According to Hubspot’s 2024 State of Marketing Report, 15% of marketers struggle with generating traffic and leads.
While I don’t have specific figures for the life sciences industry, the number of my subscribers citing lead generation as their main challenge suggests that the percentage is much higher in this field. This makes sense because targeting scientists — our primary audience in life sciences — is particularly challenging from a marketing perspective.
Lead generation has been one of my main focuses over the years. As a media operator at Labiotech, I constantly need to attract new subscribers to engage with our content. The advertising campaigns we run for our clients are also designed to generate leads for them. And now that I’m running my own one-man agency, I also need to generate leads to find new clients.
Lead generation is in everything we do in marketing, and in this article, I’m going to walk you through the basics of setting up your own lead generation engine.
What is lead generation?
The goal of lead generation is to open a communication channel with a potential buyer. The easiest way to do this is to collect personal data, such as emails or phone numbers, in exchange for valuable information like a report or a newsletter.
While there are more sneaky ways to acquire leads (like buying entire lists and bombarding them with emails), for the sake of quality, I’ll focus only on leads generated with the consent of the potential buyer. After all, these are the highest-quality leads.
Lead generation is crucial for any business because, ideally, leads will eventually turn into customers.
Although we often associate lead generation with digital marketing, leads can also come from in-person interactions at conferences or from someone seeing your ad in a magazine.
It's important to understand that leads evolve over time, becoming more “qualified” as they learn more about your brand and products. The path they take from simple awareness to buying is what we call the lead funnel.
How does lead generation work?
We usually compare lead generation to the image of a funnel:
Leads enter from the top of the funnel (unqualified) and will move to the bottom as they become more qualified. The best way to “capture” leads (i.e., collect their data) is by sharing valuable information and attractive offers, often referred to as “lead magnets.” In exchange for these, people are usually willing to share their personal data and allow future contact.
The top of the funnel is wide because you will attract a large volume of contacts through your marketing activities, but only a fraction of those who show initial interest will eventually become customers. As you move down the funnel, the number of leads decreases, but their quality improves — they become more likely to convert into customers.
We typically divide the funnel into five stages to better understand each conversion step:
- Lead: The contacts at the top of your funnel. Every marketing activity you engage in should contribute to this step, so it’s important to always have a way to capture contact data from your prospects.
- Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): A lead that shows more engagement than others becomes an MQL, indicating a higher likelihood of becoming a buyer. MQLs are also identified as being part of your buyer’s persona; if they don’t fit this profile, there’s no need to chase them. To convert leads to MQLs, you need to “nurture” them by regularly providing content or information about your product to increase their interest.
- Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): When a lead starts interacting with your sales team, they become an SQL. This stage typically involves a demo or presentation of your product, based on an action taken by the lead (high engagement signal).
- Opportunity: When an SQL expresses a purchase intent, such as asking for a quote, it becomes an opportunity. This stage has less to do with marketing and more with sales, but all the marketing efforts to increase lead awareness about your product pay off here.
- Won deal: The bottom of the funnel, where leads convert into revenue for your business. Cha-ching!
What’s a typical lead conversion rate in life sciences?
There’s no universal rule for conversion rates between different stages of the funnel, but it’s important to understand that each stage has its own conversion rate and should be optimized independently. If a sales funnel is well-constructed, the conversion rate between each stage will increase as you go down the funnel (so, for instance, your opportunity-to-won should be much higher than your lead-to-MQL rate). If it doesn’t, you might have a problem at the bottom of your funnel (aka, your sales team).
Here’s some benchmark data from FirstPageSage, which is mostly based on B2B clients:
And here’s the same data across multiple industries for the lead-to-MQL conversion:
If we take “Biotech” as an indication for the wider life sciences industry, we can see a conversion rate of 42% from lead to MQL, which is quite high compared to other industries.
While this sample is not necessarily representative of the entire field, I don't think it's too far off. Life sciences is a highly specialized industry, so the leads you generate should already be fairly qualified.
For example, a company specializing in chromatography columns will share content on that topic — which only appeals to a limited crowd — so it would be surprising if they generated many unqualified leads.
This is an advantage in life sciences because marketers don’t necessarily have to focus on quantity but instead on the quality of their leads.
Also, the average purchase in life sciences tends to be very high, so even converting a single lead into a customer can be enough for some companies to meet their revenue goals for several months.
Where are the leads coming from?
Even though we use the image of a funnel to simplify things, the lead generation funnel in 2024 is far more complex due to the variety of channels available for potential buyers and their tendency to independently seek out information online.
Here’s a representation of what a modern funnel looks like, according to consulting firm Forrester:
It's important to understand that leads can come from various channels and consume content in different places. A good way to categorize these channels is by using the PESO model, a term coined by Gini Dietrich in her book Spin Sucks.
The PESO model divides acquisition channels into four buckets:
- Paid media: Advertising campaigns you purchase to generate leads
- Earned media: Press coverage or mentions of your brand by third parties without payment
- Shared media: Social media platforms you don’t own but can use to generate leads
- Owned media: Your own website and content that you fully control.
Additionally, I would include a fifth channel: Offline media. Events and conferences can also be effective for generating leads, so perhaps we should rename the model to PESOO?
