Our founder and Chief Creative Officer Kat Arney explains the framework we use to develop effective life science comms and content strategies, and create content that lands.
Picture this. I’m on a call with someone from a research organisation who has just spent the last twenty minutes explaining the new platform they’ve built and all the things it does. The problem? Nobody is signing up for it.
Clearly the solution is to do more comms. Can First Create The Media help?
“It sounds great,” I say, diplomatically. “But who is this actually for, and why would they give you money to access it?”
A pause.
“That’s a good question.”
A longer, more uncomfortable pause.
“We hadn’t really thought about that.”
***
It’s an extreme example, but many of the life science companies that come to us for help with their communications and marketing are suffering from some form of the same problem: a lack of clarity about who they’re trying to reach and why they should care.
This manifests as unclear or boring messaging, no clear call to action, and a lot of time and energy wasted on communications and marketing activities that don’t deliver results.
Hiring an expensive brand agency to redesign your website is a frustrating waste of money if they don’t get the messaging and copy right. Sending out a press release every week is a fast way to lose journalists’ attention if you haven’t got a story worth sharing. A podcast is broadcasting into the void if you haven’t worked out who it’s for and why they’d listen.
So before we embark on any activity, whether it’s developing a communications or content strategy for a new client, rebuilding a website, creating a white paper, or even just drafting a simple blog post like this one, we run through five questions.
We call them the 5 Qs of Comms, and they go like this.
WHO are you trying to reach?
Identifying your audience is the non-negotiable first step of any comms and marketing activity. And no, “everyone” is not an audience.
We define it as “who do you need to reach to achieve your business goals?” (Sometimes I frame it as “who do you need to reach to make your dreams come true.”)
For a startup looking to land their next raise, WHO might be Series A investors hunting for ROI who’ve sat through more forgettable pitch decks than they can count. Or maybe it’s pharma partners looking to fill a gap in their pipeline.
A service provider’s WHO could be biotech CSOs searching for solutions that make their work easier, better, faster or cheaper – or ideally all four.
And for a research institute making the case for a further five years of grant funding, the audience is the people holding the purse strings, as well as the taxpayers or donors that provide the cash.
While it’s easier to create big buckets – for example, “medium-sized biotechs”, “cancer researchers”, or “big pharma” – the more tightly you can define your audience, the better your comms and marketing will land.
WHY should they care?
This one shifts shape a little depending on what you’re building, and needs to be tailored to your audience and business goals too.
For an R&D-focused startup talking to VCs, you need to articulate why your innovation needs to exist and why your company is worth investing in.
A research charity raising funds needs to show supporters that their donations will contribute to progress against a disease they care about.
Maybe you have a product or service that increases confidence in a big decision somewhere on the journey from the lab to the clinic. Or maybe you offer a single platform that replaces five others and saves a serious amount of time and money.
The angle of the question changes, but articulating what’s in it for them, and why you’re the ones to deliver it, stays the same.
WHAT do you want them to know, feel and do?
Effective communication can change minds, evoke emotion and inspire action. Yet plenty of life science comms and marketing still reads as flat and forgettable, with nothing telling the reader what to do next.
We work through this with our Features to Feelings framework, which helps life science companies move beyond simply listing features, to show how they solve their customers’ problems and why they’re worth paying for.
Another thing to remember: every communication or marketing asset should have a clear next step or call to action. You’d be amazed how often that gets missed.
WHAT do you need to tell them?
This is about nailing down the actual messaging and making sure it’s clear and consistent for each audience, and coherent with your broader company messaging and brand.
This could be top-level brand messaging architecture, from the company tagline and descriptor downwards, or detailed messaging for a single product launch. It also feeds your content strategy: identifying a few key themes (the accuracy of your tech, ease of use, and great customer support, for example) and agreeing what you consistently say about each one, backed up by a shared set of facts that everyone in the company uses.
And the importance of clear messaging comes down to each individual piece too. A LinkedIn post, a tech note, a blog, a podcast episode: the question is always the same. What’s the one takeaway message here?
HOW are you going to reach them?
Now we get on to tactics and detailed plans. We’re talking channels, cadence, budget, spreadsheets and calendars — all the fun stuff that people usually jump to first. In our framework this comes deliberately last, because none of it means much until the first four are settled.
This is where you pick the channels, activities and cadence that will actually reach your audience within the budget you’ve got, not chasing every platform because everyone else seems to be on it.
Start by finding out where your audience already spends their time and how they prefer to get information, whether that’s LinkedIn, trade press, conferences, webinars, email, or some mix of all of them. Geography matters too: is this a local, national or international audience, and how much of your reach needs to happen online versus in person at events and conferences.
This also means thinking about how your content shows up in AI search summaries and overviews, not just traditional search results, so it’s worth structuring and publicising your content with that in mind.
We’ll talk more about this in another post, but the most important thing to know is that quality, not volume, is what really matters. Creating original, data-led cornerstone content then repurposing it across your channels is the way to do this – not churning out generic AI slop. And third-party mentions from media coverage or genuine users are worth more for your visibility than your own content, so shouldn’t be overlooked.
Once the big channel decisions are settled, the more detailed planning follows: your content calendar and your events plan, built around the dates and campaigns that matter to your business.
Going from business goals to comms strategy
Working through the 5 Qs in order tells us what our clients are actually trying to achieve, then shapes the strategy, messaging and comms plan that gets them there.
We’ve used versions of this framework since the very earliest days of First Create The Media. It’s been refined along the way, but the aim is always the same: getting clarity on who you’re trying to reach and why, what you need to tell them, and how you’re going to reach them.
Need help figuring out your own answers to the 5 Qs? Get in touch. We’re always happy to talk it through.