Too much to do and no time to do it? Our Head of Creative Lauren Gray shares the signs that your life science comms & marketing has hit the bandwidth buffers.
You know that feeling when every job is urgent and important, your to-do list breeds overnight, and you’ve rewritten the same sentence four times in different styles but none of them quite hit the mark?
Congratulations — you’re officially out of bandwidth.
Whether you’re a biotech startup founder wearing all the hats, a busy BD lead that’s been landed with all the communications, or a marketing manager leading a heroic but overstretched team, the symptoms are strikingly similar.
Every day feels like another missed deadline. Each post or piece of content is scrappy and rushed or gets held up in endless signoff, rather than being something to be really proud of. And there’s never quite enough time, headspace, or hands to get back on top of it all.
Here, we’ll walk you through the telltale signs you’ve run out of bandwidth for your life science communications and marketing efforts, and what you can do about it.
1. Everything is on fire. Always.
Everything always seems to need doing yesterday. Launches. Events. Announcements. Maintaining your blog and LinkedIn.
There’s no buffer, no breathing space, and every task feels like a mini crisis. You’re constantly sprinting, but never quite getting ahead. That creeping sense that things could be better if only you had more time — but that time never materialises, because you’re straight on to dealing with the next inferno.
Every life science marketer expects to be busy. But there is such a thing as being too busy, especially if it’s causing you to be less productive overall.
Listen out for: “That’ll have to do – just post it already.”
2. Everything feels boring
This is the opposite problem. You’re not running on fumes, you’re on autopilot.
You’re powering through everything on your to-do list: the regular blogs, the social posts, the newsletters. But it’s all starting to feel samey. Safe. Predictable.
Maybe you’re relying on AI to get everything done in time, and it’s becoming generic and soulless.
You know the playbook, but not how to stretch beyond it. And it’s getting harder every month to know what you should be talking about and make it look eye-catching.
Face it: you’re out of ideas.
You’ve hit the limits of creative, rather than physical, capacity – and your falling engagement rates are the proof.
Listen out for: “Does anyone know what we should be talking about this week?”
3. The great idea graveyard
You’ve got plenty of brilliant ideas, but none of them are seeing the light of day.
That blog post you’ve been meaning to write for ages? Still a working title. That campaign concept? Still floating around on Slack.
This one’s especially common for small teams and founders. You know what you want to say, you just don’t have the time, structure, or ownership to make it happen.
The list of “yeah, we really should do that” keeps growing — and the guilt right along with it. You don’t have a content problem, you have a delivery bottleneck.
Listen out for: “We’ve been meaning to write that blog since 2022…”
4. Split-personality syndrome
If your LinkedIn sounds like a party, your website reads like a PhD thesis, and your pitch deck feels like it belongs to a different company altogether, you have an identity crisis.
This happens when there’s no clear agreement on the company messaging and branding, and nobody taking overall responsibility for sticking to it.
Maybe you worked on that kind of stuff a few years ago. But priorities change, your company focus shifts – and before you know it, nothing really sounds like you any more.
The result? Inconsistent branding, incoherent messaging, and a team that’s never quite sure what ‘good’ looks like anymore.
You know a proper refresh and realignment across all your channels is long overdue (and it’s staring you in the face every time you open your website).
But you don’t have the time to think about how you’d even make a start, let alone finish the job.
Listen out for: “The website doesn’t really explain it very well – can I just send you some info?”
5. You can’t see the forest for the KPIs
You’re cranking out pdfs of your case studies but nobody’s clicking.
Sending out yet another press release on the wires for the sake of ‘news flow’ even though you’ve got nothing new to say.
Spending hours posting on X because one of your NEDs suggested it, even though it drives zero traffic to the website and the only person that ever interacts with you is an empty account with no profile picture and the bio “just vibes.”
As the saying goes, “Insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results.”
It’s not that you’ve stopped caring about what you’re doing, you’ve just run out of space to lift your head up and think strategically about why you’re doing it.
Just as your messaging needs to evolve and change as the company grows – and the world around you changes too – so does your comms and marketing strategy.
