Brand Building for Life Sciences Companies
In today's oversaturated world of misinformation, building a credible and trustworthy brand is more important than ever. Companies in the life sciences-healthcare ecosystem have a tall task: appeal to multiple audiences, maneuver a complex and highly regulated environment, and navigate the public’s “trust issues” with the industry.
To successfully face these obstacles, every type of life sciences company–from the early-stage biotech to the multinational pharma company–must cultivate a strong and cohesive brand. A brand strategy is initially important as companies try to appeal to investors and raise awareness. As the company progresses, it will need to rebrand during key moments–transitioning from pre-clinical to clinical, IPO preparation, management changes, or a product launch.
Today’s blog will dive into the challenges of brand building in life sciences and provide a snapshot of steps to create a cohesive, trustworthy brand (or rebrand).
Challenges of Brand Building in the Life Sciences
A good challenge is always fun for a marketing team building a brand, but in life sciences, the complications and guardrails are in a category of their own. Let’s first review a few major challenges life sciences companies face in brand building.
Regulations:
Regulations set by the government ensure our medicines and technologies are safe and effective for patients. However, this means that life sciences companies cannot build brands based on medicines that have yet to be approved by regulatory agencies. Even when medicines are approved for patient use, there are still many regulations that brands must follow, such as avoiding certain words and language.
Ethics:
Ethical concerns are everywhere in an industry that deals with people’s health. The FDA mandates that companies can’t downplay risks, make sweeping promises, or use patient information (hello, HIPAA!). Furthermore, the life sciences industry is already constantly under pressure to improve its trustworthiness, making the ethical component crucial in building a brand.
Complex Audience:
Life sciences companies market to multiple audiences with differing scientific and healthcare knowledge levels and goals. At any given point, a company could be trying to reach:
investors
the press
researchers
talent
other biopharma companies
thought leaders
hospitals
providers
and patients (phew!)
When your target audience is so varied, it can be hard to build a cohesive brand.
Scientific Accuracy:
We know misinformation is pervasive in our overly connected world. In the life sciences industry, misinformation can be, at best, damaging to a brand’s reputation and, at worst, deadly. Every claim, statement and component of the brand must be accurate. How can a brand build trust with its audience if the information it’s putting out there is incorrect? It can’t, and when it comes to human health, accuracy can, quite literally, be the difference between life and death.
Define your brand purpose and values
What’s a life sciences brand to do when it has to factor in the above challenges on top of saturated markets and overly stimulated audiences? What any brand should do, regardless of its industry–define its mission, vision, purpose, and values.
When you start crafting these statements, they don’t have to be perfect or sound beautiful. (That’s where a life science copywriter can come in. 😉). Consider these statements your guiding star. Make sure they reflect your why and values. Otherwise, you are just building a house of cards.
Identify and Understand the Target Audience
Once you’ve developed brand purpose and values, the next step is good old-fashioned research, which we know this industry is all about! You’ve likely already done competitive research as you decided to launch the company, but we want you to do it again with a life science marketer’s lens. Identify the key people who can help your company to grow and ways to connect with them.
First, review your competitors’ brand voice, visuals, and content. These ‘competitors’ can be companies with commonalities to yours, i.e., same therapeutic area, similar patient population, or the same discovery phase. Who do they market to? What’s memorable and powerful? What elements are weak or missing?
From there, learn about the audiences you want to influence–talk to everyone from investors and partners to clinicians and patients. Find out what they read, what concerns them most and what resonates with them. If you’ve managed to start this process while in stealth mode, congrats because you’re ahead of the curve. Keeping this dialogue open and constant will differentiate your brand from others. The insights you gain will help you shape a relevant and credible brand voice now and later as your brand evolves.
Build a consistent and credible brand voice
Next, transform this research into a brand narrative and voice. This starts with:
building a cohesive company story, including how you discovered the technology
the unmet medical or business needs
why patients or biopharma businesses need the technology
reasons to believe in it
Remember, storytelling is a powerful tool in building a brand, so craft a company story that will build a connection, is memorable, and resonates emotionally.
As you build your narrative, develop rules and phrases around how you talk about the company and its technologies and what you can and cannot say (very important!).
Once your brand narrative is ready, use it to elevate your visibility. We’ve highlighted a few key uses for your narrative.
Leverage thought leadership and educational content
Like any other industry, the way to your life science audience’s heart is content. Not just any content—it must be engaging, relevant, educational, and research-backed. As we know, scientists have no shortage of issues to debate, so it’s a matter of turning that technical talk into compelling content (sound familiar?).
The good news is the life sciences industry was putting out educational and thought leadership content before it was all the rage. However, the lengthy data-heavy, peer-reviewed report “OG thought leadership” format can fail to break through to a varied and overstimulated audience. A life sciences content writer’s biggest and most valuable role is to find unique ways to marry the complexity of the topic with engaging content.
Implement a multi-channel strategy
A multi-channel strategy is essential to building a brand and telling a company’s story on a consistent basis. For life sciences companies, it usually includes two social media platforms (usually LinkedIn and X), thought leadership content, and a PR strategy including earned, owned, and paid media. Hitting audiences on multiple fronts allows you to deliver your content to the audience on a specific platform. For example, with one of our clients, our LinkedIn content is targeted towards providers, whereas the Meta content is patient-focused. We sometimes have overlapping posts, but the message is tweaked, and the call-to-action is different.
Engage with Your Community and Advocates
As you begin building your brand, if you’re doing all the right things, you’ll naturally build a following. These will include impacted communities and stakeholders interested in supporting your company’s investigational medicines or technology. Community engagement doesn’t happen immediately but grows over time once you’ve built trust, established credibility, and shown your audience you have compelling content to offer.
Community engagement goes hand-in-hand with advocacy in the life sciences industry. Advocacy content can complement your thought leadership strategy, especially when your company is in the data desert, i.e., you don’t have news or data to share. To fill the gaps in content, we craft advocacy-driven content that increases your visibility and demonstrates your dedication.
Monitoring and Adapting Strategy Your Brand Strategy
As with any marketing plan, monitoring your brand strategy is crucial to success. Always be checking the analytics, whether it’s LinkedIn engagement or article clicks. You want to use the data to identify your audience’s preferences and create content they will engage with. Another way to monitor your brand is to ask for feedback from your industry peers. Remember, this is about them, not you, so if you get feedback from data or people, don’t take it personally–use it to adjust.
The life science industry is constantly evolving, so companies must adjust their strategy to meet those changes. This means companies should adapt the brand as they move into different phases of the drug development process. It’s OK if you find yourself needing to rethink a part of your brand or completely rebrand. As we’ve said, brand transformations are a natural part of building a brand and mean you’re listening, which is good!
Conclusion
Brand building in the life sciences industry is not without its challenges. Still, when done correctly it allows a company to stand out among competitors and be “well-positioned to succeed in the years to come.”
With white-glove life sciences writing support, you can build an indelible brand that reaches and influences the right audience to bring your technology to patients in need.
Need help creating that heart-tugging brand? Send us a note!
