and how aggressively you want to market your company, now is the time to decide the channels that will have the most impact based on your goals.

From my experience working with emerging biotech companies, these are some of the primary areas that will have the most impact:

Branding

The first place to start on your marketing strategy after the buyer persona research is on your branding. Branding will set the tone for your logo, colour schemes, fonts, and the psychological associations you put into the mind of your consumer about your company.

Your branding partner will help you consider important psychological aspects, such as how colour represents your brand, how icons, slogans, or fonts influence consumers, and how your logo serves as a reminder of your primary focus. This provides what is called a ‘branding guide’.

As many emerging biotechs spend a considerable amount of effort at conferences and having booths, the branding guide allows for cohesive marketing materials for all future graphic design, such as print advertisements, booth creatives, print adverts, and the like.

Branding is the first consideration because it paves the way for the next big decision, your website.

Website

Your website is often the first point of contact your prospects will have with your brand. Whether you are trying to attract investors, the scientific community, or customers, this is where you can provide accurate information that provides your visitors with the details they need to know to make informed decisions.

As a foundation, most emerging biotech companies can get by with a simple five- to ten-page website that includes various sections on their leadership team, science, clinical trials, pipeline, press releases, and contact information. Where possible, invest in graphical representations – infographics, animations, videos, etc. – to help simplify complex science and distil it down to more digestible information.

These graphics are helpful for investors who want to quickly understand your science, how it works, and its potential. For visitors who want to dig deeper, links to your research will provide plenty of information, but for most visitors scanning a site will be their first interaction and graphic design caters to this type of interaction.

Once you have completed your website, it’s time to get the scientific world to become more familiar with your brand and where media relationships come into play.

Public Relations

Now that you have emerged, or are emerging, from stealth mode with a newly published website, it's time to share your news with the appropriate community. Public Relations (PR) is likely the best channel for brand exposure, as it can help your brand remain top of mind for investors, healthcare organisations, or consumers.

With the appropriate media strategy, you can see your brand mentioned on industry publications, large media outlets, or a combination of both. Public Relations professionals can create newsworthy angles from your company and help pitch to journalists or editors to get you prominently featured and in front of your target audience.

PR is more than just the publication of the occasional press release: it’s an ongoing form of marketing that uses a momentum to consistently place your brand in the media with positive coverage.

Budget considerations

Biotech companies can run the gamut of budget-strapped start-ups to highly-funded pharma companies, and everything in between. Regardless of your capital, it is important to understand there are very different vendor offerings in the world of biotech marketing.

The most well-known biotech marketing companies have a certain degree of prestige to their work and in turn prefer to work with companies that are equally prestigious. The merit of these companies provides a high level of trust, although the downside is that the price point to work with them comes at a premium, as do the contract terms.

On the other side of the spectrum are biotech marketing companies that are more approachable to emerging brands both in budgetary considerations and service offerings. These companies may be more attractive to companies coming out of stealth mode due to the more approachable investment that is required, compared to the more Fortune 500-facing marketers.

Of other note is that there are biotech marketing companies that specialise in very niche services, like webinar creation and promotion, and there are full-service companies - branding, PR, content marketing, paid and social media, websites, etc. - that can grow with you as you expand. There is no right or wrong choice here, it’s just important to be aware in the event you’ve established a very specific need or have more full-circle goals in mind.

Science and marketing are constantly evolving

All biotechs seem to have something novel and exciting to bring to the world. However, novelty alone is often not enough to generate the exposure needed to ensure long term success.

Marketing and messaging can be the catalyst for communicating to your target audience as it changes through its various stages of growth. Coming out of stealth requires a proactive marketing strategy that allows the science to shine, while attracting the right audience who can truly appreciate your work.