Positioning a Clinical Trial Brand for Growth: 4 Simple Steps to Defining a Website Strategy

Posted by Dan Sirk on 22 February 2012 | 1 Comments

The goal - create a "gold standard" website, not just for the clinical trial industry, but comparable to the best websites you see every day.  A site that looks great, and still manages to drive business growth.  Certainly that's what ERT was looking for when we started this initiative.  Often, this turns into a classic form vs. function battle - but why do you have to choose?  If you follow this age-old recipe for developing strong marketing strategies, you can have an elegant site that actually helps move your business forward.

1.       Establish business goals

2.       Define tactical marketing goals (in this case, website goals)

3.       Create a messaging strategy

4.       Measure performance with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) 

Step 1: Establish Business Goals

Piece of cake - ERT knew exactly what they wanted to accomplish with their overall business. Growing revenue with specific targets/dates, expanding particular categories, defining new service offerings.  All with concrete numbers behind them. Perfect!  Note that when clients struggle with this, we often start by asking them how they make money, how much they make in a year, sales in a given year, etc.  Then we talk about what number they'd like to get to this year, 3 and 5 years from now. 

Step 2: Define Tactical Marketing Goals (or in this case, website goals)

This is where the aesthetic piece comes in.  If we say that we are going for "gold standard" what does that mean?  And how does that result in more leads and sales?  To resolve this, we considered the website's role in the business and the purchase process.  Goals were established that mapped to the job the site needed to do, while still being considerate of visual interests.

• Extend the site's appeal by establishing ERT as a trusted clinical trial resource (get more people to the site, more often)
• Deepen the engagement of site visitors (keep people on the site and keep them coming back)
• Demonstrate ERT's value relative to the competition (starting to bridge into sales here)
• Elevate the brand (the catch all - make it pretty and compelling and play nice with the other materials out there)

Step 3: Create a Messaging Strategy

That "value" goal really became the key to unlocking the missing part of the story.  We needed to communicate all the great things that make ERT different from their competitors, which explains why they may be higher in price at first glance, but more cost-effective in the long run.  This story needed to be added to the content mix along with product/service offerings, thought leadership materials, etc.  We then defined and prioritized all the different target groups they were looking to address, considered mindsets, information interests, and matched the content to the interested audience.  This is the approach we take to all of our site builds - define what we have to say, look at who we're talking to and then create a user experience that delivers the content to those individuals who are looking for it. Visit ert.com to see the result.

Step 4: Measure Performance with KPIs

Boiling down the infinite number of metrics into a few specific KPIs is always an important exercise.  Once you've laid the groundwork with Steps 1 and 2 it's not too difficult.  The approach to keep in mind is to make them simple and ensure they're telling a clear story against your site goals.  With ERT, we settled on 6.

• Online content influence rating: Defines how much content is getting shared out in the digital ether
• Percentage of content downloads per 100 visitors, by subject matter: Assesses engagement with thought leadership content
• Percentage of event attendee sign-ups per 100 visitors, by subject matter: Assesses engagement achieved with events and informs where to do more events
• Contact form completions per month, by source (organic search, advertising, email, etc.): defines which activities drive the greatest velocity of contact form completions
• Cost per form completion, by source: Establishes which activities are most cost-effective
• Closed sale percentage: This is really a sales metric, but if the site is doing its job, we'd expect it to improve lead quality

So, how's the new ERT site doing?  Well, we just launched it on February 13^th, but hopefully you'll see lots of good news from ERT in the months and years to come.  Tell us what you think....

Dan Sirk is Vice President of Account Services at Garfield Group. Connect with Dan on LinkedIn and follow him on twitter @dsirk1. Garfield Group is an agency focused on delivering measurable business results to a client roster ranging from small startups to industry powerhouses. Positioning brands for maximum growth, Garfield Group applies innovative, strategies to drive objectives and surpass expectations through branding initiatives, digital campaigns and targeted offline tactics. For more insights from Garfield Group, visit The Lab and follow up on Twitter @garfieldgroup