The branding and creative design sensibilities of the medical marketing sector have come a long way in, oh, say, the past hundred years. Gone (for the most part) are the advertisements for pills and tonics painted on the sides of barns along US highways. Gone, too, is the era of the Yellow Pages and flyers left on doorsteps. Today the primary challenge facing a creative agency working for a healthcare client is less about building general awareness than it is about researching which stakeholders to target within the patient access journey—everyone from pharmacies to providers to the patients themselves—and identifying which digital channels they frequent.

As the audience for medical marketing has grown (and become more specialized), the options for online content creation have sprawled. Healthcare advertisers now deploy blogs, videos, podcasts, interactive quizzes, and newsletter campaigns, just to name a few. Yet eye-tracking research demonstrates the particular importance of images to a website’s business value, especially if those images are product-specific, convey the information that users are looking for, and depict people who seem genuine or uncurated—actual patients, for example, rather than models drawn from libraries of stock photos. So let’s trace how medical marketing images have evolved over time and examine some current design tactics that could help your customers find you and feel comfortable about signing up for your products or services.

A Brief History of Medical Marketing

The field of medicine is always in flux. Even today, new research has revealed that most of what we thought we knew about human metabolism was—what’s the word for it?—wrong. Still, it can be jarring to learn how many medical treatments in the past weren’t just wrong, they were addictive or absurd or even lethal. 

Prescribing cigarettes to treat asthma, eating Kellogg’s corn flakes to stymie the urge to masturbate, taking heroin because you’ve got a cough or arsenic because you’ve got syphilis, mixing wine and cocaine as “a general cure-all”—many of these snake-oil tinctures and placebos killed people or ruined their health, and the advertising that accompanied them was toxic, sometimes literally. RadiThor, a 1920s energy drink consisting of the element radium dissolved in water, billed itself as “Perpetual Sunshine” and “A Cure For the Living Dead.” An ad for the “Tapeworm Diet” shows a woman gazing at a pile of pantry items—peanuts, macaroni, graham crackers—under the words “Eat! Eat! Eat! & Always Stay Thin! How? With Sanitized Tapeworms Easy to Swallow! No Ill Effects!”

Even though the FDA was founded in 1906, it’s safe to assume that they weren’t regulating a lot of the mountebank medical pamphlets and ads circulating in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Take RadiThor again: The guy who came up with it was a Harvard dropout and—this is the salient point—not a medical doctor. Today, healthcare marketers have to work within HIPAA compliance parameters, which means they cannot ooze lies from every fiber of their being. (Considering, however, that some Big Pharma execs today are going to prison for bribing doctors to prescribe a fentanyl mouth spray, we admit it: People always seem to have a penchant for lying.)

Ever since 1883, hospitals and enterprising physicians have advertised in the Yellow Pages, and, once cars became mass-produced, on barns or billboards along the road. (The eyes of T. J. Eckleburg, anyone?) Soap and shampoo manufacturers reached a larger audience with the invention of radio. By the 1950s–60s, hospitals adopted a community-customized approach to their marketing, distributing newsletters to nearby families to inform them about their facilities and their care services.

Responsive Design

Fast-forward to the 1990s: The internet forever changed medical marketing. Hospitals created websites that were way simpler and way more HTML-y than the sites that we’re used to today, but that also combined many elements that we still use: photography, copywriting, creative design. Early websites often resembled ads and posters—aesthetically pleasing templates that informed the public about which healthcare services a company offered. Websites today are built with responsive design that lets patients access the interface across a range of devices—tablets, laptops, smartphones—and that feature addresses, phone numbers, and contact pages where users can fill out a form to ask a question or request a consultation.

Since the people who are clicking around on healthcare sites may be worried that they’re ill or misdiagnosed, they’re probably searching for providers who will give them answers and treatments with minimum hassles and turnarounds. So designers tend to choose images on those sites that evoke an aura of professionalism, or that soothe and reassure the viewer. They also make the UX smooth and intuitive—guiding users to the services they’re looking for. The importance of user convenience often means that a creative agency will spend just as much time on the “Login” and “Search” and “Subscribe” buttons, or on any instant payment or one-tap registration functionality, than it will on developing striking visuals or original artwork. As we’ll elaborate on later: The marketing in this industry is all about the consumer.

Interactive Content

Thankfully, the messages in medical marketing have evolved from the P. T. Barnumesque days of “Eat! Eat! Eat! & Always Stay Thin!” (Although, granted, the myth of being thin is still alive and well.) Today, medical advertising tends to be more interactive, which makes sense: Live Q&A sessions or educational infographics or calculators based on customer inputs help people steer through the byzantine systems of US healthcare. Messages in healthcare—at least, smart messages—aren’t blared out at the world anymore. Instead, they better resemble tools that give consumers behind-the-scenes insights and, in turn, evoke trust for their brand. Here are a few of the content types that tend to inspire loyalty and lead to a conversion:

Microinteractions:

Scrollbars, digital alarms, email notifications, pull-to-fresh animations—these are all microinteractions, UX elements that help prevent system errors and provide feedback to users. Combine these triggers into your design arsenal to engage and empower your customers within the interface that you’ve created.

Live Stream Videos:

As of 2017, 71% of healthcare companies offered two-way video and webcam functionality. Translation: Telemedicine has arrived, and if you use it to make it easier for your patients to reach you, they’ll thank you for the convenience, likely in the form of repeat visits.

Digital Tours:

Imagine that you’re eight months pregnant and preparing for your upcoming trip to the hospital. Would you want to read directions on how to get there (“Park in Lot B, go to the East Wing, take the elevator to the fifth floor, and proceed through a maze of antisepticized corridors”)? Or would you prefer to click on a series of 360° photos and watch videos with a friendly voiceover that describes where you should go and what the rooms will look like? We’re guessing that you want to see the hospital for yourself rather than just read about it, which is why this video feature can be so compelling for prospective patients.

Videos:

According to surveys from 2021, 84% of consumers reported that they were swayed to buy a product or service after watching a brand’s video. The importance of video marketing continues to rise, and it seems poised to become the preferred medium to replace face-to-face sales in the COVID era of contactless-everything. Since most people don’t trust advertising, it’s probably best to keep your video content pithy and informative rather than over promise anything. Another strategy is to create video testimonials of patients who do trust your services, which people tend to share with each other, perhaps because the unscripted quality of the messaging can feel more sincere than a PR statement that 15 people in a corporate comms department all left their paw-prints on.

Consumer-Focused Content

Pore over vintage medical advertising, and you’re likely to come across the same message again and again: “Buy now.” Focusing on all the wackadoodle products or panacea health solutions of the past—vitamin donuts, the “diet dodge” benefits of sugar, the wonders of amphetamines for weight loss—is easy enough from our historical vantage. Yet what’s just as noteworthy is that while the phrasing may differ, the essential CTA within these ads seems to stay fairly uniform: You, Customer, order this thing from us.

Medical marketing today, which has largely migrated over to a digital context, instead chops up the customer into a hundred psychographic profiles and serves each one behavior-based and bite-sized ads. Yes, you want your customers to interact with your content, but you also need to tweak your content so that its interactive features appeal to the right customer. When healthcare data analysts talk about their jobs, they sometimes describe themselves as experts who cull insights from within “the noise.” That term itself is an insight into the vastness of US healthcare, which accounted for 17.7% of our GDP in 2019 and has been described as “the most consequential part of the United States economy.” That’s a lot of noise, and to cut through it, modern medical marketing needs to feel personalized. 

The customer, then, is no longer that single Customer who’s pelted with buy-now CTAs. Instead, the customer is guided to different content types depending on which stage of the funnel she’s in. If she’s Googling how to find a nearby provider, a banner ad can route her to a hospital’s landing page. If she’s deeper in the hospital’s site and doesn’t know whether her insurance covers certain procedures, an educational infographic can answer common FAQs. Take a look at a few more examples of consumer-focused content strategies:

Beacons:

A beacon is a Bluetooth-enabled device that you can use to broadcast notifications to the cell phones of patients within a certain geographic range of your office—sending them questionnaires, follow-up messages, or reminders about their upcoming appointments.

