Trends and Best Practices for Video in Life Science Marketing
If you are using video or considering it as part of your marketing mix and want to make sure you generate as many leads as possible, you’ll want to listen to the podcast below.
I sat down with Tyler Kay, the founder of Digital Creative Associates in San Francisco this week to discuss the use of video in life science marketing. It’s likely you have seen some of his viral videos including The PCR Song and Small Molecule Investigation.
But viral videos are not the only opportunity to make an impact on your campaigns. In this podcast, Tyler discusses trends he sees and shares some great ideas on:
An untapped opportunity to reach your target audience on YouTube
Which video types are especially successful in different situations
How mixing humor and a good story captured significant market share for Bio-Rad without relying on product features
The value of documentary-style customer profiles in your marketing mix
An easy, but often overlooked tip for maximizing lead generation with video
Smart ways to use video on a minimal budget
I promise. You don’t want to miss this one. Click below to listen to the podcast. Then let me know what you think in the comments.
Links:
Intro Music stefsax / CC BY 2.5
Outro Music spinningmerkaba / CC BY 3.0
About My Guest …
Tyler Kay is from Digital Creative Associates in San Francisco. He shared a case study of live streaming to a global audience through YouTube of a sponsored lunchtime workshop at an exclusive genomics conference.
The Transcript
Intro: My guest was Tyler Kay of Digital Creative Associates in San Francisco. He shared a case study of live streaming to a global audience through YouTube of a sponsored lunchtime workshop at an exclusive genomics conference.
Chris: Tyler, tell me what the event was and what the goals were and what was unique about what you did.
Tyler: Well, as you know, in our market in life science, seminars are just intrinsic to just the overall industry. That goes back to being in academics and when you were a student. You go to seminars. That’s just part of the industry. Also, as you know, for a lot of trade shows and other events and user meetings, getting seminars together and workshops, a group of four or five speakers together, is just a regular thing that’s done.
So for years we’ve been doing on-demand recording of these events and putting them up on the web after the fact. I’ve had requests for a long time to do an actual live stream but I avoided it because it was complicated. You had to have dedicated internet lines and some of the actual streaming technology and codex weren’t quite ready yet. Or they were but it was just cost prohibitive to do for ourselves and for the client. Somewhat recently, some of those technologies have changed and made it more available to try.
So I thought it would be a great idea to see how we could extend a very exclusive seminar at a very exclusive genomics conference, out to a worldwide audience in real time. They had a great keynote speaker followed by five speakers presenting their work using their next generation sequencing system. We thought this would be interesting to the entire world of genomics researchers.
What we did is we set it up and streamed live from the event in real time as it was happening. And we streamed it directly through YouTube to their YouTube channel. I chose to do it through YouTube because I wanted the shareability of that, the familiarity with it. Obviously everybody uses YouTube. But also the shareability of it so that that video could be posted on their blog, it could go into their Facebook page, they could Tweet about it. And all of those, wherever that video was embedded in those various places, would all be the same, live, simulcast. There was about a 10 second delay, but it’s live.
Chris: Right.
Tyler: – Coming directly from this conference. And so how did that work? One, Craig Venter was speaking at this event. He was the keynote speaker. So that’s going to draw in a lot of people. And they advertised that about a month or so leading up to the event. They used that to advertise the fact that this was going to be streamed live and so that drew a lot of interest. And then they just had people check back to their blog page where you could watch it live. So at the event, there were probably about . . . it was a packed house and I would say that room probably held several hundred people and it was standing room only. Tuned in to watch it live were nearly 800 other people. Well, 800 IP addresses.
As we know, in labs there’s probably one computer and maybe three or four people standing around watching this. So we could probably effectively say there were probably close to 1,000 other people watching this live. And the really interesting thing was, there were, as it was happening, monitoring the social graph, there were people tweeting about this in real time. Grad students in Europe saying, “Wow, this is fantastic. I could never attend this conference and hats off to this company who’s doing this,” right?
Chris: Right. And could they share it? So obviously they can tweet about it.
Tyler: Right.
Chris: But could I share the link?
Tyler: Oh, yeah.
Chris: And essentially . . .
Tyler: Absolutely.
Chris: . . . in real time, “Hey, check this out. It’s happening right now.”
Tyler: Yeah, in fact, that’s what was happening. People were tweeting about it and posting. That’s how it was spreading. We saw that audience grow from a few hundred logging on initially, to just continuing to grow until the end of the event. It was a two hour workshop. And so as more people . . . because they were all using the hashtag for this show . . .
Chris: Yeah.
Tyler: . . . as you were able to actually . . . If you’re following that hashtag, then you see, “Oh, hey look. Right now there’s a live event.” So people just kept coming on and coming on through the entire event, so it just kept growing to, like I said, the 800 different IP addresses coming on by the time the event was over.
Chris: Nice. So you’re at an exclusive conference.
Tyler: Right.
Chris: You’ve got a highly regarded speaker. And because you can’t get everybody there who would like to see this person, but you can still extend the audience.
Tyler: Right.
