Our founder and Chief Creative Officer Kat Arney has a trouble-shooting guide for growing life science companies that know they need to sort their communications and PR out, but aren’t sure where to start.
“We need to sort our marketing out.”
“We need to do more comms.”
“The board says we need to do PR.”
I hear variations on these phrases all the time from overstretched leaders in life sciences. Usually, it’s because they’ve arrived at a moment of pressure or change: a fundraise or pipeline announcement is coming up, a new product is launching, competitors are rising up, or the board keeps complaining about a lack of visibility.
The obvious response is to start doing… something. Anything.
Stick a flurry of posts on LinkedIn then run out of steam and ideas. Put a press release, or two, or three, on your website. Start a blog or a podcast, post twice and give up. Or fire up the AI slop machine to produce a mountain of generic content.
But “We need more comms” is a feeling, not a diagnosis. And leaping straight to tactics before you understand the underlying problem is a very effective way to burn through time, money, and your will to live without getting the results you need.
Run through these questions to discover where your real problem lies – and, more importantly, how to fix it.
Problem: You don’t know where to start
For any life science company – whether you’re purely R&D-focused or selling products or services – your communications need to support your company strategy, not ego, anxiety, or the whims of your most annoying investor.
Are you trying to support a fundraise? Build visibility and confidence with potential partners? Attract new hires to scale the team? Create demand ahead of a product launch or promote an underused service? Establish your credibility as sector leaders or stake out an entirely new scientific field?
At First Create The Media, we use our 5 Qs of Comms framework to turn business strategies into strategic communications frameworks, using some these five key questions in this order:
- WHO are you trying to reach? Define your target audience(s) as specifically as you can (and no, “everyone” is not an audience…)
- WHY should they care? Nail your positioning by digging into their motivations and problems, and articulating why you are the solution.
- WHAT do you want them to know, feel and do? Communications should raise awareness, spark engagement or inspire action – ideally all three – otherwise they’re just noise.
- WHAT do you need to tell them to achieve that? Develop a coherent messaging framework that clearly explains who you are, what you do, how you’re different, and why it matters for each of your core audiences.
- HOW are you going to reach them? Decide on the channels, activities, content and cadence that will reach your audience with these messages, based on the budget you have available.
You should also decide how you’ll recognise success too, focusing on meaningful changes in awareness, understanding, engagement or action rather than simply counting how much stuff you put out or focusing solely on vanity metrics like follower counts.
If you can figure out the answers to these questions, then you’ll have a pretty solid communications strategy to start working with. (And if you need some help doing that, you know where we are.)
But if you’ve done that work and something still feels like it’s missing or not working, read on.
Problem: People don’t understand what you do
If investors, partners or prospective customers struggle to explain what your company does and why it matters after visiting your website or hearing your pitch, you have a messaging problem.
This doesn’t mean dumbing down the science. It means making deliberate choices about what each audience needs to know, translating complexity without sacrificing accuracy, and connecting what you do with why it matters to them.
Developing a messaging framework starts with going back to the 5 Qs and getting clear about what each of your target audiences needs to understand, why they should care and what you want them to do next. Identify the small number of messages that matter most, organise them into a clear hierarchy and support each one with credible evidence.
Don’t stop at simply describing what your technology, platform or service does: explain what that means for your audience and how it makes them feel – whether that’s confident, reassured, excited or ready to act. (This post about our Features to Feelings framework explains how we do this.)
Your messaging framework should be obvious on your company website and other channels, and give everyone in the company a consistent story to draw from. Until that is clear, creating more content will simply spread the confusion further.
Problem: People don’t see why you’re different
Delivering precision medicine. AI-enabled drug discovery. Your preclinical research partner. Patient-centred innovation. Yeah, you and everyone else.
Life science websites are full of bland phrases and buzzwords that look impressive but say very little – something that seems to have got significantly worse in the era of AI. If your competitors could paste your copy onto their own homepage without anyone noticing, you have a positioning and differentiation problem.
True differentiation rarely comes from finding a cleverer way to describe the same broad ambition as everybody else.
It comes from being specific about what you do differently, why you have chosen that approach and how it creates an advantage or solves a problem for the audiences you want to reach. That might lie in your scientific insight, technology, data, business model, development strategy, team or the particular problem you have decided to solve.
Start by looking honestly at the competitive landscape. What are other companies claiming? Which themes and phrases have become meaningless through repetition? Where are competitors genuinely strong, and where is there credible territory you can stake out and own?
You then need to connect these points of difference to something your audience values. A technically impressive platform technology or large dataset is not automatically a meaningful differentiator: explain what it enables, what problem it removes and why that matters to an investor, partner, customer or patient.