Marketing Automation:

Take some time to research the best CRM (or “customer relationship management”) platforms on the market right now. Most likely, you’ll want something with the capability to track leads, follow up with customers, or segment your audience according to age and location.

Accessibility:

Adhering to web accessibility standards is not only legal best practice (and just the right thing to do)—it also communicates the distinct message that your services are inclusive. Everyone, you’re saying, is welcome to our practice. Some ADA web compliance must-haves include adding alt tags to images, using appropriate color contrasts, captioning your videos, or providing a text transcript for audio files.

Social Media

The images associated with the word “medicine” are rarely all that inspiring. Surgical lights, microscope slides, lab coats, pills, syringes—it’s hard to move anyone to action when most of the pictures you’re showing them suggest blood being drawn or the human body diagnosed, analyzed, cut open. The old solution to that issue was to show healthy people looking ecstatic about guzzling back tonics or elixirs. Medical marketing today relies more on social proof of the efficacy of a clinic, a new medication, the importance of getting your flu (read: COVID) shot this winter—namely, people, preferably real people, who have gone to said clinic or taken the aforementioned medication or gotten their shot.

You could, potentially, reach billions of patients across social media, and because social is often more about retention than acquisition, you should use it to boost your brand awareness and manage your reputation. To the extent that you can—we realize that HIPAA, rightfully, establishes protections around patient privacy—be sure to tell the stories of the people you serve. Post one of the video testimonials that we mentioned earlier. Open up your accounts to reviews, and pay to boost the most glowing, praise-heaping of those reviews. Just bear in mind that companies can’t delete reviews on Yelp!, but they can change them on Facebook and Twitter. So while you want your social media to immerse your audience into the stories that make your branding feel relatable, it’s also important to choose your platforms wisely.

It’s Business—And Personal

Healthcare marketing has garnered a certain reputation for being outmoded—the last bastion of Yellow Pages ads and the only niche that still thinks direct mail is a smarter investment than email newsletters. All the tactics that we’ve listed above can help your medical marketing efforts thrive in the digital age, but unless your content feels personable, those tactics won’t amount to a heap of asthma cigarettes. Crafting a creative design that assuages people’s worries and leads them to answers that are relevant to them may set them at ease enough to filter out the rest of the noise in this industry and focus on the images that you show them.

The world of digital advertising, in many ways, can be split into two hemispheres—social and search—and the boundary between them is often difficult to discern. You can market content on your social media channels, or you can buoy it up the SERPs (search engine results pages) through SEO strategies—or you can do both. Take this blog as an example. We’ve pushed it out on our LinkedIn and Instagram pages, but we’ve also optimized it with keywords, alt tags, mobile formatting, and sundry other SEO tactics so that it pops up when people Google, “How do I calculate the ROI of SEO?” We dedicate a lot of time to our blogs, so we need to make sure that the energy we’re investing in them gets us the results that we want. Some version of that quandary is on the minds of every other SEO agency, as well: ‘We’re sinking resources into this,’ they’re thinking. ‘What are we getting back in return?’

 

Now, when we say that the map of digital advertising is divided equally into social and search, our geography is, admittedly, a bit skewed. According to recent stats, social only accounts for 4.7% of web traffic, while organic and paid search make up 76%. Social is important, in other words, but it’s important the way a county highway connects outlying towns, whereas search is like the 101 freeway packed with 12 lanes of cars. Social is also more flashy than search. You blast content on social. You plan content through search—which is like the back-of-the-house Michelin-star chef, the researcher making the head litigator look good in the courtroom, the unsung hero and the multigenerational investment. Search is modest and search takes time, but if you do it right, you can reroute that 101 freeway of web traffic to your site.

 

Yet even though SEO strategies do so much behind-the-scenes work for you, this question must be faced: Are they worth it? In a previous blog, we discussed how social media impacts ROI. But how do you measure the return that you get on SEO? Time to get technical.

Measure What You Know

Correlating dollar amounts to SEO initiatives can get tricky—an informed guessing-game, but a guessing-game nonetheless—because the costs associated with them aren’t as clear-cut as PPC (or “pay-per-click”) marketing, where search engines charge you each time someone clicks on your ad. If you’re running paid ads, set up conversion tracking in a platform like Google Ads to figure out how many of those clicks turn into sales, then deduct the amount that search engines charged you from the revenue that you earned. (Tracking sales from products is usually easier than sales from leads, but we’ll unthread those distinctions later on.)

 

Search engines do not, however, charge you for clicks on organic posts, which is why determining how much you’re spending on SEO can be squirrely. But you can tab up how much you’re paying an agency, or the SEO team on your staff, to run your organic advertising. If you’re the client, you’re probably aware that agencies typically charge you per project or on a retainer basis. Dissecting both of these invoicing models into line-items of SEO versus paid costs is pretty straightforward. If you’re the agency, the calculus is more involved, but still manageable:

 

• Ask your employees working on SEO campaigns to track their time per account.

 

• Match the rate that you’re charging your clients for, say, creative, marketing, or web development against those hours.

 

• Figure out the prices of all the SEO tools that you’re using. Our bet is that one of those tools is SEMrush, which you might have to shell out $119.95, $229.95, or $449.95 for, depending on whether you’re a freelancer, an SMB, or a conglomerate.

 

All of these variables—agency, internal, and tech fees—you can add up, plan for, and control. The deeper question is what the numbers mean. Is your unlimited access to SEMrush worth $449.95? Does the SEO agency’s work justify the cost of their retainer? 

 

Our advice is to research a few premium SEO tools and pick the ones that’ll give you the insights you’re looking for. (But, yeah, those tools are worth it.) Keep watch over the SEO results that the agency reports to you, but also give the campaigns they’re handling enough time to mature. The same caveat applies to running the numbers on how many hours one of your web developers is logging versus the results that come in. Comparing the 4.2 hours she worked on a landing page with the 1,619 impressions that that landing page garnered might mislead you into circular reasoning. (Because 1,619 impressions divided by 4.2 hours equals … well, nothing.)

… But Know Your Metrics

Even in creative agencies, the marketing team sometimes gets a rep for merely “measuring stuff.” But think about what they’re measuring—the market, a vast aggregation of products and services and innovations that’s always in flux. Measuring the market is akin to dipping a yardstick into the ocean. Start tracking the search performance for one website, and inside of a morning’s work you’ll have created a spreadsheet with five tabs and 1,000+ columns for each tab. Scrolling through all the numbers can get dizzying, and pretty soon you realize that unless you align KPIs with metrics, you’ll drown in the data.

 

KPIs are “key performance indicators,” and while that sounds similar to metrics, KPIs and metrics are not quite the same. KPIs represent strategic goals. Metrics tell you how close you are to achieving those goals. KPIs span multiple industries—marketing, operations, sales, finance—but some standard KPIs are number of qualified leads, order fulfillment times, dollar values for new contracts signed, or returns on investment. Metrics quantify KPIs, which means you gotta make sure that you’re using the appropriate counter for your goals. So if your KPI is your SEO ROI—sorry not sorry for all the acronyms—figure out which metrics will illuminate that big-tent business objective.

 

Marketers learn in their bygone college days to set SMART goals for their campaigns—that is, goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and bound within a set timeframe. In the work-world, they learn that it’s smart to only unsheath a few yardsticks to track those goals. (Otherwise, you really will measure stuff endlessly.)

 

Choose 2–5 metrics that replicate the consumer funnel—from your audience’s first-touch impression to the final sale—and space them out according to the objectives that your campaign is trying to accomplish. Here are some metrics that you might consider analyzing:

 

• Organic click-through rates, which pinpoint the ratio of users who viewed your post in the SERPs to the users who clicked on it and landed on your site.

 

• Bounce rates track how many people come into your site and then bounce out of it. A high bounce rate tends to indicate structural SEO issues in your web architecture.

 

• Pages per session measures how many of your web pages visitors flip through while clicking around on your site. Unlike a high bounce rate, a high number of pages per session often means that people like your content.

