Our Head of Creative Lauren Gray digs into the three pillars that underpin our approach to life science comms and marketing: credibility, differentiation and awareness.
At First Create The Media we’ve worked with nearly a hundred innovative life science companies and research institutions, helping them figure out who they’re talking to and why anyone should listen, then clarifying their message and getting it to the audiences that matter.
Over the years, we’ve spotted the same pattern coming up again and again. No matter what their size and stage, or the exact details of their work, these organisations need to achieve three things with their communications and marketing: Credibility, Differentiation, and Awareness.
Do your science and strategy stand up to scrutiny? What makes you stand out from the competition? And how do you get the right people to pay attention at the right time?
Every piece of content, every media campaign, every conference talk, every LinkedIn post should be supporting at least one of these (and ideally all three). If it doesn’t, it’s just noise – however well-written or nicely designed.
That’s the framework. Sounds simple in principle, but surprisingly hard to stick to in practice.
Here’s what each element really means.
Credibility: the operating currency of the life sciences
Trust is the foundation on which successful life science companies are built. Demonstrating that you’re credible and legitimate – scientifically, professionally, and commercially – is how you build it.
Credibility signals include your website and messaging, your team’s presence on LinkedIn, your scientific presentations and publications, and your external media coverage. They include whether your sales, pitch or BD decks tells a coherent story, or force people to work too hard to figure out what you’re offering.
It also includes the quality and visibility of your thought leadership, and how clearly everyone in the team from the CEO down can explain the company’s vision and strategy.
Credibility operates on multiple levels simultaneously: scientific credibility, commercial credibility, operational credibility, and the personal credibility of your leadership team. They’re all connected, and a weakness in one bleeds into the others.
The phrase we keep coming back to internally is this: the data do not speak for themselves – we must speak for them.
Great science still needs clarity of context, a compelling story, and consistent communication to have an impact.
That’s true whether you’re selling a product or service, fundraising, hiring, or trying to attract a strategic or commercial partner. And it’s increasingly essential in a world where having a coherent digital footprint affects how AI systems and search engines surface and represent you.
Life science communications and marketing that build credibility aren’t flashy PR puffery. They’re clear, consistent, and grounded in real data and truth.
Differentiation: what’s your special sauce?
The life science ecosystem is full of companies that sound remarkably similar.
AI-powered drug discovery. Revolutionary platform technology. Transforming precision medicine. Your trusted preclinical research partner.
We see this kind of generic language everywhere, and it’s understandable where it comes from. Companies focus on describing what they do rather than explaining why it matters, fail to focus on customer needs, and lose sight of what makes them genuinely different.
The result is communications and marketing that could belong to any of twenty competitors – something that the current tide of generic AI slop isn’t helping to solve…
Differentiation is about building a narrative that is both memorable and believable, that enables you to stand out from the crowd. Those two things matter equally. Memorable without being believable is hype. Believable without being memorable is boring.
The best differentiation comes from the science itself. When we worked with Scripta Therapeutics, the narrative – flipping the script on drug discovery – wasn’t invented by us to make the company sound cool (although of course we think it does!)
It came directly from their underlying scientific rationale of treating disease starting from the underlying biological dysregulation, rather than the usual target-down approach.
In turn, this speaks to their value as a company with the potential to find drugs that genuinely move the needle for patients by modulating biology, not just treating symptoms.
That’s always our goal, whether we’re working with an R&D biotech startup or an established life science product or service provider: find the angle that makes their distinctive ‘special sauce’ obvious and understandable to the people who need to know.
This is also why we also work with our clients to help them find and tell the boldest possible true story about who they are and what they’re doing.
Not the safest story. Not the most hedged, caveated, worried-about-being-seen-as-showing-off story. The most compelling story that they can absolutely back up with evidence if they were called out on it, clearly articulated in a way that shows why it matters and how they’re different from the rest of the herd.
Awareness: getting the right people to pay attention at the right time
Awareness is simple in concept: do the right people know you exist?
For R&D companies, this has direct implications for fundraising, hiring, partnerships and other opportunities.
For life science product and service companies, it drives pipeline, category dominance and long-term growth.
The first mistake is not being clear on who the ‘right people’ are. There’s a reason that every piece of comms and marketing work we do starts with the question, “Who are you trying to reach and why?”
Getting your audiences nailed down – as well as clarity on why they should be interested in hearing from you – is essential. And, as a brief reminder, ‘everyone’ is not an audience.
The second mistake is assuming that ‘awareness’ just means putting out press releases or posting content on LinkedIn.
A strategic communications plan should be integrated across all relevant channels, which could include your website content and social media, media outreach (a.k.a. PR) and thought leadership, newsletters, events and conferences, paid advertising and more.
The key word here is relevant, by which we mean aligned to your audience and their goals, as well as your own. An oncology biotech is unlikely to find their next Series A investor by posting on TikTok. And a massive PR push for a software platform is a waste of money if you’re not actually ready for people to use it.
The final error is treating awareness as a switch – something you turn on ahead of a fundraise or launch and then turn off again.
Awareness compounds slowly, through repeated exposure and consistent activity. That’s why the Rule of Seven (the idea that audiences typically need multiple touchpoints before they engage or act) matters so much in practice.
For a growing life science startup at the Series A stage, strategic awareness looks like a sustained LinkedIn presence, regular thought leadership, consistent media engagement, and an active conference calendar.
This is why isolated, one-off marketing activities so often underperform expectations. A single brilliant piece of content or press release can be genuinely impressive and still achieve very little momentum in the long term, because it’s not connected to anything that came before or after it.
The goal isn’t trying to do ‘everything, everywhere, all at once’, or putting all your effort into one big push that fades fast. It’s showing up repeatedly in front of the audiences that matter, with a consistent message they’ll recognise when they see it again.
How credibility, differentiation and awareness work together in life science marketing and communications
Credibility, differentiation and awareness are the three essential pillars of life science communications and marketing. And like the dials on a complex machine, each can be ramped up or down, but the effects are interconnected.
Maybe you’re an early stage R&D techbio company with a truly innovative technology that almost seems too good to be true. Dial up credibility by leading with your data and seeking external validation.
Perhaps you’re a life science product or service provider losing traction in an increasingly crowded market. Stand out by steering away from generic language and leaning into your areas of specific expertise, where you can confidently show how you move the needle for your clients.
Then take a strategic approach to awareness that clearly articulates and reinforces your positioning, and see how the effects compound.
Strong thought leadership builds credibility. Clear differentiation makes thought leadership more memorable, and memorable things spread, which in turn grows awareness. Greater awareness amplifies credibility signals, because people trust companies they’ve encountered before. And so on.
Struggling with your life science communications and marketing? Ask yourself these four questions
Whether you’re an R&D startup seeking funding or an established life science product company, when you’re starting to plan out your comms and marketing activities ask yourself:
- How do we build credibility with our audience?
- Are we giving people a reason to choose to buy our product or service, or invest in us, or work with us, over another company?
- Do we know whose attention we actually need to attract and how we reach them?
- And does our messaging connect to what we’ve already said, and what we’re going to say next?
If you can answer those questions clearly, you’re on your way to having a coherent communications and marketing strategy that helps you achieve your goals. If you can’t, it might be worth pausing and getting some expert help.
At FCTM, this three-part CDA framework sits at the heart of how we think about communications for life science companies, from early-stage biotechs finding their narrative to scaling organisations trying to stay coherent as they grow. If you need help showcasing your credibility, standing out from the crowd, and making sure the right people notice, get in touch.