You can't all be world-leading
Over fifteen years writing science content for biotech and pharma and here are but a handful of things I see all the time.
The science is almost always brilliant. That's the thing I want to say first, because everything after it sounds like I’m kicking someone when they’re down (and admittedly I am indeed doing that in places, sorry). But in more than fifteen years of writing for biotech and pharma and small businesses and charities, I’ve read some genuinely lovely work. It’s done by clever, thoughtful people who care about it far more than their job description requires. There are cool mechanisms and beefy data and you just know folks in lab coats worked late to get them.
And then Marketing gets hold of it (and yes, I know, technically that’s me) and buries it alive. Or, those enthusiastic scientists, who are brilliant in the lab but perhaps less capable with keyboard than pipette, have a go at turning it into something that sadly, often, falls a little flat.
So that’s me, right in the middle. I love the science and I'm saddened at what happens to it, at the same time, all day, every day. Let me show you what I mean.
The plan-shaped hole
Almost nobody has a plan, a proper content strategy. Yeah they’ve got 112 very shiny slides an agency built, a handful of topics they know lots about, a desire to do something driven by a vague sense that content is a thing companies are supposed to do. But what they don't have is reasoning. No distinctiveness, no thought about where anyone actually enters the category, no clue what really makes people think about them, no answer to the one and only question that matters: why anyone should care this came from them and not the fourteen other firms selling the same thing (reagent, service, whatever).
Instead you get
Here's a topic we know about, and here are twenty-eight blog posts about it.
And because there's no plan, there's no confidence and because there's no confidence, there's also the competitor tunnel vision. A competitor makes an infographic and suddenly it's “Ooh, we should do one of those!”. That, believe it or not, is not strategy.
This plan-shaped hole also produces the opposite effect, where everyone has a burning, panicked need to make more stuff. Just… more – so much more. Publish it, fire off a single social post, offer a small prayer to the SEO gods and hope the article you spent three days on gets found by someone, anyone. And I know volume really does have an effect, but it’s just woefully inefficient. Far better to make one thing genuinely good (that your writer spent three days working on), chop it up where it actually makes sense to and hammer your one best channel over months. But that requires guts, and guts are in short supply, which brings me to the real problem.
Everyone’s terrified
Risk aversion is super big in Biotech Land, especially with the many regulations and hordes of stakeholders loitering around. The resulting feeling is that it's safer to say what everyone else is saying and post what everyone else is posting because that’s what people always post. The wonderful thing about the terror, this risk aversion, is that when your content reaches the world, no one’s pissed off and no one has to defend a decision in a meeting.
Which is great! Everyone’s happy. YOU’RE happy. It’s just that you’re also invisible.
Play it that safe and you end up as another science company with a slightly wonky logo and some text sitting on a blue gradient background surrounded by stock images of scientists looking oddly excited while pointing at a powerpoint slide or staring down microscopes with their safety specs on. That is, utterly indistinguishable from the other two hundred science companies with slightly wonky logos and text on blue gradient backgrounds. No one remembers you and no one can tell you apart from the competitor you were nervously copying. But you have spent real money to achieve the precise sensation of not existing. You’re paying to be dull.
The cost of being dull
Interestingly, there’s data on being dull! Exciting, I know. Peter Field, Jon Evans and some clever folk at System1 and eatbigfish measured the most common emotional response to advertising and found – wait, can you guess? Happiness? Anger? Shockingly, no. It was NEUTRALITY. The most common response to advertising was nothing. In B2B it's worse than anywhere with around 60% of people feeling precisely sod all about UK B2B ads. Worse still, playing it safe doesn't even buy you the safety you think you were paying for! Their data shows that as content gets duller, the positive reactions die off, but the negative ones hold completely steady. Turns out you can’t bore your way out of offending people. .
And it's expensive. In UK B2B, they reckon only about £9m a year goes to the least-dull ads, while over £53m props up the dullest, and dragging that beige heap up to the standard of the interesting stuff would cost an extra £267m. It’s like a tedium tax.
So yeah, you can be as safe and dull as you like, you just have to throw way more money at it to achieve the same effect as if you’d just taken a bit of a risk and been a bit more distinctive.
Meanwhile, the actual science
Remember the science? The good stuff, done by people who care? It's still there, somewhere, just a little buried and gasping for air beneath all the adjectives. Because every single company is world-leading, apparently. Every one is pioneering. Every one is at the cutting edge and ready to accelerate your science with innovative solutions.