 

• “Conversions” is the oddly spiritual euphemism that we marketers use when talking about sales. If you’re getting the word out about a volleyball convention in Omaha this year, your conversion is likely going to be the number of volleyball coaches who sign up for that convention. Depending on your campaign, though, your conversion might be anything—arborvitae trees shipped, marriage counseling sessions attended, virtual kombucha brewing classes subscribed to, or the number of times readers shared the stellar blogs of a certain San Diego-based agency.

 

Your call on your conversions. But whatever call you’re urging people to follow, if your overarching business concern is ROI, all these metrics should clarify rather than clutter up how much return you’re getting on your investment.

Track Conversions

To keep stretching this metaphor past its furthest limit: The world of marketing conversions itself can be parceled into two hemispheres—“hard” or “soft” conversions. 

 

A hard conversion might be a phone call, an online sale, or someone filling out a contact form. All of these actions show that customers intend to buy from you or are buying from you right now. A soft conversion indicates that they’re interested in you—they download your brochure, they click on your site, they share your content on their social media. They’re not purchasing from you, yet, but they are eyeing you with intrigue.

 

To track conversions with accuracy, you need to adopt a nuanced view of them. Are they intent-based or interest-based? Are you selling products or services? And perhaps the biggest consideration of all: Did you build your site as an ecommerce platform or to generate leads?

 

If you’re in the ecommerce game, tallying up conversions is simple enough. Remember those SEO tools that we mentioned? SEMrush and Botify will serve you faithfully, but get familiar with Google Analytics, too. Once you download it, follow these steps:

 

• Open Admin > View > eCommerce. Click the rather alliterative toggle that lets you “enable enhanced ecommerce reporting.” (Got questions? Consult this guide, or work with a friendly developer about any coding issues that you encounter.)

 

• Click on the “Conversions” tab of your Analytics view and select the insights that you’re interested in—shopping behavior, product performance, product list performance, and so on.

 

• To zero in on data about organic traffic, segment these conversions according to channel. The metric you want to view here is “Revenue.” (Don’t we all?)

 

That metric lets you peer into submetrics like transactions or average order values, which are fairly easy to track in an ecommerce context because the purchase is frequently—though not exclusively—product-based. But even if your business is more lead-oriented, configuring ecommerce tracking can help you gauge how your site is performing with greater accuracy.

 

Now to explore the other hemisphere: Businesses whose primary conversion is lead generation. 

 

Ecommerce sales generally take place on your site, whereas the conversions of lead gen. companies tend to take place offline. That, in large part, is why we walked you through the metrics in the previous section—because the final sale is often the culmination of a strategy of previous touchpoints. But after you’ve aligned goals and metrics, you can still track them:

 

• Once more, open Google Analytics and click Admin > View > Goals. You can choose from a template, a smart goal, or a custom goal. Click “custom.”

 

• You’ll see another toggle for “Value” on the “Goal details” screen. Which begs the question: What is the value of your goal? First off, the values in lead gen. aren’t precise—at least, not in the way that ecommerce merchants can retail sneakers for $15 and multiply that sum by the number of people who buy their sneakers. But what you can do is dig into your historic sales data to figure out what percentage of your leads turn into sales.

 

• Use those insights to take a fearless moral inventory of your operation’s customer lifetime value (or CLV). Let’s say your CLV is $10,000 and your close rate—or the percentage of leads that become customers—is 10%. You might assign each lead a value of $1,000. (That is, 10% of $10,000.) Granted, that’s a rough-and-ready calculation that’ll vary according to your service model and campaign goals, but you get our drift.

 

Let the numbers pile up for a few months. Then parse through the data at your disposal:

 

• Click on Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions. Select “Conversions” at the top of the report.

 

• Tinker with the settings to view a list of conversions across channels.

 

• You’ll be able to look at social, referral, paid—and, yes, organic search.

 

See that dollar amount under the “Conversion Value” column? You’re about to use that number to calculate the ROI of your SEO.

Calculate Your ROI

At long last we arrive at the bottom-line takeaway, the roi of all metrics, the final figure and the thing itself: Your ROI.

 

Once you know how much time and money you’ve invested in your SEO, how your metrics ladder up to your KPIs, and the type of sale that you’re trying to close, figuring out your ROI can seem almost alarmingly simple. Here’s the formula:

 

(Value of Conversions – Cost of Investment) / Cost of Investment

 

Go back to the dollar amount under the “Conversion Value” column in the Google Analytics tabs that we mentioned in the previous section. (This is the “Value of Conversions” number.) Subtract the costs that we discussed in the first section. (This is the “Cost of Investments” number.) Then divide that figure by the same “Cost of Investments” number.

 

So let’s say that, in the last business quarter, the value of your conversions was $250,000 and the cost was $25,000. Here’s how you’d plug and chug those results into the equation:

 

($250,000 – $25,000) / $25,000 = 9

 

To find the percentage of your ROI, multiply the answer by 100—in this case, 9 x 100, or 900%. But because your boss, the project stakeholder, and the board of directors are way more interested in dollars than percentages, the takeaway here is that for every $1 you spent on SEO, you earned $9.

 

An SEO ROI of $9 is on par with recruiting Steph Curry to your pick-up squad or investing in Apple back in 1976—so excellent that it’s unrealistic. The numbers will rarely be this high, and they may even be so low that it’s hard to justify sustaining an SEO budget. To take another, more depressingly real-world example: Your conversions might be valued at $25,000, but you spent $250,000 on SEO in the same month. In that case, the formula would spit out these numbers:

 

($25,000 – $250,000) / $25,000 = –9

 

Multiply your answer by 100, and you can see that you’ve just earned an ROI of –900%, which is enough to put a cold hand on your heart. But that’s the thing about numbers: They don’t lie. If you monitor your SEO investments objectively, you can better strategize how to apportion your budgets to the channels that are performing the best. Without strategy and objectivity, well, stand by to empty your pockets very rapidly.

Adjust Your Attribution Models

All right, we admit it: This entire blog could’ve just been one line of copy—that formula above. “There you have it,” we could’ve said. “Off you trot.”

 

In a way, we duped you. But we blasted on for so long because the insights that the formula yields are premised on the type of conversions that Google Analytics measures. By default, it tracks “last non-direct click conversions,” or the last channel that drove users to your site. Thing is, last-click conversions provide a somewhat blindered view of consumer behavior. Studies suggest that users may need as many as 20 interactions with a business before they convert. So if you’re tracking how they acted during their 20th interaction, you can’t take into account the 1st–19th touchpoints that made them feel comfortable enough to buy from you.

 

Imagine that you’re a luxury resort and you want to find out which channels led your guests to book with you. If you simply track the last PPC ad that piped them to your site, you may not realize that they first saw one of your social posts, then read one of your blogs, then chanced upon some earned media where people raved about the pineapple-beetroot amuse bouche that you serve for breakfast on the patio overlooking the Pacific—before finally seeing that last PPC ad, clicking it, and reserving a room for a weekend getaway. All these other touchpoints (the social content, the blog, the reviews) did their part in urging customers to click on that last paid ad. Which is why another function of Google Analytics, the “Assisted Conversions Report,” can give you a more nuanced view of how your audience engages with your brand than the standard analytics report generally delivers.

 

To view your assisted conversions, click Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions. The screen that appears should lay out a number of columns side by side—including channels, assisted conversions, and last-click conversions. All the channels connect, so this report helps you see how they route users through the slip ’n slide of your funnel and into your site, as well as the dollar value of the connections—rather than just the dollar value of the conversions.

 

Another attribution model to look at is Top Conversion Paths. (Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths.) This report lists the most common channels that your users click through before converting. (Most people get your email newsletter and then type your URL into their browser, for instance. Or they search on Google and click one of your paid ads. Etc.) Other attribution models to consider:

 

• First Attribution: The opposite of last-click conversions, this metric credits the sale to a customer’s first touchpoint with your business.

 

• Linear: Gives equal props to every channel that chutes customers into your site.

 

• Time Decay: Like “Linear,” this one credits every channel for getting customers to convert, but lends more emphasis to the channels closest to the sale.

