Bio Technology Web Design and Development

Biotech Marketing and Website Design

Biotech companies are at the forefront of cutting-edge technologies that often influence our lives in profound ways. Staffed with the brightest minds and latest tools, bio-technology firms are discovering, inventing and innovating at a furious pace.

So why are so many biotech websites so bad?

Bio technology web sites are often terrible because biotech companies are not usually founded by marketing experts, graphic artists and web development professionals. Biotech companies are founded by doctors, engineers and scientists passionate about their field and highly focused on their company's vision. And just like so many other industries, bio tech companies will often assign the an inexperienced junior staff member to "deal with the website" while often expending marketing budget on traditional ways of marketing, including colorful print ads and product catalogs.

But biotech companies with awful websites may be missing out on a very important and potentially large audience: those seeking to do business with them.

Great Websites Have A Lot In Common

A great biotech website has the same ingredients that any solid web presence enjoys:

• A clear explanation of what the company makes or does
• A clear value proposition
• A frictionless sales funnel
• A understandable and flexible navigational structure
• Clean XHTML and CSS
• A beautiful design

Unfortunately "design" is usually the most obvious element and the one aspect on which every person at the company feels comfortable weighing in. But web design is not a single subject. Esthetics, while inarguably important, play a lesser role as compared to the effectiveness of the communication, the value proposition and the sales funnel.

Let Your Best Prospects Find You

In order for a website to be effective, it must communicate with the client base and potential client base of your company. The order in which these things happen is important to note -- your prospects must find you, and you can help them by "finding" them first.

You find your clients by doing market research. Fortunately most biotech companies have already identified their potential business prospects or at least, the ones they know about. The other interesting clients are the ones they don't know about. In many industry verticals, this latter audience is by far the largest (if you already know there are only two or three possible potential buyers for your product you're probably not reading this!) We often note with interest that businesses identified as "competitors" by our clients are frequently invisible on the web.

So how do you go about helping your potential clients to find you? Integrate your market research into your website. Then let your potential clients find you via a search engine.

Fortunately for new biotech companies looking to make a big splash, very few biotechnology companies bake their marketing research into their website. With a fairly modest effort, a new biotech company can often quickly dominate their chosen niche online.

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A Day In The Life of Biotech On The Web

Let's take a simple example. Search on "cancer diagnostic kits" in Google. The first few search results which just appeared in my web browser were as follows:

1. A biotech company's web page
2. Two press releases on medicalnewstoday.com
3. One press release on bizjournals.com
4. A biotech-related FAQ on faq.org
5. A biotech company's product web page dated 1992(!)
6. A spammer website

You might think that the biotech company in position #1 was staffed by some smart cookies -- however, the biotech company's web page was blank. You can blame Google for many things but they are pulling the most relevant results based on their sophisticated search algorithms. The problem is more basic: there's just not much in the way of relevant biotech search results. A great many bio technology companies are missing out on an incredible biotech marketing "gold rush" since in many cases their competition is not doing much either.

The fact is that many biotech companies are not using the web effectively and their websites often contain broken, hard to search (Flash websites are difficult for search engines to penetrate), irrelevant or out-of-date information. Savvy new biotech companies who develop effective web presences can leapfrog over competitors who have been around for years.

So You've Been Found, Now What?

The next biggest mistake in online biotech marketing today is the confusing, out-dated or ineffective layout and design of their website. Some biotech websites put forth tedious Flash, Silverlight or other graphic animations (animations are still an effective way for web designers to sell web design jobs!) to make a splash but unless they are communicating information, animations are a waste of time. Thus even if a biotech company's website is found, the potential client has precious little idea of how to engage or worse, is potentially annoyed.

It's time to go back to Marketing 101: Make it easy for your prospects to do business with you. Your website must make it clear to your potential clients:

• What you have to offer
• What makes you different/better/special
• How to contact you

In the mid-2000's "dive level" was a web marketing term that meant how many clicks and/or pages your prospect had to traverse in order to contact you. A dive level of one meant that your contact form was on your home page. This was considered ideal for quick Business-to-Consumer retail or other generic consumer engagements.

A dive level of one is often not well-suited for a professional Business-to-Business (B2B) biotech prospect engagement. Informing and to some degree vetting your potential client is usually the best way to start a conversation that leads to a sale and an ongoing business relationship. The B2B biotech audience is often busy, quite bright and require a healthy dose of information before making even a casual inquiry. The proper web architecture to engage a B2B biotech prospect is a clear path to the information in which they are interested, an appropriate amount of detail followed by an easy-to-use contact form -- just what we mean when we use the term "frictionless sales funnel".

Biotech Marketing That Means Business

Don't allow your biotech company to make a bad first impression!

Request A Quoteor call us today at 800.309.7298.

Let AET help make your bio tech firm a runaway success! Simply request a quote using our convenient online form, give us a call at 800.309.7298 or send us an email at info@acceleratoret.com.