By Rich Glew
Launching a new life sciences technology solution is a significant undertaking in addition to your ongoing marketing activities. Growth companies need to establish a foothold in the market for the product or service and quickly gain traction with potential buyers and influencers, and early adopters. With proper planning, you can position your market presence solidly and set your new offering up for success.
We see five key elements of a successful life science technology: knowing your market, publishing a launch plan, defining clear positioning, producing engaging content, and measuring the results.
1. Understand your market and your customers
Well before the launch, it’s important to deepen your understanding of the target market your product is intended to serve. This includes understanding how well the new or updated product addresses customer needs and the shortcomings of what they’re currently using. Traditional market research often includes surveys, interviews, and focus groups, while digital tools unlock details about how buyers conduct online research about new products to enable tailored interactions. Both types of data are critical for understanding the market.
Working closely with a small number of key accounts to evaluate pre-release software delivers early feedback on product quality, references for other interested customers, and can help you produce testimonials and case studies to utilize in the launch activities, as well as an advisory board providing feedback on deployment and adoption.
Social media is now an essential component of market research as these platforms provide unfiltered customer feedback on your product or company, while also providing a mechanism to monitor competition. Similarly, healthcare industry events and conferences are forums for gauging customer interest through technology previews and learning about emerging solution categories.
2. Create a launch plan
Launching a life science tech product is not a one-day event; instead, launches begin well in advance and extend for months after the formal announcement. We refer to this as a “rolling thunder” launch approach because an effective technology rollout requires a cadence of announcements, major customer wins, and case studies to generate momentum. The plan should build upon learnings from the market research and clearly define the initiative’s objectives, timeline, and budget. The plan also includes a promotional strategy, articulating how to engage with customers using advertising, social media, email marketing, and public relations outreach.
3. Define new and differentiated messaging
A thorough understanding of the target market informs a detailed messaging framework to serve as the single source of truth for your product or offering. In writing the positioning, define your product’s unique value proposition, identify differentiators, and explain how it solves customers’ persistent business challenges. Keep in mind that the product group usually describes the technical capabilities of the new product, so product marketing is responsible for speaking to different buyer personas about practical benefits to customers. Those benefits may include faster time to insights, integration with multiple life science data sources, higher performance, customizable deployment, and more.
4. Develop compelling content to drive awareness and interest
To increase the likelihood of a successful launch of your life sciences tech product, you’ll need to connect with potential customers through engaging content. An omnichannel campaign leveraging one or more launch events, email marketing, paid and earned social media, a refreshed website presence and SEO, webinars, and other activation strategies maximizes reach and uncovers opportunities.
5. Measure progress and make adjustments
Finally, it’s important to measure the success of your launch. Begin by setting up key performance indicators (KPIs) — specific, quantifiable metrics such as the number of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) generated by launch activities, the number of companies evaluating the product, and the number of early adopter customers that adopt the product within months of general availability. These success factors help you assess whether the new solution is resonating with your target market. Effective tracking of launch performance enables data-driven changes to sustained launch marketing tactics, captures customer feedback to improve the product in future iterations, and signals the return on investment (ROI) of the launch’s impact on your business.
Ready to launch?
Launching a new life science technology or data product is complex, but product marketing can simplify the process and improve outcomes by developing a deep customer understanding, creating a comprehensive and “rolling” launch plan, and building immersive content that communicates the benefits of the product. Rebound experts work with you to create and implement an insight-driven strategic plan to distinguish your product from the pack and set up your sales team for success.