Marketing-based Lead Generation in the Biological Sciences (Part 3)

Which means that effective marketing-based lead generation is more important than ever. It serves as a way to get prospects to “raise their hands” – alerting you that they might be interested in making a purchase, and giving you permission to sell to them.

The ladder of marketing-based lead generation for life science, biotech and med-device companies

By now you should be familiar with the ladder of marketing-based lead generation, a concept introduced in the last two issues of this newsletter. I’ll briefly review the ladder and it’s components before looking at the six uses of the ladder of marketing-based lead generation. Then, I’ll outline a plan to improve your own marketing-based lead generation initiatives.

The ladder is a scaffold that supports all your lead-generating activities (also known as touchpoints). See Figure 1 for a depiction of the ladder.

Figure 1: The ladder of marketing-based lead generation is a way to organize ALL possible lead-generating touchpoints in your organization from Personal Interactions at the bottom to Free Exposure at the top.

Foundation: The ladder rests on a foundation with two layers: your positioning – that is, what your organization stands for – and your brand: how you communicate this stance. One of the purposes of the touchpoints on the ladder is to raise your visibility, so that more people in the life science, med-device and biotech companies can be educated about your offering and inspired to believe that you can help them with their challenges. But to be effective in engaging your prospects, you need more than simple visibility; you also need to be attractive to your prospects. Without a strong foundation consisting of a clearly articulated brand and a value that is well defined and differentiated, any visibility you generate will not necessarily result in attracting your prospects.

One-on-one touchpoints: The lowest rungs of the ladder are composed of those lead generating activities that involve one-on-one contact, such as Personal Interactions or Outbound Solicitations. At these levels, your unique value is claimed privately, in specifically targeted encounters.

Paid Exposure touchpoints: In the middle of the ladder are those activitiesthat fall under the traditional mantle of “marketing” and include a variety of touchpoints: your web site, advertisements, direct mail, email blasts, etc. With these touchpoints your unique value is (or should be) declared publicly.

Content Marketing touchpoints: The newest rung on the ladder is composed of touchpoints that demonstrate your unique value, primarily through the distribution of valuable content to your life science, med-device and biotech prospects. This relevant, unique content should be a clear demonstration of your unique value; the more education, inspiration and (ultimately) reassurance you provide to your audiences, the more effective these touchpoints can be.

Free Exposure touchpoints: The highest rung on the ladder is composed of touchpoints that result in free exposure for your organization. These activities represent the validation of your unique value by someone else (such as a magazine editor, a publisher or a producer of a conference).

The uses of the ladder of marketing-based lead generation

There are six common uses for the ladder of marketing-based lead generation. In practical application there will be some overlap, but for educational purposes I am drawing clear distinctions between them; I want to focus your attention on the varied uses of the ladder.

Measurement. The ladder is a yardstick that you can hold up against your current portfolio of marketing activities. You can use it to determine many things, such as whether your current mix of marketing-based lead generation activities is balanced. The ladder can allow you to see deficiencies in your current allocation (“oops, we have no content marketing activities”) as well as track trends over time.

Planning. The ladder of marketing-based lead generation helps you plan future life science, med-device and biotech lead-generating initiatives.

Comparison. You can also use the ladder to examine your competition’s lead-generating activities. Head-to-head comparisons with your major competitors’ publicly visible efforts can reveal the differences in your approaches, as well as your messages.

Quality control. The ladder can be used to ensure that each touchpoint is providing maximum benefits as an effective part of your organization’s marketing mix. We’ll cover this in more detail in our next issue.

Goal setting. The ladder is both inspirational and aspirational. It shows you the possibilities for additional marketing-based lead generation activities and can inspire you to reach higher than perhaps you thought possible.

Education and Management. The ladder can help you educate, inspire and reassure others in your organization about marketing-based lead generation. It can be used as the basis for a shared understanding about your marketing activities and as a shared tool for tracking these activities.

Planning your own ladder of lead generating activities.

Let’s outline the steps you can take to create your own ladder, and some issues to keep in mind as you measure and improve your portfolio of lead generating activities. Due to space limitations, the list of steps/issues I’ll be reviewing here is incomplete – it won’t cover every contingency in every biotech, life science and med-device sector. It also may include items that don’t apply to your specific situation. But these steps and issues should help you get started towards customizing your own lead-generating activities.

Begin by building your own lead-generation tracking tool, categorizing all of your lead-generating activities in one location. A spreadsheet or a database is perfect for this. If you need help getting started, you can download a sample Excel template from our website that you can customize to meet your needs.

To create your own lead generation tracking tool, list the following for each touchpoint.

• Activity – what specific activity are we focused on? E.g., an email blast designed to drive traffic to a particular trade show.
• Primary Audience – who is the primary audience for this activity?
• Secondary Audience – who are the secondary audiences for this activity?
• Targeted or broadcast? – is this activity aimed specifically, or broadcast widely.
• Call to action – what change in attitude, belief or behavior does this touchpoint seek to accomplish?
• Typical stage in the buying cycle – at what stage in the buying cycle is the primary audience, if known?
• Educate, Inspire or Reassure? – should this touchpoint be primarily focused on education, inspiration or reassurance?
• Frequency/Timing – how often and when will this activity be initiated?
• Metric for success – what will be measured to determine success?
• Conversion rate? – for the metric you just listed, what target value do you hope to achieve?
• Total Cost – what is the total cost of the initiative?
• Cost/Lead – what is the cost per lead (either anticipated in the future, or achieved in the past)?

