Successful Marketing For “Boring” Industries [Plus Free Guide]

You’re here for a reason: The industry you work in is just not sexy. Whether it’s selling pipettes or GLP compliance software, many of us in the science industry face the same excitement and engagement challenge. Let’s face it, if the audience can’t relate to your content they’ll soon move on to the next “shiny” thing that does have a marketing X-factor.

Fortunately, there is more to work with than you think. Every field can be made compelling — you simply need to uncover the stories and relevancy within. Start by outlining the common challenges your audience faces. Life science marketing is about showing the outside world what tangible problems your company can solve and how it relates to them. For an extra leg-up on the competition, weave in an underdog narrative that tugs at the audiences’ heartstrings. After that, it’s just a matter of making the content accessible.

“Science can change the world”

To see compelling science marketing in action, look no further than DSM’s “Science can change the world” video campaign.

DSM is a global company science-based company active in health, nutrition, and materials. With the launch of their “Science can change the world” campaign, they set out to tell the story behind scientific discovery, capturing the attention of scientists, governments, academics and the general public. Essentially anyone: The story of human innovation and medical progress is universally relevant.

To engage non-scientists they recreated the attempts of several research teams to solve global problems, creating a mini-movie to share the challenges, adversity, set backs, human emotion and ultimate triumph. It was an underdog story of what is required for human innovation to breakthrough the status quo and highlighted how these research projects could impact the entire world. The goal of the short film was to show the audience (of any professional background) that scientific innovation is not research for the sake of research or personal curiosity; it is a response to global challenges, something that effects and benefits us all. By doing so, DSM placed a giant wedge between the terms ‘science’ and ‘boring.’

Lessons learned

What lessons can be learned from DSM’s strategy and execution?

An integral part of the campaign’s success came through crafting a story that could communicate how the research projects were relevant to a broad population, not just scientists. Secondly, they presented projects that provided new solutions to problems that hadn’t been addressed. For an audience to be engaged, marketing content must be new and insightful. If the problem and solution are already widely known, the story will be a lot less interesting and memorable. As with most marketing and advertising campaigns, the goal is to give the audience a reason to pay attention, while communicating benefits/solutions not otherwise available.

Once the message is in place, marketing teams can work wonders to support the campaign. Likewise, your team should make it as easy as possible for people to share your content via social media. You can create relevant downloadables and platforms for seamless lead generation — even microsites or landing pages dedicated to your cause. These are all things DSM executed wonderfully to help extend audience engagement far beyond video viewership. The idea is to provide additional information, bring in new customers, and help drive traffic to other parts of your website.

In summary, marketing campaigns like DSM’s “Science can change the world” video can appeal to a general audience, by investing marketing energy in the following ways:

 Make the topic relevant to the audience
 Present new solutions
 Appeal to human emotion
 Couple the content with additional information, “downloadables,” landing pages, etc.
 Make the marketing campaign easy to share “socially” online

To see this in action for yourself, you can check out the “Science Can Change The World” movie and microsite here: http://www.sciencecanchangetheworld.org

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