 

Studying consumer behavior online can get so complex that, in some ways, it’s a doomed endeavor. (How do you plumb the ocean with a yardstick?) But depending on your KPIs, a savvy marketer should be able to analyze these nano-metrics and inform you which dollar values to plug into your ROI formula—even if, ultimately, those values are just one feather off the fowl.

So … What’s the ROI of SEO?

‘Enough with the fancy terms,’ you’re probably thinking. ‘I get how to calculate this stuff. But what’s a good ROI of SEO?’

 

Allow us, once more, to be cagey: Every business is different, so the money that you get back on your SEO will depend on a lot of factors—how much you’ve invested in it, how fiercely your competitors are optimizing their own SEO strategies, how often you’re monitoring changes to Google’s algorithm, and so on. With that said, here are a few guidelines to keep in mind:

 

• Compare different metrics across similar timeframes. One late-night session sussing through troves of data where you accidentally compare monthly investments to quarterly returns can throw your budget into wild (albeit likely temporary) disarray.

 

• SEO takes time. Generally, you won’t start seeing results until 3–6 months. But if you’re still not getting returns after 6 months–1 year, something’s probably rotten in the state of your SEO marketing strategy. (Like the budget you were balancing during that late-night work sess.)

 

• Before you spend money creating new SEO content, optimize the content you have. If your site has 5,000 pages but only 1,000 of them are optimized, 80% of your current content is, digitally speaking, dead space. Monitor your SEO presence so that you can fix any technical issues and rank higher in the SERPs—which, in turn, will elevate the rankings of the content that you produce in the future.

 

So what’s a good ROI for your SEO? The way we’d answer that is by running analytics on your site, researching your target audience, talking to you about your messaging goals, and coming up with a brand development plan that helped lower your customer acquisition costs over time. Reach out today and learn how we can help you chart your course through the world of digital marketing.

To amplify brand presence and build relationships with customers, businesses must push out digital content on a regular basis. That content tends to split into two categories—organic media and paid media. 

Marketers often view organic media as the softer, homespun fare that serves mainly to poke existing audiences with hey-remember-us reminders. (Your hairstylist posting headshots of her clientele post-haircut on Instagram is an example of organic content. So is a New Orleans law firm that blogs about matters of Louisiana jurisprudence.) Whereas paid media—as the name might suggest—costs money, and it’s more results-driven: an investment in reaching new audiences and generating leads and conversions.

A worthy media plan should incorporate both organic and paid, but it needs to be said: Organic is often slower than paid, and it can take a lot of time and tinkering to calibrate what’s working and what’s not. Plus, the average reach of an organic post on major platforms is fairly low, in part due to the complexity of ranking algorithms. (For Facebook, it was 5.5% last year—and it’s on the decline.) Hence the usefulness of paid media, which allows you to target audiences and measure the results of your endeavors more precisely. So if you’ve got some extra money in the budget, here are a few tips on how to boost your brand with paid media.

 

Research Your Audience

Before you go about purchasing ad placement, run some analytics on your target audience—their ages, interests, languages, locations, and spending patterns, to name just a few metrics. Knowing who you’re talking to and which channels they frequent will help you craft your messaging in a way that resonates with them, and gets their attention in the first place.

Let’s say that you’re a senior living company. You can spend as much as you want advertising TV infomercials at 3 AM, but if your research reveals that your primary demographic—an adult in her mid-50s—is clicking around on Facebook at 3 PM, you’ll end up misfiring an entire digital marketing strategy onto the wrong channels.

So figure out how much money you want to spend and set the marketing goals that you want to accomplish, which might include chiseling off people who follow the social media accounts of other brands in your market niche. Serve them paid ads that direct them to well-crafted landing pages that offer subscription or membership discounts sweeter than the competition’s (if you’ve got any, that is).

 

Tailor Paid Media to the Platform

Once you know which platforms your audience is on the most, leverage those platforms’ paid media resources. With Facebook, you can purchase targeted advertising that bubbles up onto users’ news feeds and place your ads across any of Facebook’s portals (Marketplace, Right Column, Suggested Video, or Messenger Inbox). Twitter has its own ads center that gives you the power to fine-tune campaigns so that they drive toward certain goals—promoting offers, boosting your brand awareness, increasing the number of your followers, or getting people to install your app and click around on your site. YouTube’s paid media options might include bumper ads, Google Preferred, TrueView Action and InStream, all of which basically vary according to how long they are and whether or not you can skip them.

If your audience doesn’t spend a lot of time on social platforms, you can also try pay-per-click ads, AKA the blurb at the top of a search results page with a green “Ad” icon next to it. Imagine that Pinterest buys a pay-per-click ad on Google. Each time someone clicks on that ad, Google charges Pinterest. That’s the downside (for Pinterest). The upside is that its place at the top of a search page enhances the brand awareness of the buyer in that transaction, which comes in handy. (When was the last time you clicked past the first page of a search, anyway?)

 

Decide What Needs to be Paid For

In advertising, as in life, just because you’ve paid more for something doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to get what you want out of it. Organic media tends to reach the customers you already have, so if your research shows that you need to expand your reach or increase impressions, paid media it is. But if you just want to create some viral word-of-mouth, launch a campaign custom-made for your existing audiences and let it ripple through the internet.

With all of us isolating in 2020, people have been scrolling through their social channels more than ever. At the same time, many companies have paused their ad spend during the pandemic as cost-saving measures. But ad prices seem to be staying consistent—even becoming slightly cheaper. Point being, if you do want to buy paid media, you probably won’t have to shell out a fortune. Start with an initial budget of a few hundred dollars, see what results come in, and scale up (or down) from there.

 

Convert Organic to Paid

Paid media is an investment, and one way to gauge whether you’ll get a return on your investment is to boost your organic content that’s performing well. Because you already know that people like an ad or a post, the risk here is low—it’s most likely going to do even better with some money behind it—so the real question becomes how to calibrate which posts are successful and which aren’t.

Look at the number of likes a piece of content gets, for sure, but also how many profile views and conversions it leads to, and how many times people have read and reshared it. Tracking who’s responding to your organic media can help you get into the virtuous cycle of sketching ever-more-granular profiles of your loyal customers (ages, interests, languages, locations …) so that you can better target them—and audiences similar to them—as your brand evolves.

While you’re at it, try various iterations of ads on different audiences. (Do 18-year-olds like a post more than 65-year-olds? Do people in cities share it more than their rural counterparts? Why?) Swap around the CTAs, the copy, the design, to test which version is most effective—and to whom. Evaluating your consumers’ preferences will supply even more of the data that you need to achieve a bird’s-eye perspective of how your brand should continue to invest in paid media.

 

Make it Seamless

Running any of the tactics that we listed above can get time-consuming. Overseeing multiple campaigns that interweave a bevy of those tactics can be nearly impossible. So if you can, automate your paid media campaigns. That doesn’t mean you should blast out content willy-nilly. Instead, use tools like Adobe Advertising Cloud or Google Double Click to fire off ads according to a preset schedule and spend a designated amount of money boosting your posts. Automating your content helps it flow out into the world in ways that can get you the results you deserve. After all, you paid for it.

As a brand agency, we dabble in words and images all day, and if we’re honest, the words “life sciences” feel like an opaque block of lettering. That term does conjure up images, yes, but images of pipettes and Petri dishes, laboratory shelves where germs fear to tread, maybe a microscope slide or the title of a 7th-grade exam booklet. Not exactly visions of inspiration or stirring narratives that people love to sink into. The thing is, though, the work that the life sciences sector does makes the rest of our jobs look mind-numbingly dull. In only the last few years, these fine folks have been cloning monkeys, making snow through cloud seeding, and creating a 3D map of the universe. They also found time to develop migraine prevention drugs, and they may have gotten one step closer to identifying universal cancer treatments.

 

The life sciences, in sum, are life-changing. But the public’s never going to care about medical progress or paradigm shifts in biotech if your scientists speak to them the way that you speak to each other—you know, with all that talk about clusters of methyl groups and calcitonin gene-related peptide receptors. (Snooze.) Branding your life sciences expertise, however, can help you speak more directly to your audience, as well as hire the right people, protect your IP, and streamline mergers and acquisitions. So let’s analyze a few of the benefits of branding that can differentiate your company from the competition.