Finally, prove it. Support your positioning with data, publications, patents, partnerships, clinical progress or other concrete evidence. Which leads us on neatly to the next issue.
Problem: People don’t believe you
Credibility is the currency in which life science companies trade. As the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So the bigger and bolder your claims, the more evidence people will need before they believe you.
This is a particularly tough problem for companies working on highly innovative technologies, or in fields where there have previously been issues with scientific or social acceptance, such as psychedelics.
Credibility comes from avoiding excessively hypey language and telling a strong story embedded in data. Back up your claims with robust scientific evidence, be honest about what has and hasn’t yet been proven, and don’t skate over inconvenient uncertainties. And if you don’t have the evidence you need to support an important claim, work out how you’re going to generate it.
This doesn’t mean hiding your light under a bushel. If you genuinely have the biggest dataset, the most advanced platform, or the best-performing technology of its kind in the world, say so! Just make sure you can easily show people the data when they call you on it.
Problem: You aren’t getting through to the right people
You’ve nailed your positioning and have a messaging framework to be proud of, but it feels like nobody is listening.
Now is the time to consider your tactics, from PR to online content, LinkedIn or other social media, newsletters, podcasts, videos, events (attending, speaking or running your own), partnerships and more.
Picking the right mix depends on your audience and objective. Investors, pharma business-development teams, and scientists do not all discover and judge companies in the same places.
PR and media outreach can be extremely valuable for providing independent visibility, building authority and helping a company become part of the conversations that matter. Media coverage is also a valuable source of external validation that can strengthen the online footprint that helps AI search engines understand and recognise your company.
But PR cannot rescue a non-story, sell complex science that nobody understands, manufacture a meaningful difference that isn’t there, or compensate for a team that has not agreed what it’s trying to achieve. And one burst of coverage will not build sustained awareness that sets you up for future success.
Nor does “more PR” automatically mean “more press releases”. PR works when you have something genuinely newsworthy or a useful expert perspective, and when it is relevant to the journalists and publications you approach. There’s also good mileage in pitching for interviews and features, or writing your own thought leadership articles for relevant outlets.
At some point you may also need to consider paying for attention. Things like LinkedIn boosts and ads, paid advertorial features, newsletter placements, and conference sponsorships all have their place (and their price). Set a budget and spend it wisely so you get the most bang for your buck.
Problem: You know what needs doing, but it never gets done
Sometimes the diagnosis is refreshingly straightforward: bandwidth. You have plenty of things worth saying, but everyone is too busy raising money, developing the science, speaking to partners or customers, or keeping the company running to go out and say it.
Milestones go unmarked. The website hasn’t been updated since the Queen was alive. Your company LinkedIn page still shows the Christmas party as the most recent post, while the CEO is completely MIA. And your board are still asking why the company isn’t more visible.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard overstretched CEOs, BD leads or marketing managers confess, “I know we should be doing this, but I just don’t have time.”
Delegating it isn’t necessarily straightforward either. Your science is complex, the claims need careful handling, and you don’t want to spend hours correcting someone who doesn’t quite understand what you do. It feels quicker and safer to do everything yourself – right up until the point you realise that means nothing gets done at all.
Even using AI doesn’t seem to help much. It still takes time to plan what you’re going to do, think of ideas, create decent prompts, edit what it spits out so it doesn’t sound like generic slop, and then put it out into the world. And if you’re just putting out unedited generic slop, you’re running a massive risk with your credibility, and I will judge you accordingly.
The same goes for PR. You may have a genuinely important milestone and be perfectly capable of writing a press release about it, but do you know which journalists might care, how to reach them, and how to pitch the story so it gets their attention? Sticking the news up on your website (when you get around to it) and hoping the right people stumble across it is unlikely to do the job.
You need people who can understand the science, capture the thinking in your team, exercise sound editorial judgement and reliably turn good ideas into high-quality work. Crucially, you need to trust them to get on with it without creating even more work for you.
Out of bandwidth? Here are five comms and marketing solutions for growing life science startups – find out which one is right for you.
Need help “sorting your comms out”?
Of course, you may recognise more than one of these problems – most growing life science companies do.
Strategy, messaging, differentiation, credibility, awareness and bandwidth are all connected, and weaknesses in one area tend to undermine the others. The important thing is to diagnose what is really getting in the way before leaping into more activity.
First Create The Media brings together strategic brains, scientific understanding and creative skills to help innovative life science companies develop impactful communications and content strategies, along with the extra bandwidth to deliver them. Drop us a line to see how we can help you.