If only you had the time to sit down and figure out where you ought to be directing your efforts and know how to get the most bang for your buck.
Listen out for: “We agreed last year we were going to do all this – we can’t stop now.”
Capacity + capability = bandwidth
We’ve given you some of the common scenarios we see when clients come to us having hit capacity in their life science communications and marketing efforts. And while it looks slightly different every time, the patterns are the same.
Maybe it’s the founder trying to write a press release or marketing brochure at midnight, or the research scientist struggling to create sparkling website copy without any guidance on messaging and tone of voice.
For growing life science product and service providers, it’s trying to do everything — PR, events, content, social media — with a handful of stressed-out people and a spreadsheet, while ‘Work on comms and marketing strategy’ gets pushed back into next quarter yet again.
Bandwidth isn’t just about having the capacity to deliver all the communications and marketing activities on your to-do list. It’s also about having the creative and strategic capability to make sure that everything you do is coherent, credible, and focused on your company goals.
Even the most capable teams hit a point where the to-do list outruns the skillset. You need enough hands and brains to plan and deliver an efficient, effective life science communications and marketing strategy.
Not having enough of either isn’t a symptom of failure. It’s a sign you’ve grown.
So, what can you do about it?
If you’re reading this thinking, “Yep, that’s us,” you’ve got a few options.
Option 1: Clone yourself. (Tempting, but ethically questionable.)
Option 2: Keep pushing and hope the chaos sorts itself out. (It won’t.)
Option 3: Get help. The kind that adds capacity and capability.
That’s where we come in.
At First Create The Media, we’re the hassle-free plug-in extension to your overstretched life team.
We bring the strategic brains and the extra hands you need when you’re stretched thin, flexing around busy periods like conference season, product launches, or team changes. And because we’re steeped in life sciences, we really understand your story and we get it right first time.
Here’s how we’ve helped teams move from firefighting to focus:
- For teams running on autopilot: We’ve come in with a fresh perspective, running story workshops to help them rediscover their voice, reconnect with business goals, and inject creativity back into their content.
- For idea-overloaded teams: We’ve helped turn great intentions into structured project plans, prioritising what matters and taking on the production so things actually happen instead of staying stuck in limbo.
- For those struggling with staying on message: We’ve created impactful narrative and messaging frameworks so that everything — from the website to LinkedIn — finally sounds cohesive and purposeful again. And we’ve brought in our brilliant design partners to give everything a professional polish.
- For teams stuck in reactive mode: We’ve helped them build coherent content plans and delivery rhythms that stop the last-minute panic and restore breathing space for creative thinking.
- For the gaps that need filling: We’ve brought in design, copywriting, project management and strategic expertise as needed, without the overhead of a full-time hire or hassle of hunting for another agency.
If you can’t hire us (yet)
If now is really not the right time, or you simply can’t afford to bring in extra help, here are a few small changes that can make a big difference:
- Revisit your messaging. Before creating more content, set aside some time to make sure everything ties back to clear goals and audience needs. Who are you actually trying to speak to? What are their pain points? How do you solve their problems? And what do you want them to know about you?
- Cut the ‘nice-to-haves’. Do fewer things, better — not everything, everywhere, all at once. Look at the analytics across all your outputs, focus on what’s really going to move the needle for you, and cut the rest.
- Build a simple monthly rhythm. When it comes to comms and marketing, consistency beats erratic spurts of activity every time. Block out time to plan and batch content in advance so you’re not scrabbling for ideas at the start of every week. It builds trust and helps you look credible and professional.
- Protect strategic thinking time. Schedule it like a meeting. (Because it is important, no matter what your never-ending to-do list tells you.)
- Make the most of what you’ve got. Check out our Chief Creative Officer Kat’s smart tips on using the 3 Rs – Reduce, Re-use and Recycle – to make your life science content stretch further.
And when you’re ready to swap spinning plates for steady progress, we’ll be here. Extra brains. Extra hands. Zero drama.
OK, we might be a little biased. Of course we’re going to say the solution to your problems is hiring us! But this is exactly why First Create The Media exists, so if you relate to this post then we’d love to chat about how we can help.