How to serve your customer’s immediate needs while still sharing your brand’s greater purpose

If you are simply focused on the nuts and bolts of selling, you may be missing an opportunity to build a meaningful brand that will elevate you above the competition. Sharing your larger vision can set your Life Science company apart.

Of course, people come to your Life Science website to do business, so properly navigating visitors to product/service information is a priority. Yet, even more critical is that ALL visitors understand why your brand matters. Every visitor should leave with a clear idea of what your brand stands for and how it delivers on its promises. Brands that focus too much on selling without telling their story run the risk of becoming just another vendor.

Here are 3 ways to share your Life Science organization’s unique value while still funneling customers and potential customers through your virtual sales cycle:

1) Meet, greet, and direct

According to the Nielsen Norman Group, if your Life Science website doesn’t capture your audience’s interest in the first minute, you’ve probably lost them for good. A strong positioning statement that defines your offering and your unique value up-front is a good way to share your vision while also getting and keeping their attention. Swiftly directing them to the information they need is a close second in importance. Here’s how to pull these best practices together:

Meet
Consider how many times you’ve visited a website looking for a service or information only to find something completely different than you expected. Having a strong positioning statement that meets your customer at the door is a powerful way of saying, “Welcome. You are in the right place to find what you need.” This statement represents your homepage headline, and it should clearly state what you do and for whom. For more on life science brand positioning, check out this recent post: Great Taglines Stem from Strong Brand Positioning. Here, you’ll find the basic structure for creating your own positioning statement too.

Greet
Being in the right place and being in the best place are two different things. New visitors may wonder if they should be checking out someone else’s site instead. Before they do, tell them what makes your Life Science organization different from the others, so they don’t feel the urge to roam.

What makes you different? Your brand vision. What your organization is hoping to achieve through the work it does, and how purposefully it focuses on those goals. This information can be a part of your headline or it can be a subhead that further explains why you do what you do.

It may seem more efficient to forego this type of aspirational copy and get down to brass tacks, but without it, you are on par with any another product or service provider. By sharing your brand’s values, you give your audience something to connect with and more reason to keep exploring.

Direct
The majority of users leave a website when they don’t know what to do, so smart navigation is always a top priority. Rather than using your headline and subhead to route users (and wasting an opportunity to meet and greet), you can rely on good design to create a virtual way-finding system. Whether that means color coding information by user type or using images that help a visitor identify their area of interest, clever design choices can solve a multitude of navigational challenges and ensure customers move through your site as quickly and efficiently as possible.

2) Share your values on every page

The vast majority of content on your Life Science website will be product, service or benefit-focused, but at least one element on every page should speak to your organization’s larger vision.

Conveying what motivates your staff to get up every morning is an emotional driver that puts a human face on your brand. Visitors may not know they care, but they do. No one wants to do business with a company they don’t trust or feel connected to.

Sharing your core mission and values can be as simple as placing a well-crafted tagline on each page or as sophisticated as combining emotional photography with customer testimonials.

To successfully carry your vision through a website, you have to have a well-defined brand voice and tone. After you have solidified a positioning statement, your organization should create a document that outlines the personality and point-of-view your brand wants to convey. This positioning should permeate every page of a website, giving visitors a consistent feeling whether they are on the home page or a product page.

3) Use CTA’s that fulfill your customer’s needs and reinforce your brand mission

Every page of a website needs a call to action to help encourage visitors to keep moving through its pages and content. Ultimately, you may want them to contact someone at your organization, but just asking them to do so will be largely ineffective. Instead meet them where they are in the buying journey and provide the information and resources they need to make decisions.

More effective than asking a visitor to contact your company (which may be premature) is inviting them to access premium content, such as a video about changes in the marketplace. You can then capture their email if they accept, giving you the opportunity to nurture the relationship. If you are positioning your brand as an industry expert, offer white papers, tools and other resources that they must set up an account to access.

In order to create content that works this hard, you need to know exactly who your target audience(s) is, and what they might need to successfully reach their goals. When you put a website visitor first, they are much more likely to become a return visitor, and, even better, a loyal customer.

Approaching website content in this way gives your brand a chance to “walk the talk” of its mission and values. For instance, if you position your Life Science company as a proactive partner, you need to BE a proactive partner by offering guidance, insight and information without asking for anything in return. This is how you can create trust and do business in a way that you can be proud of.

Conclusion

There is a business purpose for sharing your Life Science company’s vision. It is the basis of building a sustainable life science brand and creating a loyal customer base. When looming sales goals are a priority it may not feel as critical as telling potential customers all about your products and services, but over the long-term life of your brand, it will be critical for staying ahead of your competition.

To learn more about defining your target audience so that you can create content more purposefully, check out my post Using Marketing Personas To Engage Your Life Science Audience.

Other related posts: Making Your Website Visitors Feel Like They Belong