As a Marketing professional, I am keenly aware that I live, eat, and breathe the work, culture, and desires of the people that are likely to need what my company has. For many years, I have been immersed in the world of science. I feel that scientists, and academics for that matter, deserve special consideration because of their profession.
I recently read a great article on some ‘myths’ about marketing to scientists. I think the author Marina Hop is spot on about how many scientists think and how many marketers misunderstand the motivations involved in selecting a solution, whether the solution is an instrument, software, or service.
- Brand doesn’t matter to scientists
- Influencer marketing has no place in science
- Marketers should focus on product features
- Social media marketing is not for scientists
- More content is key to driving your digital marketing strategy
One of the vendors with which I had the privilege of working while I was at Cubresa is AZO Network. Here is an example of their very high-quality work: OEM Sensor Marketing. AZO provides precisely targeted distribution, a powerful proprietary analytics platform, as well as ten industry-specific sites (as of September 2017) for the latest news, insights, content and more from Materials Engineering, Optics, Sensors and Nanotechnology to Medical and Life Sciences.
Although I have worked in Marketing for decades, I learned a lot from Lee Pickering and April Cashin-Garbutt at AZO.
Here is an example of placing carefully prepared company and product information in a high-traffic place, in this case on AZO’s well-known Life Science news aggregator site, to supplement a company website.
Prospective customers, in this case researchers performing preclinical imaging using MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) or PET (positron emission tomography) who may be interested in performing simultaneous PET/MRI, have a greater chance of finding a product that could be the difference between a successful and a failed experiment due to inadequate information from imaging the animal model.
I’ve also been habitually creating and updating relevant Wikipedia entries to boost search engine results:
- PET-MRI (positron emission tomography – magnetic resonance imaging)
- LCTF (Liquid Crystal Tunable Filter)
- SLM (spatial light modulator)
According to an acquaintance who works for Google, this all helps boost visibility, and makes it more likely that people who should be your customers actually find you. Then, he says, it’s up to you!