Branding Makes Your Messaging Feel Human

One of the pitfalls that life sciences companies risk stumbling into is that while they excel at developing complex and esoteric technologies—how many people have heard of cell viability analyzers, multimode microplate readers, or laser capture microdissection systems?—they can get so product-focused that they forget about their own customers. True, they frequently sell to hospitals and medical device makers, all of whom have heard of those technologies. But a brand-focused life sciences company that understands the core values it delivers to its customers will likely have a better sense of which of its products benefit patients versus researchers versus their own sales team(s).

 

A company that seems too clinical—even if what you do is by definition clinical—might feel cold and distant to consumers. That impression, in turn, can create a lamp-under-a-bushel effect: You may be helping people recover from debilitating diseases and raising the world’s standard of living, but if no one knows about it, the progress that you’re making is, in some sense, stalled. So shine a light on your operations.

• Promote earned media to spread positive word-of-mouth about yourself.
• Talk to a brand agency so they can talk about what you do in plainspoken terms. (Remember, a buzzword does not a brand make.)
• Start a podcast on the latest trends in your industry. Ever heard of More Perfect or Hidden Brain? They tackle subjects that could be dry—like Supreme Court decisions, or how our personal decisions are rooted in our subconscious—and turn them into fascinating episodes. (People love learning, so pack your episodes full of information, but make them eminently listenable.)

 

All these tactics can help you communicate the emotional tug of why the work that you do matters, which may assist in attracting funding opportunities for healthcare apps, life-saving therapies, diagnostic software—and launching new scientific products.

Branding Speaks to the B2B Space, Too

Sometimes you need to translate jargon into straightforward conversion copy so that the public understands what you do. But sometimes the sale is more intricate—or it’s not really a sale at all. In the previous section, we marketers were telling you scientists how to appeal to a broader customer base. Yet we also recognize that companies often need to speak straight to the scientists themselves. In that scenario, bear in mind who your audience is. 

 

Scientists, you see, are not necessarily interested in bottom line results or benefits-forward language. These are not your WIFM-oriented, instabuy consumer types who got into research to make squillions of dollars. They trust in the scientific method. They view skepticism as a strength. They respond to evidence, data, and optimal test conditions. And they tend to avoid risk, in part because the spigot of grant money is not exactly free-flowing.

 

Point being, businesses that sell protein sequencers or mass spectrometers need to know how to adapt their content marketing to speak to scientists in ways that don’t come across as glib pitches. We’re talking data sheets, white papers, infographics, testimonials from other scientists about the efficacy of a certain product—collateral that feels more faction than fiction. Position yourself as the brand of the scientists, for the scientists, by the scientists, and you’ll be able to create inbound marketing strategies that net results because you respect the emphasis that your niche consumers place on intellectual investigation—rather than on the quarterly report—while they trust you to speak to them on their own terms.

Branding Attracts the Right Candidates

Another perk of branding that merits mention: Attracting the right employees. The life sciences industry has been surging of late, clocking a whopping 93% spike in investment in North America between 2018–2020—from $36 billion to $70 billion. (With 2021 expected to rake in $90 billion in total.) All that capital sloshing around the sector has opened up jobs aplenty for skilled hires—and you need to hire them first, or else another company will.

 

According to stats from 2018, 69% of all job candidates consider an employer’s “brand strength” before accepting a position. So bolster your brand strength as it relates to hiring:

 

• Make the careers page on your site easy to find and easy to read.
• Write job descriptions that convince every individual candidate that they should work for you. Even in these copy-paste times, reusing the same phrases across multiple role descriptions feels lazy. Address professionals like professionals—tell them how they’ll grow their skill-set in each job that they apply for.
• Never keep candidates in abeyance while you review their materials. Sure, making decisions takes time, but if applicants have been through a few rounds of interviews, have the propriety to text or email them with updates. (“Thanks for applying, but this role has been filled.” “Give us a few more weeks to make a determination.” “We’ll keep you in mind for future openings.”) Nearly nothing makes people in a workplace context quite so mad as a lack of communication, so remember that job seekers may consider disappointing news preferable to no news at all.

 

Believe us when we say that the researchers who you’re trying to hire are doing their own research on the companies that want to hire them. They’re reading your Glassdoor reviews. They’re scoping out your LinkedIn presence to make sure you’re real—or even that you’re a leader in your industry. And they are taking a peek into your workplace culture through the lens of your other social media, because they want to see if they’d be a good fit with you. (Even if they bring a wildly different style to how you run meetings or set work hours.)

 

Use your social channels, then, to show what the day-to-day is like inside your company. You don’t have to lead with photos of the staff going to baseball games together or brainstorming over brews and BBQ at somebody’s house. If you’re a corporate culture that takes its upscale-casual dress code seriously, be that corporate culture. If you’re all about data panels and lab efficiency, own it. Your job here is not (exclusively) to market yourself for the sake of lead generation. Rather, it’s to broaden your brand awareness and streamline the recruitment process so that the right candidates find you—and you retain their talents for the long term.

Branding Helps You Claim Your Intellectual Property

As we’ve argued before, branding can help businesses stake out what distinguishes them from their competition. But for life sciences companies, branding can also provide opportunities to safeguard their most innovative ideas and technologies. Granted, anyone who wants to secure a patent has to pass through the labyrinth of filing with the USPTO—and these dedicated public servants do not whisk you to the front of the line just because your brand is better-known than the next applicant’s. 

 

But the larger point is that a brand is a consolidation of your company’s principles and vision. Consumers respond to, say, a logo because it serves as a beacon of familiarity in a market landscape—and the rubber-stamp of legitimacy that guarantees a certain caliber of service. Similarly, investors who see that a brand upholds a portfolio of intellectual property could be more willing to fund the launch of your products. Defining the parameters of your IP can help keep competitors from infringing on your innovations—confusing customers into thinking that it was you who gave them that subpar experience.

 

Finally, branding tends to focus a company’s operations. Life sciences businesses that come out the other end of some soul-seeking realizing that their culture is premised on innovation may be more willing to shift money into R&D. They also may be more inclined to spend on life sciences marketing—informing the public or key industry stakeholders that they were the first to harness fusion, map the genome, or save bananas before they go extinct. (Can you imagine?)

 

Bragging about your accomplishments may get tiresome, but being too humble about your inventiveness can have its own consequences, as well. Ever heard of a “Maurice Hilleman”? No? Well, you should have heard of him, because Mr. Hilleman pioneered vaccines for measles, mumps, chickenpox, hepatitis A and B, and a host of other global viruses. But you haven’t heard of him, because Hilleman—a forceful personality, but a modest man—named exactly zero of his discoveries after himself. According to some estimates, Hilleman’s vaccines save about 8 million lives a year. Yet few of us who take those vaccines realize that he deserves a place in the pantheon of medical history next to the likes of Louis Pasteur or Jonas Salk.

 

Fame isn’t for everyone. But fame can help life sciences companies secure the patents, grants, and copyrights that they need to pay the oncology researchers or environmental scientists in their employ to (for example) save lives or rid our waterways of pollutants. For their sake alone, use your marketing strategy to do some humblebragging.

Branding Plays the Game of Brands

So far, we’ve talked about “branding” as if it were some monolithic structure—a sign above an archway through which employees and customers pass into the stronghold of your company. But brands beget sub-brands, which themselves parcel into mini-brands and smaller products. At first blush, all those org. chart levels might seem like they add up to corporate gigantism and a zeal for reinventing the wheel. Yet a brand architecture, if constructed correctly, can serve as a force multiplier—a few umbrella brands doing the work of hundreds of smaller trademarked brands. In that sense, then, a smart brand architecture staves off business bloat, allowing life sciences companies to group all their products under a few defined categories.

