As life sciences firms say goodbye to 2020 and look to find a new, positive normal, an examination of emergent and significant video trends in 2021 can provide a roadmap to success. How will your firm’s video content look in 2021? And what kinds of trends will you follow in your content creation?
Trend: Continuing Digitization of Marketing
Like many industries including, more specifically, the pharmaceutical industry, the most notable trend is certainly the ongoing digitization of marketing. As Beth Snyder Bulik writes, companies in these fields “scrambled to advance digital strategies that were waiting in the wings or invented entirely new ones in the weeks and months after the pandemic began.”
The necessity of digital strategies in marketing (and elsewhere) for life sciences companies is highly understandable in the modern world. The pandemic has created a need for remote work, interactions, and marketing. It’s only natural that digital initiatives would address these needs.
Life sciences companies have a particular use for video and other digital communication tools: collaboration. As the world works together against the pandemic, in addition to normative research, sharing of information, techniques, and discoveries has never been more important.
And with the pandemic restricting in-person even more than preexisting geographic separation, a trend of digital communication makes perfect sense. Market from the safety of your office with whiteboard video. Introduce your lab to future partners with a greeting video from your whole staff. Share data and insights across continents with video, webinars, and more.
Trend: Align Sales and Marketing Teams
Another trend that dovetails well with digitization—especially video—is what Mike Knapp describes as the need to have your marketers “…consider sales teams as an extension of their marketing team.” In other words, don’t limit your increasingly-digital marketing initiatives to your website or YouTube.
Combine your sales and marketing teams into a powerful outreach machine. Make a great first impression on prospects with a personalized video in your introductory email. Lean into content marketing with useful and relevant content and softer brand promotion. And optimize that first communication by pairing it with your sales associate’s expertise.
Trend: Video Content For Training a Remote and Dispersed Workforce
Knapp also makes a point about the future of training in life sciences that underscores the utility of video in internal use: training and development. While you won’t be able to keep staff out of their labs and offices entirely, you can minimize the amount of in-person time required by training with video.
As the central concern is that staff “…need to be trained and have access to information quickly, easily, and effectively,” whiteboard video is ideal for training messaging. Video is absolutely quick and easy to consume (especially when the video is designed to be mobile friendly), but it’s Knapp’s third criterion that matters most.
Video is effective. It provides social distancing while delivering crucial information. It can deliver that information at any time. What’s more, it can be endlessly reviewed. The final product allows your technicians and staff to train themselves in their own home, on their own time, and review as much as necessary. That means your video won’t just engage your audience—they’ll retain it.
Trend: Reach Customers with In-Depth Video Content
Thinking externally once again, life sciences companies can benefit from video in more ways than just catchy sales promotions. Reach current and prospective customers with explainer videos that go beyond introductions. Give viewers a more intricate understanding of your offerings.
For example, physicians spend an average of 180 minutes watching medically-relevant content. So a video explainer is a great way to showcase your product to its intended audience. And take full advantage of the trend by using explainers in more than personalized settings. Medical conferences, email, and many other opportunities abound for reaching your target audience with explainer videos.
Trend: Omnichannel Video Content
Finally, a trend that life sciences companies (and most other industries) should pay close attention to is going omnichannel with video content. Many life sciences companies hesitate to enter the video realm, as it seems less fitting a format (for whatever reason) than it might for other industries; omnichannel messaging is the opposite of this hesitation.
How can you make your video content omnichannel—and what does omnichannel mean?
Onmichannel means that, in the modern era, “No one uses just one digital platform,” and neither should you. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, IMGUR, Metacafe, Dailymotion: you don’t have to use just one, or even just two.
The thinking here is simple: reach as many people as possible with your life sciences video content. Not everyone is on Facebook, and you can’t expect to communicate with all of your prospects through Twitter. If your video is available on a multiplicity of platforms, however, the chances are high that your target audience will see it, as an ever-growing number of people are on at least one social media platform.
Key Takeaways
Life sciences industry video trends are pushing towards digital video and tools, remote work and training, and omnichannel delivery. Making marketing videos for use in sales, and creating explainer videos to reach your target audience with the information they need to convert, will be game-changing factors as 2021 continues.
How will you adopt these life sciences video trends in 2021?
What does your content strategy look like as the New Year unfolds?
Get in touch about your next video project!