Each of these channels is important for your lead generation strategy, and each has its own specific characteristics when it comes to generating leads.
How do you generate life sciences leads?
Let’s explore each channel of the PESO(O) model independently:
1. Paid media
Generating leads through this channel is usually straightforward: the more money you put in, the more leads you generate. Paid media can include advertising through trade publications (both print and online), Google Ads, and other advertising platforms. However, leads generated through this channel may be of lower quality because advertising doesn't always offer a significant value exchange for potential customers. But it’s a very important channel to consider for companies that are scaling up rapidly and have a substantial budget. The key to success here is optimizing your ad copy to maximize your conversion rate. This involves experimentation and A/B testing to find the messaging that resonates most with your prospects.
2. Earned media
Earned media is harder to control and is usually an organic approach. Public relations activities can help drive your earned media, but most of the time, this channel will increase your brand awareness without generating a high volume of leads (which may be a strategy you’re also looking for in your overall marketing approach). However, leads from earned media are usually of very high quality because they require effort from the potential customer to move from a third-party channel to yours. Being recognized as an expert or having a top-notch product will usually earn you this type of visibility over time, but again, it’s hard to control, so don’t exclusively focus on this channel.
Recommended reading: How to Get (FREE) Press Coverage for Your Life Science Product
3. Shared media (or social media)
Generating leads on social media is a topic far too large to cover here, but the key takeaway is that it’s the most efficient discovery channel. Social media platforms have an immense reach that you can use to spread information about your company. The strategy is to use it to your own benefit, but of course, it’s easier said than done. Anyone who has ventured onto LinkedIn has seen how crowded the feed can be, and attracting eyeballs to your company is often challenging. Leads generated through social media tend to be of medium quality due to the broad audience. Remember, social media lead generation is a long-term strategy. Spreading yourself too thin across many platforms can be detrimental, so focus on mastering one or two channels first. For more insights, keep an eye out for articles dedicated to social media strategies.
Recommended reading: Mastering LinkedIn in 2024 - Part 1: Understanding How the Algorithm Works
4. Owned media
In my opinion, more effort should be put into owned channels and especially into the content of your website. You probably know by now that I'm a big believer in content marketing, and I think it's a great lead generation strategy because the leads you generate through quality content are already highly qualified. The downside is that this channel can be slow to generate leads and requires a bit of effort to keep producing content. The key is to ensure that once visitors are on your site, they should have a clear reason to stay and enter your lead funnel. Every qualified visitor leaving without sharing their information is a missed opportunity, so make sure your website is full of useful content and resources.
Recommended reading: How to Write a Sales Page That Converts the Right Customer
5. Offline media
Let’s not forget that offline is also a good channel to keep in mind, but as I've pointed out in several articles, you’re never sure who’s going to walk by your event booth, so it’s often a hit-or-miss approach. Event marketing is also quite expensive compared to other lead-generation channels. You should definitely consider it in your multichannel approach, but be mindful of the lead acquisition costs of this channel and pick the events that generate the best leads for your business rather than trying to be everywhere. As with other channels, making sure you have something of value to offer attendees passing by your booth is a good lead-generation strategy.
To recap, here’s a table I made to compare the different channels of the PESO(O) model:
Lead generation examples in life sciences
Pictures speak louder than words, so let's take a look at some real-life lead-generation examples:
1. Email advertising
The example above is from an ad campaign we ran for Altasciences. I chose this example because it illustrates well how you can use paid media to generate leads. Altasciences used the Labiotech channel to send a promotional email to all subscribers. The email is well structured, with a clear value proposition in the image at the top, a short explanation and a good call to action in the form of an ebook download. If this topic interests you as a reader, it doesn't feel like a stretch to give away your email.
2. Webinars
Webinars are also a great way to generate leads. Crown Bioscience organizes them regularly, and I chose them as an example because they also offer webinars on-demand, which means you can still watch the webinar after it has been broadcast live. This is a great way to maximize the effort of organizing a webinar. Instead of generating leads only at the time of the recording, an on-demand webinar can be reused over time and in multiple campaigns. Plus, webinars are great for promoting your thought leaders, so it's an excellent way to generate leads and increase your brand awareness.
3. Downloadable content
Creating PDF reports or ebooks is a great way to generate leads. The advantage of this strategy is that the content creation effort is more limited in time than keeping a blog constantly fed with posts. So, if you are struggling with content marketing, this can be a good place to start. I chose the above ebook from CRYOPDP because it uses a clever trick to generate leads. You can access the ebook from anywhere without registering, but after you've read a few pages, a registration form opens to collect your information if you want to continue reading. It's a great way to generate only qualified leads because people who aren't interested enough in the content will simply leave.
Lead generation: focus on quality
Too often, lead generation is approached without a clear strategy. Under pressure from management to meet lead targets, marketers may prioritize quantity over quality and lose sight of the bigger picture.
Lead generation should be a collaborative effort between marketing, sales, and management. Each group needs to understand why leads are necessary, what types of leads are most valuable, and the journey from lead to customer.
It's certainly a huge topic to cover, and I've only scratched the surface with this article, so keep an eye out for more content on this topic in the future.