 

Have you ever gotten a letter from an insurance agent that took over the agency you used to work with who bought a new auto policy for you because the old insurers are pulling out of your state—but nobody told you any of that, until you got this letter? In a situation like that, there’s, like, four or five players all swapping around policies, so when you receive notice of these shenanigans, you might feel like someone’s spamming and scamming you. Well, you might feel similarly weirded out when you encounter a strange brand that’s tied to a larger brand who you’re kinda-sorta familiar with. ‘Who owns who, who’s selling me what, and how do I know they’re legit?’—customers are wondering this all the time. That’s why big brands make it easy for them to understand their brand architecture (or, at least, they should).

 

The FedEx Corporation owns FedEx Express, FedEx Ground, FedEx Freight, FedEx Custom Critical, and FedEx Trade Networks. That setup’s known as a “branded house,” where the firm (in this case, the FedEx Corporation) is the brand. Consumers see “FedEx” in each sub-brand and think, ‘Okay, it’s FedEx, so it’s not a scam, and each of those subsets is a different wing of their operation.’ But Procter & Gamble—an international life sciences company—errs on the side of a “house of brands” organizational approach, as they own a range of products like Tide and Bounty and Pampers that aren’t stamped with Procter & Gamble’s brand design. Shoppers might not know that Tide has a parent company, but once they realize who that parent company is, they’ll think, ‘Okay, it’s P&G, so it’s not a scam, and each of these subsets is a different wing of their operation.’

 

Brands put their houses in different orders depending on the objectives they want to achieve. Branded houses tend to be more sound when the company name is well known. (“Google Mail / Google Play / Google Drive / Google Hangouts” or “Amazon Fresh / Amazon Alexa / Amazon Prime / Amazon Kindle.”) Whereas a house of brands is built to mitigate risk in certain product areas—since those products are often better known than the company name. (“Procter & Gamble” sounds like something staid and official that you’d see in a headline about the NASDAQ. “Tide” is laundry detergent. Most of us recognize Tide better than P&G because we all do laundry, but we don’t all have money parked in the NASDAQ … or have any clue how it works.) 

 

Here’s our point to all this: Branding should be important to life sciences companies because it controls sprawl. P&G owns Tide. Tide offers multiple products. But no matter if we’re talking about Tide Berry Blossom or Tide Spring Meadow Scent or Tide PODS Coldwater Clean, those products are all grouped under one trademark.

 

Can you imagine the logistical nightmare of filing trademarks for hundreds of products across a portfolio of 20 sub-brands? Can you envision the cost of maintaining trademarks for every product and ensuring they were using the correct one for each piece of marketing collateral? And can you conceive of the confusion and the gnashing of teeth—the legendary vituperation of the public—that you’d be subjecting yourself to? You’d need that migraine prevention pill on the market yesterday to steel yourself through the behemoth headache that awaits you.

 

‘Ah, but this quandary doesn’t apply to me,’ you may be thinking. ‘We’re one of those small life sciences companies that only has one brand.’ You might be right about that now—but the life sciences is quite the acquisitive sector. You know what we’re talking about: Johnson & Johnson recently bought Momenta Pharmaceuticals. Merck recently bought VelosBio. Biotech startups are getting hoovered up, too, and mergers and dealmaking just seem to be how business is done in this industry. C’est la guerre.

 

Whether you’re the buyer or the buyee, merging with someone else will be a lot easier if both parties have already done all of the brandwork involved in defining their values and deciding which departments or service levels or even the more intangible aspects of their cultures should be integrated and which should be scrapped. You’ll save money now on the market capital of your brand value—and you’ll save money later if customers continue to trust in a newly acquired brand because its personality has stayed consistent even under new ownership.

Branding Equips Companies with Tools

The tools at the disposal of a life sciences company—robotics that improve precision surgery, or maps of patient genome features that help personalize medicine—may appear to be the diametrical opposite of the tools that a brand agency uses, the images and words that we wield all day. But those branding tools can help stencil forth the spark of invention that excites you about your own work, showing the world the vividness of your insight and imagination. We love working with pathfinders and visionaries, so reach out to us today and let’s chat about your brand. Who knows? It could be vital to your success.

The art of good business, it’s often said, is the art of being a good middleman. That maxim applies to ecommerce, which gives online vendors a platform to sell virtually anything—and sell it virtually. Amazon, the tallest, most imposing ecommerce presence in the world, largely makes its money as the retailer who can get you everything from a Nicholas Cage pillowcase to the newest Nicholas Cage movie (which seems to come out every two months). They didn’t stitch the pillowcase. They didn’t direct the movie. (They certainly didn’t act in it.) They’re the people who get you the product. The middleman.

 

The problem for middlemen appears when other middlemen get a reputation as more reliable, or more appealing, middlemen. Amazon is a known quantity. So is Alibaba. So is Walmart. But these are multibillion-dollar conglomerates. As we’ve pointed out before, the competition among smaller ecommerce merchants is intense, in part because even if your products are wildly superior to your competitors’ products, what often sways consumers is not the quality of the thing they buy, but the experience they have buying it. Inhabit the viewpoint of a customer strolling through a digital mall. (Which, in many ways, is what the internet has become.) Why should said customer stop at your online brick and mortar, as opposed to your neighbor’s, especially if your neighbor’s shop is more fun and easier to wander through than yours?

 

To stand out in the ecommerce world, you should be doing more than fulfilling a strictly intermediary function, valuable as that product-to-market hinge is. No, you should be building a creative branding experience that your customers can enjoy. Here’s why it matters:

 

You Make a Great First Impression

People know within fifteen seconds if they want to stay on a website or bounce out. A lot of managers decide whether they’re going to hire a candidate between five to fifteen minutes after the interview starts. Images are impressions, you see, and those impressions sway choices. Your ecommerce identity is no different.

 

Look at our site. The hero module features a video of athletes sprinting and lifting weights and doing pushups, while the brand palette incorporates a vigorous dosage of red—a color often associated with energy, movement, boldness. We made those design decisions because we want to attract clients who like to work with a fast-paced agency that’s not afraid to reinvent their brand. Since that’s the experience that we want to give them, that’s the first-glance, fifteen-second takeaway that we want to impart upon them.

 

So think about what first impression you want to convey, and make sure that impression matches up with what it’s like to work with you. Let’s say you’re an autumn aficionado who’s selling PSL-themed everything—cinnamon-scented brooms, porcelain pumpkin bowls, leaf wreaths galore, a “Happy Fall, Y’all!” tchotchke or three. Your site should feel like it’s nestled inside the Hudson Valley in late October. Appeal to your customers’ senses. Tap into their emotions. If you’re selling fall, your ecommerce creative should swaddle your audience in a flannel blanket and plunk them down in front of a bonfire. If you’re doing skincare, think soft tones, floating petals, luminous hydrating masks. You get the idea. Build your ecommerce platform so that people are intrigued enough to keep perusing your (metaphorical) aisles.

 

You Improve Your ECX and UX

Looking at the header for this section, you might be forgiven for wondering, ‘What is this noxious alphabet soup that I’m smelling?’ Allow us to define terms: “ECX” refers to “ecommerce customer experience,” and a lot of the tips that we gave about branding in the previous section touched on ECX. But the principles of ECX are founded on UX (or “user experience”), a discipline that urges web designers to build sites so that navigating them feels seamless and intuitive, like gliding along on cruise-control.

 

The distinction that we’re drawing here is between aesthetics—your site’s cozy hearthside glow—and functionality, or the ease with which your customers can find the information that they’re looking for. You know how you land on Amazon, and a few clicks in, your cart is full and you’re proceeding to checkout? Do as Amazon does.

• Make the copy and design simple, but effective enough to move people to action.
• Delineate prices, delivery timelines, product specs and categories, and so on.
• Offer customers a bevy of payment options—debit or credit, subscription services, layaway and pre-purchasing options—and this above all else: Make the checkout process easy.

 

The goal of your branding is to optimize your platform for your users’ convenience. Sure, people love fall, and they’ll love the panorama of red and gold trees that light up across your hero images like discs of stained glass. But none of that matters if they get lost in the pumpkin patch and can’t find their way back to the cash register. The trick, then, is to twine aesthetics with functionality. Give your customers all the information they need to learn why a product or service benefits them—but also let them bounce along on a hay-ride of style and panache that treats them to a view of the whole autumnal horizon.