You can't all be world-leading, yo.
The tragedy is the hyperbole isn't even necessary. The findings are usually interesting enough to carry themselves if you'd just get out of the way and let them. Strip the marketing glitter off and there's something genuinely worth reading underneath. Nobody trusts it enough to try because they’ve forgotten that what they do is cool and then buried it beneath a mountain of marketing bullshit in an attempt to make it sound cool.
No pulse
Which is why so much of this stuff has no personality whatsoever. Social media, that place where you have the opportunity to go and talk directly to the people who have chosen to follow whatever it is you do, somehow has become the least social thing biotech companies do. There’s a fortnight of “Here's a blog we wrote” posts loaded into a scheduler and fired off into the void with no human ever logging in to actually talk to anyone.
Email, another platform to speak with those people who haven’t just hit a follow button but willingly handed over their email address, is either nothing at all or a relentless nurture onslaught with forty campaigns running at once, trying to beat the customer into submission by sheer volume.
And humour may as well be radioactive. Everything is scrubbed clean and weirdly contractual, as though a joke might throw everyone into outrage and how unprofessional you are. There are handful (a really small hand) of companies who are using humour (n6, Unchain Labs) and surprise surprise they stand out – people remember them.
Look, you don't have to do a bit and I’m not saying you have to do standup or slapstick, but a quip now and then, a genuinely human aside, an actual conversation with the people who followed you will be the difference between a company people think of and a logo they forget. Just take a look at Monzo – they’re a bank holding bajillions of pounds of people’s cash. Stop worrying about being so serious all the time and take a moment to remember you’ll still a human (I’ve seen “human” on enough of your About Us pages…).
Worshipping the wrong number
And then, having done all of the above, everyone panics about ROI. If a blog didn't drive a satisfying spike of traffic straight to the site, it's declared a failure. Bin the writer, scrap the campaign. No traffic = immediate lose.
But most of the people you want aren't looking for you at all; 95% of people aren’t even in the market for you when they see your stuff. They don't know you exist yet, BUT, buuuuuuuuut, what they might do – if you'd taken the risk, built the personality, hammered the one channel – is half-remember the genuinely good thing you made and come back to you in a few months when they actually need something. For that kind of awareness work, impressions and reach tell you far more than clicks ever will. Top of that funnel stuff is slow to build but it’s cumulative. Measuring it on click-through is like judging a first date on whether they signed the mortgage agreement and agreed to 3 kids and a dog. ROI like clicks is the wrong number when you’re trying to get the Reach ball rolling.
And yeah, before you say it
I know exactly how rich this is coming from me. I am the marketing. I write this stuff for a living and I have, at various points, produced the blue-gradient special, softened a finding into mush because someone senior got itchy feet, and reached for pioneering when I knew full well the science could stand on its own without the fluff. I'm not lobbing this from some clean patch of moral high ground because I'm standing in the same field, holding the same shovel.
So if this sounds like a lecture, I’m sorry. These are just the things I mutter to myself every time I open another deck from another agency that a great company with great science has paid through the nose for.
I was planning to make this 10 points, because 10’s nice and round (even though I’m sure there was something years ago about deviating from round numbered lists to encourage clicks… so many changing rules, I forget). But I don’t like padding things out (which, if you've been paying attention, is the entire bloody problem) so I'm leaving it at 6.
What it looks like when it works
You may be surprised to hear that none of this is hard to fix, it's just uncomfortable. A good content strategy doesn’t need to be polished deck with slides in the triple digits. All you need is just a honest decisions made on purpose. Who are we actually for? How are we distinct (not USPs)? What do we know that nobody else is saying? Which one channel are we going to be genuinely good at instead of mediocre across six? What does the science say when we stop shouting over it?
Get those right and that plan-shaped hole starts to look pretty filled. You stop making more and start making things people remember. The good work finally gets the attention it deserves and you become the company someone half-recalls six months later when they need exactly what you do, which is worth rather more than a traffic spike on a Tuesday. Distinctiveness is the only thing standing between you and the blue-gradient graveyard.
And yes, this is the part where the copywriter and strategy bloke who just spent nearly 2,000 words slagging off corporate copywriting and strategy tells you he can help with it. I'm aware of how that reads, but it's also true, and it's genuinely the work I like most: finding the actual reason a company is worth listening to, then getting out of the science's way. If that's the problem you've got, that's the problem I fix.