How to Keep Your Life Sciences Content Evergreen

By now, it is clear that life sciences companies should have a blog and be publishing content. It is a great opportunity to boost SEO, humanize your brand, and build credibility. But publishing content for life sciences presents some challenges that other industries may not face. Life sciences content needs to be not only entertaining and helpful, but it is vital that it is accurate, insightful, and up to date with the latest information in order to build trust for your brand and establish your company as experts in your field. Oftentimes the most difficult content to create for Life Sciences companies is evergreen content - which remains relevant even with the passing of time.  

We have put together some tips for creating a strategic marketing mix of content that includes both evergreen content & the latest research innovations.

Create evergreen content at the awareness stage 

The content that is least likely to be impacted by the latest innovations and research is your awareness content. When a prospect is in the awareness stage of their journey, they need to understand the basics of your offerings, which will remain fundamentally unchanged. By creating really strong content at the early stage of the buying process that you can easily reuse and repurpose, you can then focus more of your resources on making sure you are staying current. 

Your evergreen awareness content should take many forms such as videos, infographics, white papers, podcasts and more, to make sure you are reaching your audiences through their preferred channel. One way to reuse your content and make sure it is engaging for a low-attention span awareness stage buyer is to include lots of visuals. Infographics are a great way to display data or processes yet make them easily digestible. Many of your long-form research articles can become short stats or micro-videos that will be attention grabbing on social media. Repurposing content in new forms will help you establish credibility without boring your visitors with content that is too text-heavy.  

Many prospects in the awareness phase are also looking for you to establish trust and credibility, and it is important that you learn to craft a narrative around your relentless quest for innovation and your areas of expertise. Creating videos with case studies featuring your groundbreaking work or documenting your evidence-based processes will help you engender your audience to your brand, more than long-form articles with facts and figures. The foundations of your business and the dedicated people in it don’t change, even if the latest research does.  In our work with Life Sciences companies such as Moderna Therapeutics, we were able to increase leads by documenting their key processes such as the progression of individual medicines, from development to funding. We helped build trust with their target audiences by featuring their dedicated staff at the forefront of their digital marketing. By focusing on building credibility and forming an emotional connection with your prospects, you can create strong evergreen content that will continue to produce top of funnel leads.  

Create content pillars and use keyword research 

Plan your content strategy around key search terms that your target audiences are using to find you or your competitors. By forming a top-down strategy that buckets your content into key pillars, you will be able to build templates that you can reuse as your content gets more granular. The latest data points and key research insights may change, but your content containers will remain consistent. If you are housing all of your content in one place and reusing boilerplate materials it will be easier to do mass updates and keep up with regulatory changes. 

Keyword research is also essential when building out content that captures the latest and greatest elements of your research. In the life sciences industry finding a keyword that has low search volume may actually be a good thing. It gives you the opportunity to be one of the first companies associated with this new research development. The more specific you can be, the higher your company will rank on lucrative longtail keywords. Using more specific terminology can also help you separate who is actually in the market, from students or laypeople just doing casual research. An example of a top-down keyword approach can be seen on the Thermo Fisher Scientific website, where the content starts at the very broad level of life sciences and gradually narrows to more specific topics like “Flow Cytometry Antibodies”. With a keyword driven top-down approach to your content strategy you will be able to create both evergreen high-level content and up to date research on in demand topics.

Diversify your blog 

Websites with blog content have 434% more search engine-indexed pages than those that don’t publish, which means maintaining a blog is crucial to gaining online exposure. However, when many companies run a google analytics report on their top blog posts, they may be shocked to find that their most popular blog is not their latest and greatest, but a long-forgotten article on the basics from years ago. In the life sciences industry, it may be tempting to only focus on blog posts that feature the most exciting research development, however, make sure you are mixing in some content that talks about the differentials of your company and what sets you apart from your competitors. This content may seem basic but explaining the essentials of your business could be what brings in large segments of new traffic to your site. Once your prospects are reeled in with the basics, they will then discover your more granular work on today’s research. 

Creating new content in your blog is also important, because if your life sciences blog doesn’t cover unique and engaging content, it will seem out of date from the moment you publish it. While it’s important to stay up to date with industry trends, it’s vital that you capitalize on what makes your company unique and any innovative research, methods, and technology you are using. By sharing information and insights that are exclusive to your company, you ensure that your audience hasn’t already read about it somewhere else. 

Of course, it is essential that you make sure you are 100% confident before publishing anything, as the goal of a life sciences blog isn’t just to capture attention and entertain like some other business blogs, but it is vital to gain respect and trust, and establish credibility.  

Rethinking your life sciences content strategy 

It may seem impossible to keep content evergreen in an industry that is constantly changing, evolving, and making new discoveries and advancements. But as long as you keep your content unique, engaging, and relevant, you will establish credibility, trust, and a reputation of expertise for your brand.