 

You Foster Brand Evangelism

Now that you’re taking a bird’s-eye perspective of your market landscape, ask yourself this: What’s the point of someone coming to your site in the first place?

 

See, we’d argue that the consumer funnel isn’t really a funnel. Ideally, it should look like an hourglass, balanced upon a base of retained customers who purchased from you once and continue to come back for more. Marketing-speak has a tendency to find religion when it talks about this stage of the sales process. We advertisers bat around terms like “conversions,” “audience loyalty,” “brand evangelism,” “the end of the customer’s lifecycle,” and the rest of it. (In a phrase: “Brand evangelists infuse their marketing message with passion.”) Kinda weird? Kinda weird. But, in a way, it makes sense: You’re asking people to believe in you. 

 

“This moment,” you’re saying to them—“this is not where the journey ends, but where it begins.” Your task now is to build communities of followers (without making it feel cultish). So keep in touch with the customers who have just bought from you:

• Post announcements and updates on your social channels.
• Build live messaging functionality to answer questions from on-site customers.
• Send out surveys after you closed a sale to gauge feedback on what people liked about your site and service (and what they did not like).
• Email newsletters to your subscribers about seasonal promotions. (Even though, yes, we all wish it was fall year-round.)

 

We’ve already talked about designing your site to be user-friendly. Now pair that strategy with making your branding customer-centric. After all, brands that prioritize customer service rake in 5.7 times as much revenue as their competitors who “lag in customer experience.” So listen to what your customers are saying about you. Create communities where members can swap tips and share content across your channels. Let them advocate for your brand, and invest in boosting the rave reviews that they post about you—the earned media and organic buzz that make evangelism powerful rather than proselytizing.

 

You Can Connect With Your Customers

So far, we’ve led you down the primrose path of immersing your site visitors into a curated experience and making your platform customer-centric. But we’d also recommend developing tactics around this strategy, too: Personalizing your ecommerce position.

 

Being customer-centric is not the same as being personable. The former answers questions and absorbs criticism and presents a “How can we help?” shining morning face to the world. The latter establishes rapport with people. Granted, this type of talk can veer into squishy platitudes about making the customer your friend. But all we’re trying to say is that companies have a propensity to sound more company-like as they get bigger. They trot out milquetoast nostrums rather than saying anything of substance, all in the service of appealing to everyone and fortifying their bottom line. Too often, though, the effect of playing it safe is that they blend in, which is an excellent way for the non-Amazons of the world to shrink into obscurity.

 

You shouldn’t (necessarily) make controversial statements to get attention, but you do need to be memorable. 

• Write witty copy that makes your customers laugh. 
• Take every opportunity to thank them and address them by name. 
• Come across as an approachable, knowledgeable human, rather than a PR statement. 
• Surprise your subscribers with shipping or return policies that feel like they’ve been designed for their convenience (which, as it happens, they have). 

 

And now prepare yourself for a hard left turn: Do some research on them.

 

This last point may seem paradoxical—pairing a people-first approach to branding with a data-driven segmentation of consumer profiles. But those right brain-left brain modi operandi really form one mindset: An ecommerce entrepreneurism that feels real and relatable, and a digital shop equipped with AI that anticipates the customer’s needs. 

 

In case you haven’t been keeping up, ecommerce personalized marketing has become quite sophisticated. Modal pop-ups, dynamic content blocks, aggregating top referral traffic sources by cohort—it all sounds so technical, like the distant drone of a 12th grade calculus class. But those terms add up to Stitchfix sending you outfits tailored to your style choices, or Netflix recommending movies based on your viewing preferences.

 

People sometimes complain that algorithms get things wrong, and here’s a tip for you: Algorithms get things wrong. Your marketing strategy will, too. But ponder that issue from the other direction: Would you prefer that Stitchfix not handpick the scarves and sweaters that your purchase history indicates you want to wear this fall? Would you rather that Netflix adopt a more sink-or-swim attitude to your moviegoing selection? Let’s be honest: You would not. And let’s give them credit: At least they’re trying. So as a rule, treat the people who frequent your shop as individuals with idiosyncratic tastes and you’ll have a better chance of making them feel like they’re getting an experience from you that they can’t find anywhere else.

 

You Can Scale Up

In many ways, the point of forging an ecommerce brand is to stake out your market position and then grow that position. The expert consensus—and the commonsense conclusion—is that better customer service improves sales, because branding defines your values and sharpens your identity. Once people know your brand, they’re more likely to buy from you. Once you know your brand, you’re better equipped to expand its parameters in ways that make sense for your business—offering a new service line, taking stances on social issues, or deciding which other companies to partner with or become an affiliate of.

 

Here’s the thing: Any middleman can open an eBay account and start selling leaf blowers and fire pits. But a customized brand experience makes you unique. Without it, you blend right in, like a nutmeg-scented candle on an autumnal mantelpiece.

Even in these digital times, construction often remains one of those word-of-mouth industries where people find contractors through friends or neighbors who recommend the company that remodeled their garage or tiled their bathroom. “I’ve got a guy,” or, “They do a good job, and it’s very reasonable”—you hear that a lot, and we salute you if your construction business has earned a strong rep around town. But before you build anything else, you need to build a digital marketing strategy to put that word-of-mouth praise into hyperdrive online. 

 

About 3.6 million construction companies currently operate in the US, and despite the toll that the pandemic took on building projects, the number of construction businesses has grown around 2.7% per year between 2016–2021. Since you drive bulldozers and operate cranes in all manner of weather, the work involved in advertising yourself might seem like a gratuitous side-project. But rest assured, your tech-savvy competitors have already launched their own promotional campaigns, and you need to recapture the business that they may be poaching from you. So allow us to rattle off some proven tactics on how to market a large construction company.

 

Build a Website

Construction is also one of those industries whose services customers seem to have a tough time evaluating. Can’t anyone jackhammer a driveway? Does it really take an expert to mud drywall or install windows? The answer is that builders are skilled tradesmen, but non-builders don’t always remember that until we witness the horrifying consequences of shoddy oversight, like the collapse of the Surfside condo in Florida last month.

 

So use your website to show how your company guarantees quality. Our agency dedicates a bulk of our site to the projects we’ve done—including for construction companies—so our prospective clients can see the caliber of work that we’ll deliver for them. Do the same on your site. 

• Add a Gallery page and fill it with photos of the kitchens you’ve renovated that you’re particularly proud of—the ones with marble countertops and subway tile backsplash and soul-seeker-blue cabinets that light up in the morning. 
• Write an About Us page that introduces your staff and conveys your brand personality. (We’re sure that you’re lovely to work with, but as far as most clients are concerned, businesses are guilty until proven innocent. Remember: The collapse of the Surfside condo.)
• Include testimonials of clients who swear that you really are lovely to work with. 

 

Oh, and don’t forget to list your services. Have you ever scheduled a contractor from Lowe’s to survey your backyard so that you can chat about the patio of Pennsylvania bluestone that you want to put down only to learn, five minutes into the chat, that Lowe’s doesn’t do patios? That’s annoying. And you do not want to annoy your customers.

 

To be fair, though, that miscommunication is probably the customer’s fault, because Lowe’s has included on their home services page a list of UI-friendly icons showing everything they can do to your home, from building a new fence to adding deck railings to replacing your doors. Just no patios. Make a similar list on your site, because customers need to know whether you’re the people to contact if they want solar panels installed on their roofs or their toilet snaked. (Both of which, mind you, are worthy services.) 

 

And how do they contact you? Make your address and phone number easy to find, and integrate a form where they can drop a question or schedule an appointment any time.

 

Create a Real Brand 

All those tips we just gave about launching a website? That’s only the starting point—the nuts and bolts of getting noticed online. Anyone with a Wix account or a middling knowledge of WordPress can fire up a website. The bigger challenge is creating a brand.

