With niche market segments and limited budgets, many science marketers fall into a common trap: relying too heavily on push marketing that fails to build brand awareness or a consistent customer base.
Campaign bursts are good to have but far from enough to build a connection with scientific buyers who are looking for information 24/7.
Regularly nurturing your relationship with these potential prospects at the top of the funnel is what will lead to growth in brand awareness and the volume of quality leads. You need to always be ready to engage with each potential customer at the crucial Zero Moment of Truth, when they start to look for answers or casually browse for solutions.
And this is possible with always-on marketing (AOM).
Think of it as the success factor that empowers your brand to consistently deliver helpful and personalized content experiences, at scale.
The common alternative to AOM is push or burst marketing. It involves showing ads to potential customers for short periods, whether they want to receive your message or not.
Such cyclical campaigns run for as long as your business has marketing dollars to spend, and then there is radio silence. In this quiet period, a competing supplier could entice the prospects to consider alternate solutions. And you will need to spend a lot more effort and money to win them back.
This is why burst marketing seldom wins. It isn't a very good use of your marketing team’s time or budget, especially for scientific equipment and consumables that are high-involvement purchases.
On the other hand, powered by automation, always-on campaigns consistently engage researchers when they’re most receptive to receiving your message.
This customer-centric strategy, also known as lifecycle marketing, regularly nudges audiences through the early stages of the buyer's journey to secure as many new prospects as possible.
Scientists and engineers spend between one month to one year on pre-purchase research and planning, looking for information on the issues they face and guidance on the solutions available. They often access publication pages on ResearchGate to find solutions, where advertisements can provide further solutions.
You want to be there for your customer, addressing their problem with engaging and useful content right when they start their research — because first impressions matter. It is what will decide whether the scientific community will remember your brand as they move further down the marketing funnel.
But most businesses in the sciences industry are still a long way away from adding value at the pre-purchase stage of the buyer journey. Extremely low NPS scores signify their inability to solidify customers’ loyalty at early customer experience touchpoints.
It’s possible to distance your brand from this awareness deficit by being ‘always on'. Ultimately, consistent promotion of your business will lead to growth in brand and product awareness and fewer missed prospect engagement opportunities.
Customers make 57% of brand choices in the early stages of the buyer journey.
At this juncture, it is critical to maximize online brand visibility and resonance, with a strong AOM program that:
1. Focuses on customer needs
Boost your brand’s ability to alleviate the customer’s pain point by understanding their problem and reaching out to them with helpful content exactly when they are looking for information.
2. Creates multiple touchpoints
Repetition is key to improving recall and awareness, especially for products that carry a high price tag. So, when you advertise to scientific audiences, do so more frequently and across multiple channels such as social media, websites, email, etc.
3. Promotes the right kind of content
Did you know? Focusing on educational, rather than promotional, content for scientific audiences can increase lead-gen performance by over 700%.
And remember that AOM is a highly iterative process. By intelligently using historical and real-time campaign data, you can consistently improve your ad messaging and optimize distribution. Over time, such data-driven content upgrades will drive relevance and audience receptivity to your campaigns.
4. Sets contextual relevance
Include specific and direct communication, within relevant pieces of scientific content, that focus on your customer’s industry and specialization. By capturing relevant eyeballs, it is possible to improve the impact of your AOM messaging.
5. Targets your customer segment
In the sciences business, researchers need to consider many variables before making a purchase. Hence, more than one person may be assigned to research and plan the procurement of equipment, consumables, and other solutions.
Using profile, behavioral, and contextual targeting tools, you can uniquely connect with each of these personas for maximum campaign effectiveness.
Non-stop online marketing is a medium-term commitment to building brand awareness. It requires you to identify the right channels, create multiple touchpoints, track campaign performance, and optimize content. Manually managing all this can seem like an impossible task.
But when done right, it can deliver on ROI.
This is why you need an advertising partner who is experienced in working with businesses in the scientific community and who offers scalable, always on solutions.
Typically, such a solution provider will improve your team’s productivity by automating the ongoing ad workflows. They will also connect your organization directly with relevant audiences — an expansive community of diverse researchers eager to engage with your content.
In turn, this will free up your team’s time to focus on the more strategic and creative aspects of top of the funnel outreach efforts.
Learn how ResearchGate Marketing Solutions can help you efficiently and steadily build brand and product recall among the right researchers.
