8 Biotech Social Media Tips to Eliminate Marketing Waste

You read it everywhere: to be successful in promoting your digital brand, a presence on social media is vital. But does biotech social media work for the industry? And, just as crucially, are you just wasting your time trying to take advantage of a tactic that simply doesn't make much sense for your industry?

The answer to that question depends entirely on your approach.

Curb Your Biotech Social Media Waste

In the life sciences industry, social media marketing can easily waste resources without making a significant impact on your marketing success. But if you approach it the right way, you can make it work for your brand in a way that emphasizes and accelerates business growth.

Biotechnology as an industry is ideally suited to the agile content marketing philosophy. Rapid changes in technology, environment, and audience expectations necessitate a similarly nimble approach to your digital marketing. 

Similarly, an emphasis on reducing waste and maximizing efficiency should be music to the ears of healthcare and biotech companies looking to edge out a niche against industry goliaths.

In social media marketing, agile means finding an approach that helps you maximize the impact of each marketing effort while reducing the amount of wasted efforts and resources. Here are 8 tips that can propel you toward that goal.

1) Follow Your Audience

Establishing a successful social media presence comes down to understanding and following your audience. Other than Facebook, which is home to (nearly) all demographics, social networks tend to present very different audiences to brands looking to maximize their exposure.

Snapchat and Instagram, for example, have tended to attract younger audience than most alternatives. On the other hand, LinkedIn attracts working professionals and business prospects, ideal for biotech companies with a B2B focus.

This comprehensive overview gives you a great place to start your network selection process. Find the network(s) most likely to attract your ideal customers, and focus your efforts there. In the process, you will avoid wasting time on a platform that primarily reaches users outside of your target audience.

2) Embrace the Community

It may seem obvious, but: never build a biotech social media strategy without understanding and embracing the first word of the phrase. Social media, even in a marketing context, needs to be social first.

On networks like LinkedIn your strategy could include joining the discussion in one of the countless groups related to the life sciences industry. On Twitter, the same effort may be more complicated, and you have to find other means to engage your audience.

But that engagement should be a constant emphasis. If your posts get comments or responses, let your audience know they're heard. Over time, you will build a loyal following that not only increases the chances of your current audience converting to customers, but also your credibility for those who are just joining you on social media. 

3) Emphasize Visuals

It's one of the easiest hacks in all of social media. If you want your posts to reach more people, use effective visuals.

A plethora of studies and statistics support that claim. For example, simply including images on your Facebook posts will multiply your reach by 230%.

For your biotech company, that's an invaluable opportunity. Especially if you have trouble explaining the viability and benefits of your product, visuals on social media can help. Through an infographic or explainer video, you can showcase your brand and explain your competitive advantage more effectively.

The lesson is simple: don't spend valuable time crafting a 500 character social media post. Instead, reduce it to 50, and let your visuals do the talking.

4) Automate Your Posting Schedule

Among the biggest potential pitfalls of social media is the frequency at which you need to post in order to succeed. Research estimates, for example, for optimum success and maximum reach on Twitter, you need to tweet 15 times every single day.

If you have to write and post each of these posts individually, you end up spending so much time crafting the message that you don't have any left to strategize. Automation in social media therefore becomes a key to success.

A variety of social media management and scheduling services can accomplish that feat for you. Some of them even suggest ideal posting times for maximum reach and engagement. Find a tool that allows you to keep your brand personality while alleviating the time it takes to schedule each post.

5) Listen to Audience Chatter and Feedback

The best social media marketers, in biotech and other industries, treat social media as a two-way conversation. In addition to posting their own content and replying to relevant responses, they also listen for chatter and conversations to which they can add their own voice.

Social listening, in fact, can become a vital part of your marketing strategy. You want to know if your audience is talking about you or your industry, even if they don't tag your brand page or profile.

Last year, only 24% of brands actually engaged in strategic social listening. But if you do, the benefits can be considerable. Not only will you be able to find and engage in relevant conversation without having to spend valuable time finding them, but you'll also be able to respond to feedback, get content topic ideas, and much more.

6) Leverage Real-Time Analytics

A large emphasis of the agile philosophy consists of real-time data insights that allow you to make strategic decisions more quickly and decisively. Social media is the perfect environment to accomplish just that.

Every social media network, from Facebook to Twitter, now offers integrated analytics platform in which you can see the reach and engagement numbers for each of your posts. You will also be able to find audience demographics, competitive analysis data points, and much more.

Based on these insights, you can improve your social media success almost overnight.

Find the type of content that resonates most with your audience, and try to replicate it. Learn more about your audience's demographics and online behavior to adjust your posting strategy and schedule to specifically to their needs.

7) Jack the News

Finally, let's not forget the final benefit of agile social media marketing: the ability to respond to real-world news almost instantly.

Whether through social listening or strategic following of influencers in the biotech industry, you will regularly come across news as they happen. That point in time is ideal to jump in and share your thoughts.

Provide instant analysis, share your opinion, create a flash poll, and more. In other words, add your own voice to breaking news in the biotech industry.

That news may be a new study being released, or a mainstream media article (such as a high-profile interview) that covers your industry. Whatever the news, jack them with your own thoughts to provide relevant content for your audience at the exact moment they're looking for it.

8) Integrate Social Media Into Your Inbound Strategy

Ultimately, your social media efforts can only be successful if they are integrated into a larger strategy. Isolate them, and you will end up with plenty of favorable vanity metrics that do little to actually drive web visits, leads, and customers.

That's why the litmus test of any social media strategy should be its integration into your overall digital framework.

Use your presence to promote blog posts and gated content, as well as highlighting events and product presentations to come in the near future. Use it as an opportunity to prompt additional marketing touches.

That type of integration, of course, requires an inbound marketing philosophy that goes far beyond social media. Instead, you need a framework that encompasses your website, email marketing, content marketing, search engine optimization and more.

Ideally, a larger strategy like this embraces agile marketing principles on a larger level. To learn more about the concept, and how it can help your healthcare or biotech company succeed on both social media and digital marketing in general, contact us.