 

When we say “brand,” we’re not talking about making a logo on Canva. Yes, a logo is important, but a brand goes way deeper than stylescapes and a color palette. Your brand is your company vision, the expression of your deepest values. To consolidate a professional brand, you’ll want to talk to a digital marketing agency with web design expertise who can …

• Run a technical audit on your digital identity.
• Map your customer journey and site architecture.
• Develop a media plan and write a brand standards guide.
• Track the right metrics to understand how your SEO impacts your CRO.

 

If that sounds like fancy jargon, it kinda is, so allow us to translate: We help you figure out your construction marketing strategy so you can distinguish yourself from your competitors. 

 

Construction projects can range from, say, a $10,000 bathroom remodel to skyscraper projects in New York priced at $15 million per floor. With all that money at stake, any client, from a homeowner to a C-suite board, will want to make sure that the construction company they hire is at the pinnacle of professionalism. Our job, then, is to boost your SEO with certain tactics—producing content, optimizing for mobile, incorporating backlinks, adding metadata and alt tags—that help clients find you in an online search.

 

Finally, we’ll build your site to embody your workplace culture, making it easy to navigate and topped off with a polish that’s a few steps up from a Wix account. A modern digital presence can impart the legitimacy on you that you need to win a construction project, be it a bathroom remodel or one of the giants of the Shanghai skyline.

 

Embrace Social Media

Those photos of the renovations you built with teak pivot doors or Capiz shell chandeliers that you put all over your website—put them on your social media, too. 

 

The day-to-day work of construction is a sweaty morass of paint-streaked shirts and rooms stripped to the studs and muddy craters gouged out of the earth where a foundation is about to be poured. But the end-result of all that work is often a layout worthy of a magazine cover, or a trove of posts on Pinterest and Instagram. Those two platforms are particularly well-suited to showcase shots of poolsides bordered with blue agave, hotel lobbies walled with backlit quartzite, Toronto clubs filled with imported palm trees—or makeovers of frowzy starter-homes turned into flipped-and-furnished beauties.

 

So put your artistry on display. Since sites with video content are 53 times more likely to land on Google’s first search results page, include how-to videos, footage of your team at work, and before-after montages that make the case for why you’re worth hiring. Upload those videos to YouTube. Open a Facebook account. (1.5 billion users, anyone?) Make sure all your channels connect. And don’t ignore LinkedIn. 

 

Your prospective clients frequent all types of social media, but you may have a better chance on LinkedIn of getting the attention of the decision-makers who vet bids and proposals for lucrative projects. To make your presence felt on that channel, host webinars, share your content, and follow or comment on the posts of the vendors who you want to partner with.

 

One last thought on flaunting your work: Build interactive experiences at construction trade shows where your audience can put on a headset and visualize, quite literally, what it would be like to walk through a courtyard that you designed or a foyer that you refurbished. Even if you don’t have a developer on staff or you’re not familiar with 3D software, check out solutions like Amazon Sumerian that help you create browser-based AR and VR applications.

 

Share Your Thoughts

So far, we’ve suggested launching your site, championing your brand, and showing off your work. That digital strategy will make you competitive in your market. But to stand out, you need to attract your target audience with commentary on the latest trends in your field. 

 

Consider writing a blog where you answer questions about construction that your potential clients are probably wondering: “How much does a new fireplace cost?” “Where’s the best place to site an office building?” “Should I do electrical work myself?” (See—there are three topics to get you started. And, no, don’t mess with electricity. Hire a pro.)

 

Research what your audience wants to know, and then establish yourself as a resource that they can consult, because resourcefulness is a close cousin of credibility. As you know, reliability and trustworthiness are of paramount importance in construction. Your clients are trusting you to replace a load-bearing wall in their living room with a steel beam—that is, to replace it correctly—or to bolt together the skeleton of their skyscraper. How do they know you won’t botch the job? (Read: Surfside condo.) 

 

Writing blog content gives you the opportunity to demonstrate your depth of knowledge in the area of construction that you specialize in. One well-written piece of content can impress those decision-makers on LinkedIn, setting their minds at ease that you are the company competent enough to handle their multimillion-dollar contract.

 

Run an Email Newsletter

One extension of your blog that you should consider launching is an email newsletter. Granted, email may be hovering above the cultural abyss. (73% of millennials report that email is their preferred mode of business communication, but Gen Z abhors email as woefully outmoded.) Still, for every dollar that you spend on email marketing, you usually get back around $38–$44. That’s a high return on a relatively small investment in time, because if you developed a social media presence or started a blog, a lot of content that you’ll produce can spill over into your newsletter.

 

One of the benefits of email newsletters is that people who sign up for them are often qualified leads, since they want to hear your latest thoughts on a regular basis. So divide your subscribers according to the audience type that’s relevant to your digital marketing strategy. 

 

You might target leads based on their location or budget. You might write one newsletter for someone who wants to build a tiny home, and another newsletter for someone who wants to build a warehouse. Research the platforms that you can use to automate your email campaigns—managing your contacts, customizing your messaging, A/B testing what’s working (and what’s not)—because that list keeps growing every year.

 

Optimize a Google My Listing Page

Remember how we mentioned that construction companies often get business through flattering word-of-mouth? That’s true, but that word-of-mouth is so much easier to drum up if you’ve got a Google My Business listing. 

 

Assume that potential clients all around you are Googling, this very moment, “best large construction company near me.” If you don’t pop up in their search, you’re more or less ushering a sizable swath of business that you could be attracting right into your competitors’ funnels. And as far as search engines are concerned, you’re invisible. 

 

To help clients find you, sign into Google My Business. Add the name of your business. Enter your location. Fill out some contact info (phone number, web address, area code). Click “Yes”—and “Finish.” You’ll have to verify that it’s you and claim your business on Google, but all this should be the work of an afternoon. 

 

As we’ve argued before, you also need to … 

• Optimize for Local SEO

Follow this sage advice no matter how large a construction company you are, because construction work is so intrinsically un-remote. (You can outsource web development to programmers in Bulgaria, but the worker replacing ban boards or sistering in new joists needs to be on-site—ergo, local.)

 

• Encourage Reviews

Even if the reviews you get are sometimes snarky, they round out the appearance of a full-service business that your customers need to see in order to feel assured that you’re real. After all, consider their viewpoint. They Google “best large construction company near me.” Your Google My Business listing pops up, along with two of your competitors. All three of you have a website, a logo, a map marker, but you don’t have a phone number. Or you don’t have photos. Or you stripped away your reviews. Anything that’s missing, or that feels amiss, may cause people to think that you’re hiding something, you’re hedging, you’re being coy—all of which is bad for your bottom line. So use Google My Business to be as visible and accessible as possible, keeping the entryway wide open for consumers to fall into your funnels.

 

Extend Your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

As any long-suffering homeowner knows, the real cost of a house isn’t the mortgage—it’s the upkeep. Things, as they say, fall apart. The bay window leaks, the first floor is sagging in, the basement needs a French drain, the roots of the 80-year-old oak tree looming above your roof are breaking up the driveway into dinner-plate-sized chunks. Just when you think it’s all fixed, you discover that another crack is winding its merry way through the plaster. And that’s the need-to-have stuff. The nice-to-haves are endless. Want to wire up your garage and add a hot tub behind it? That’ll cost you money, as will every single other project that you want done.

 

All these rolling maintenance and renovation fees, they apply to larger buildings, as well, only on a much grander scale. Which is why, if you’re a construction company, you need to think about extending your customer lifetime value and charging clients to fix up or work on those homes or office towers that you built for them. 

 

Please don’t take that “charging clients to fix up” line to mean that you should run the Kansas City Shuffle on them, laying down slipshod work and re-billing them for repairing it. Quite the opposite. We’re just pointing out that buildings, no matter how snugly constructed, have a pesky tendency to auto-generate their own to-dos. So it makes sense to be available to mend and patch and rewire anything that goes ga-flunk in the night. Because no matter whether you’re living in the Upper East Side or in a double-wide, something always breaks.

 

So stay in touch with your past clients. Call them a few weeks after you wrap up a project. Use your email newsletter to check in on them, offering to finish upkeep tasks that keep them safe and up to code. Who knows? A good relationship with one customer might lead to a glowing review or more referrals and—you may have heard us mention this before—positive word-of-mouth.