Figure 2: A sample ladder of lead generation, constructed as a spreadsheet, is shown here. Tracking data in this manner gives you a clear and simple way to compare the relative effectiveness of your lead-generating activities.

You can group your touchpoints as I have organized them in Figure 1, with foundational activities at the bottom and the various rungs above that. Or you may choose to put each rung of the ladder in a separate tab in your spreadsheet as we have done in the template.

Over time, it is likely you’ll create many different columns on this spreadsheet. For example, you may decide that you want to track the amount of labor required to implement a particular touchpoint, the vendor used, or the travel costs incurred. Such additions can be useful, but remember that it is best to keep it simple at the start: document and monitor only a few key data points. There is another reason to keep it simple at this stage; entering all this information can be quite a bit of work. The overall goal is to allow you to compare different initiatives; enter the minimum amount of information that you need to achieve this goal.

Using the ladder to diagnose your individual situation

Given the response we’ve received on this topic, there is a significant amount of interest in lead generation. There are many specific questions, such as, “Should I attend a specific life science, med-device or biotech trade show, or are my resources better spent on a different initiative – such as a email campaign combined with an upgrade to my web site?”

The answers to these questions depend, of course, on your individual circumstances. No short newsletter can diagnose your situation with enough specificity to give you a perfect answer. What I am providing is advice on how to create your own customized tool, one that does have the ability to give you some of the insight you’re looking for.

As you create your own ladder, make sure it’s focused on your specific situation and captures information that is important to you. As you begin, this information will mostly describe the past performance of your lead-generation initiatives.

Using your ladder of lead generation to look at your past history, you should be able to answer questions that focus on future opportunities. By looking at the metrics associated with activities such as your trade shows and email campaigns, you will be able to compare the performance of each. This will provide clues about where to focus your resources in the future.

And since marketing is not an exact science, there are some caveats (hey, even the “exact sciences” have caveats).

Caveat 1: Lead attribution is difficult

It is difficult to identify the precise origin of each and every lead, and attributing each lead to a specific investment of resources is almost impossible. There are many reasons for this, chief among them the desire for anonymity by your early prospects – those who haven’t yet “raised their hands.” It‘s hard to know whether the prospect that stops by your booth at a show has actually been following you and your company for years. If you attribute this lead only to the trade show, you could be underestimating the role played by other lead-generating tactics, such as your white papers.

Caveat 2: Consider your ultimate goals

Remember that your ultimate goals are to increase the number of people who “raise their hands” and increase the amount of conversation (or the number of touches) you have with them. Given the attribution problem mentioned above, it is difficult to measure these precisely. Other metrics, such as “cost per lead,” can be used as surrogate measurements, but it is important not to lose sight of the overall goal.

To say this in another way, making all your decisions based solely on cost per lead or some other surrogate measurement could lead you to sacrifice long-term effectiveness for short-term expediency.

Optimizing your ladder of lead generation

Given these two caveats, it is wise to “hedge your bets” by using multiple lead-generating tactics. In fact, one of the benefits of tracking all your lead-generating activities using a tool such as the ladder of lead generation is that you can begin to see how multiple tactics work together.

Once you become comfortable with the ladder as a tool for tracking your lead-generating activities, you can begin the process of optimizing the performance of each individual touchpoint and the mix of all touchpoints for your biotech, med-device and life science audiences. There are many ways to accomplish this. Within any particular touchpoint – email blasts or banner ads, for example – A/B testing, though simple in concept, can lead to significant improvements. From a larger perspective, there are specific tactics that can be applied across multiple rungs of the ladder, and we will cover these in our next issue.

Summary

• There are six common uses for the ladder of lead generation:
  • Measurement
  • Planning
  • Competitive comparison
  • Quality control
  • Goal setting
  • Education and management
• Build your ladder of lead generation tracking tool; a spreadsheet is an effective way to do this. A template is available here.
• For each touchpoint, enter key data, such as:
  • Activity – what specific activity are we focused on? E.g., an email blast designed to drive traffic to a particular trade show.
  • Primary Audience – who is the primary audience for this activity?
  • Secondary Audience – who are the secondary audiences for this activity?
  • Targeted or broadcast? – is this activity aimed specifically, or broadcast widely.
  • Call to action – what change in attitude, belief or behavior does this touchpoint seek to accomplish?
  • Typical stage in the buying cycle – what stage in the buying cycle is the primary audience in, if known?
  • Educate, Inspire or Reassure? – should this touchpoint be primarily focused on education, inspiration or reassurance?
  • Frequency/Timing – how often and when will this be initiated?
  • Metric for success – what will be measured to determine success?
  • Conversion rate? – for the metric you just listed, what target value do you hope to achieve?
  • Total Cost – what is the total cost of the initiative?
  • Cost/Lead – what is the cost per lead (either anticipated in the future, or achieved in the past)?
• Use the ladder to compare the past performance of different lead-generating initiatives.
• Remember that attributing any one lead to a single lead generating tactic is difficult at best.
• Focusing on surrogate metrics (such as “cost per lead”) should not overwhelm your ultimate goals: increasing the number of people that “raise their hands” and your level of conversation with them.