Life Sciences Marketing: Guide to Strategies & Trends

Life sciences marketing requires multiple competing priorities. Pharma and biotech marketers need to present technical topics in a way that engages healthcare professionals (HCPs) yet still complies with regulations. This demands an approach that standard marketing playbooks don't cover.

In this article, we'll walk through how to create a life sciences marketing strategy that addresses these challenges and incorporates current trends. You'll learn which marketing channels and formats to prioritize, how to optimize results.

Key takeaways:

• Successful life sciences marketing strategies require a balance between educational, thought leadership, and lead generation content.
• To stay ahead in this sector, factor trends like AI-powered tools, omnichannel approaches, and influencer marketing into your strategy.
• To overcome industry challenges, focus on regulatory compliance, making technical information accessible, and monitoring scientific advancements.

What is life sciences marketing?

Life sciences marketing is** the process of promoting pharmaceutical and biotechnology products, services, and innovations**. This type of strategy informs, educates, and converts a diverse group of stakeholders including HCPs, patients, and investors.

In many industries, marketing focuses mainly on driving sales and revenue. While that's certainly an end goal for biotech and pharma companies, life sciences marketing has to prioritize other outcomes as well.

Within the life science sector, effective marketing has to establish credibility for your organization, build trust with your audience, and educate customers. All of these elements have to work together to help your target audience make important health-related decisions.

5 Life science digital marketing trends to follow

Because research and development (R&D) drives the life sciences sector, pharmaceutical and biotechnology marketing practices change quickly. Stay ahead of the competition by incorporating these trends into your marketing.

1. Omnichannel marketing approaches

Life sciences companies are quickly shifting from single-channel sales led by field representatives to multi-channel marketing strategies. Customers increasingly expect omnichannel experiences, and up to 60% of HCPs prefer digital engagement when making buying decisions.

Instead of focusing all your efforts on a single channel, it's more important than ever to diversify. Coordinate messaging across email marketing, webinar series, and social media content. Then, use channel-specific analytics to learn what works best for your audience so you can optimize your approach.

2. AI-powered life science marketing tools

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools help marketers do more with less and stretch budgets further. For life science companies, AI-powered solutions can transform everything from content creation to marketing analytics.

AI marketing automation tools simplify email, social media, and ad creation, helping you create omnichannel campaigns quickly. They save time by generating marketing content, applying your brand voice, suggesting audience segments, and sharing campaign insights.

Livestorm's AI marketing tools make content creation faster and easier. Use our webinar outline generator to plan your next pharma or biotech webinar in seconds. Plug in the topic and a short description, and set your tone of voice and audience knowledge level.

Whether you're hosting a webinar, planning a YouTube video, or brainstorming a short-form video, our AI-powered video script generator can help. Just input the topic, description, format, and tone of voice. Then, let the tool create a full script in seconds.

Get more value from your online events with our AI-powered content repurposing tool. Turn any Livestorm event recording into a summary or a transcript. Or repurpose it into a blog post, email draft, or social media post. Then, distribute the content across marketing channels.

3. Life sciences events and conferences

While asynchronous engagement tends to be more convenient for customers, real-time interactions help build relationships and drive lead generation. Incorporate virtual events and conferences into your marketing strategy, either by sponsoring or hosting.

An online event platform like Livestorm makes hosting biotech or healthcare events easy. In fact, our 2024 Healthcare Webinar Report reveals that the average healthcare organization hosted 23 webinars in 2024.

On average, these webinars maintained an average 51% attendance rate, making them powerful opportunities to educate potential customers, build relationships with HCPs, and drive adoption of therapies and treatments.

For example, Protein Production partnered with Beckman Coulter Life Sciences to host a webinar exploring the latest trends in protein production technology. The event included several expert perspectives and is available for viewers to watch on demand.

4. Expert-driven influencer marketing

Whether you host a webinar series or you plan a virtual conference, you shouldn't rely solely on speakers from your organization's leadership team. Instead, include HCPs and key opinion leaders (KOLs) in your marketing efforts.

With a strong KOL engagement plan, you can build relationships with experts in key therapeutic areas. Then, you can invite them to participate in your educational events and product launches.

It's just as important to make HCP engagement a priority as you plan your marketing tactics. Organize engaging events that educate and create trust with your target audience.