Chris: To everyone else who couldn’t get into the conference or just couldn’t travel that far to a conference, whatever.
Tyler: That’s right. Yeah, and everything worked. It was really our maiden voyage in doing this kind of live stream so it was a little bit of a high wire act . . .
Chris: Yeah.
Tyler: . . . when we got it going, but it worked fine. It was streamed really nicely. There were no interruptions in the stream through YouTube. And at the end of it, we had a two hour, archived workshop, which we then, in turn, turned into individual webinars – chapterized on-demand webinars.
Chris: Nice.
Tyler: And then there was a follow-up campaign that went out that had the links to all. If you happened to miss the live event, here it is, and people could watch it.
Chris: Tell me a little bit about the promotion part upfront and getting people to attend and why doing it live is special as opposed to just sending out the archive after the fact.
Tyler: I think the promotion really isn’t any different than you would, say, promote any other live webinar event. Live webinars, I think everybody is familiar with that because people have been doing them for many companies, many media companies in our market and individual companies have been. I mean live science companies have been doing live either in-house or contracting with someone to do a live phone-in webcast, for example. And to do those, there’s usually email blasts that go out ahead of time, banner ads that are run announcing it, newsletter sponsorships. Usually, it’s the same suite of digital marketing channels that go out to promote this, right?
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Tyler: And then it comes back and you have a live webcast that you host. But what’s different is that’s not the same as taking your seminar, which you’ve already organized at a real event, and then extending that audience beyond your room that may hold 1,000 people at the most.
Chris: Right.
Tyler: I think that’s the big differentiator.
Chris: From a lead generation point of view, so this obviously isn’t gated. Anyone could share it with anyone else.
Tyler: Right.
Chris: You don’t need permission to get in there and watch it.
Tyler: Right.
Chris: But somehow you managed to generate enough interest and . . .
Tyler: Yeah. I think, from a lead generation standpoint, they took sign-ups to receive the archived event, the on demand event. And they also took sign-ups to receive an announcement as a reminder that this live webcast was going to happen. So there were several hundred names captured for the registration. So there’s that aspect, but there’s really the idea of being able to share what these key opinion leaders are doing with your technology in real time, from this exclusive show.
Chris: Yeah.
Tyler: And be able to see, “Oh, okay. This is how I can get these highly accurate, long read of these DNA sequences for this particular application.” Because they’re able to actually see the data that’s being shared there.
Chris: Yeah. So a little bit of shifting gears here. You said people were tweeting this live and hats off to this company for doing it. What about social engagement with the people who were tweeting about it? Was there any effort around that? Do you get back to those people, pull them in some other way? I’m just curious.
Tyler: That I don’t know. Like on an individual basis?
Chris: Yeah.
Tyler: I’m not sure but there was a big follow-up campaign that, again, went out through all the social channels about hey, if you missed our live stream, here’s a chance to watch the on demand version. So there was another follow-up campaign that went out with the on demand version and that utilized the Twitter channel, Facebook, LinkedIn, all the various social channels that were part of that campaign.
Chris: I guess, now . . . I wasn’t thinking that when I asked it originally, but now I’m thinking about the possibility of people asking questions even though they couldn’t ask them at the live event.
Tyler: Oh, right.
Chris: Submit questions through Twitter, for example. Then someone at the company gets back to them and says . . .
Tyler: That would be good next generation. So to speak.
Chris: Yeah. Exactly.
Tyler: That would be a good way to do it and a good addition to this would be the ability to ask questions. Ideally, in the live session. Obviously, there’s going to be some kind of . . . gated area.
Chris: Like a a twitter chat. Now obviously, the speaker can’t answer those questions directly but some of the questions, I imagine, could be handled by someone from the host company.
Tyler: That’s right. Yeah. Monitoring that and saying, “We’ve got a question that came in through Twitter. This is the question.” Right.
Chris: Oh, yeah. That, too. And/or just answer it right off the bat.
Tyler: Yeah. There’s no reason why . . .
Chris: Or “I’m the Product Manager. Here’s what you want to know.” (as an answer to a question)
Tyler: Exactly. There’s no reason why that couldn’t have happened that day except for we just didn’t think about it.
Chris: Right, yeah.
Tyler: How that would be adopted and such that they use.
Chris: A bit of a stretch on the first try.
Tyler: Right, yeah. But I think, yeah, as a follow-up it would be great to be able to take field questions from your global audience that’s tuning in for these.
Chris: Well, that’s cool. I want to thank you for sharing that information. I think it’s a really exciting possibility. How can people get in touch with you if they’re interested in doing more of this kind of stuff?
Tyler: If anyone is interested in learning more about how to do a live webcast they can just visit our website at dcasf.com. That’s short for Digital Creative Associates, San Francisco. So dcasf.com. You can click on the contact page and our contact info is there.
Chris: Awesome. Well, Tyler Kay, thanks very much for sharing that, I think, revolutionary information with us.
Tyler: My pleasure, Chris.
Chris: All right.
Tyler: Thanks for having me.