5. Case studies and customer testimonials

As important as educational and thought leadership content are for life sciences companies, they aren't the only kinds of content to create. Savvy life sciences professionals are increasingly focusing on content that shares pain points, challenges, and outcomes from the perspective of a patient or physician.

• Case studies typically focus on data and are designed to help HCPs make smarter, data-driven treatment decisions.
• Customer testimonials generally center on storytelling and help patients understand if a treatment could be a smart option.

For example, pharma company Pfizer hosts Front Porch Conversations, a video series that shares open discussions about health risks, family history, and treatment options.

How to create a life sciences marketing strategy

Use our straightforward framework to create a life science marketing strategy from scratch or update your current approach.

Set marketing objectives

Every B2B marketing plan starts with clarifying goals. For life sciences companies, marketing objectives might include:

• Increasing market share for a specific product or treatment
• Generating qualified leads for a new product
• Establishing thought leadership in a certain therapeutic area

Set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals. With these objectives in mind, your team can work toward clear outcomes that are easy to track.

Perform audience research

To meet your marketing goals, you need to know how to connect with potential buyers. Conduct audience research to learn everything from which clinical specialties best fit your solutions to which content formats and marketing channels your audience prefers.

Use social listening tools to analyze audience behaviors, interests, and preferences. Host interviews or focus groups with HCPs to ask more nuanced questions about preferred resources, training gaps, and treatment selection methods.

Then, turn your audience research data into an ideal customer profile (ICP) or buyer persona that defines your target customer. Use this information to guide your marketing materials.

Define your unique value proposition

To attract the right audience, you have to differentiate your company's position. Do competitive research to learn more about the other brands, products, or services in your niche. Analyze the values they promote and the challenges they solve as well as the opportunities and threats they create for your business.

Then, craft a value proposition that's completely unique to your company. Outline how your company's offerings improve patient outcomes, address cost concerns, and provide innovative treatments. Incorporate this information into your marketing messages.

Choose relevant marketing channels

Use your competitor and audience research to decide on the marketing channels that resonate best. Pharma and biotech companies often use a combination of:

• Email marketing to share news and product developments
• Social media marketing to build relationships with prospects
• Content marketing to share more in-depth educational information
• Video marketing to engage potential customers
• Webinars to provide thought leadership and build trust
• Event marketing and virtual medical conferences to connect with customers in real time

Plan and launch marketing campaigns

Now you're ready to map out a cohesive marketing campaign and start to create content. Life sciences marketing campaigns typically include educational components as a foundation and thought leadership as a strategy to build trust before introducing more targeted, conversion-focused messaging.

For example, GoCheck Kids had a goal to generate and qualify leads for the company's retinal scan software. Product demo webinars played an important role in the company's strategy, relying on Livestorm's webinar engagement tools to interact with participants and build trust.

Measure and optimize results

As you carry out your marketing strategy, monitor the results closely to make sure the outcomes align with your goals. If they don't, analyze the data to determine what went wrong. For example, low registration numbers might make it impossible to deliver the leads you need to generate.

Tools like Livestorm's video engagement score calculator make it easy to measure the success of your webinar marketing efforts. This tool shares engagement metrics and insights like attendance rate and engagement scores to help you understand what's working and how to improve your return on investment (ROI).

Tips to overcome challenges with marketing life sciences

Biotech and pharma marketing have their own unique set of challenges. Use our suggestions to make them easier to manage:

• Complying with industry regulations: Create regulatory review processes for marketing content prior to publishing. Develop pre-approved messaging your team can use in any organic campaign or ad.
• Making technical topics accessible: Break down complex information and share real-world applications to communicate effectively. Partner with HCPs, KOLs, and patients who speak your audience's language.
• Staying on top of scientific advancements: Establish open lines of communication between your R&D and marketing teams. When developments happen, prioritize incorporating them into your messaging.

Livestorm for life sciences marketing events

Building an AI-powered omnichannel marketing strategy doesn't have to be difficult. With Livestorm's webinar software and AI tools, you can easily develop webinar series and repurpose the content across channels — helping you reach crucial business objectives.

Curious how our webinar software works for your organization? Book a demo to learn more about our enterprise and business plans.