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3 Missed Opportunities with an Outdated Life Science Website

Life science and biotech is a fast-paced, innovative and exciting sector. The pace of change is an inherent part of the life science landscape and something you need to reflect as a business too.

If your website is out-of-date and doesn't reflect where you are now, you are missing out on critical opportunities. Here are at least three missed opportunities with an outdated life science website.

First impressions count.

Is your life science website looking outdated?
Are you struggling to change or update the content to better reflect where you are now?

Are you a little embarrassed or feeling unconfident when sending people to your website?

Where to start, how to make it all come together and please your peers and investors?

When visitors land on your life science website, they make a value judgement within less than a second. First impressions have to work hard and clearly communicate your message, within less than a second.

How do you create such an experience? Don't worry, we are here to help.

Here we give you 3 key reasons why this is a priority for you to get your website right. Show this article to your CEO, your CFO, your CSO and your team, this will give you the reasons to invest in a true brand building online presence.

Many moving parts, historic information, unclear structure, a confusing user journey?

Does that sound familiar?
We work with you to bring clarity, sort out the best content, dig deep into your team's resources and bring to the front the very best innovation, data, studies and results that you need to showcase right now.

We have a transparent, highly-efficient process for delivering website project, which gets you from muddled mess to a website that tells the world what you do and why you are the innovators in your field.

In this article, we share our experience of taking over an underperforming website in the life sciences sector, which had been in business for over 20 years, with an outdated website in place.

We have the experience and insight you need.

As a business operating in a science and technology sector, you’re often the one creating the latest developments.
You need to stay agile and responsive to how you present yourself. If you’re growing, innovative biotech, then that’s a key advantage you have to compete against big companies and global brands.

Talk to many small Life Science organisations, and you’ll see the same, or similar applies to any size life science business. We could share examples across the board. However, this is one example.

Getting started.

We started by involving everyone inside the business to set a brief for a new website, including a discovery workshop with Arttia Creative. With Arttia Creative on board from the early stages, your new website is more likely to become a brand-building tour-de-force.
Here are 3 opportunities that a new website project presented to the team that you can gain too.

  1. Up-to-date creative design that is beautiful on all screens
  2. Reflect the strategy and focus of your business today, not what it was.
  3. New website content doesn’t get lost amongst your historic detail.

If you feel these are missed opportunities with your current life science website, speak to the team at Arttia Creative.

#1 - Up-to-date web design that is beautiful on all screens

During creating a brief for a new website, we see many companies citing their "favourite" websites as examples of liked and how they think theirs should look. Displaying website examples on-screen alongside a client's current site can highlight a clear difference in look and feel. Comparing examples is an excellent process to show how outdated a site has become.

Everyone in your organisation can be aware of the need for a new website, at some level. But the process of creating a first stage website brief  can help you to focus on a clear consensus of what you think the site should be and it's potential to reach a global audience with the focus of a new purpose.

An added directional highlight of a life science website assessment is that it can very often bring to the fore clarity around operational activities for the business.

The result was a joined-up plan of what things you should be working on and what you can use the power of your website to do for you.

Firstly, make people who had never heard of you confident in you as a business. Secondly, to answer 80% of the objections to trialling, purchasing and getting the most from the product.

Visiting your website, making it easy for customers to take a look, try a demo, find out the facts. We can prove to you your sale process will be dramatically shorter when we work with you on your website project. A life science website by Arttia Creative can demonstrate the advantages in time-saving across all of your business.

Have you checked how your current website looks on different devices?

Outdated life science websites can be hard to view on tablets and smartphones.

Other factors to consider when reviewing an outdated life science website...

  • Does it reflect the look and feel of your offices and brand today?
  • Does it have any out of date news, personnel profiles, products and logos?
  • Does it do the job you need it to do?

We can open your eyes to many more possibilities that you probably haven't even thought of!

#2 - A website to reflect the strategy and focus of your business today, not what it was

From the experience of the Arttia Creative team, a business plan can often be out of date by the time it's started, collated and published. Internally you know you are developing a new product for a new market.

Does anyone outside the company know you're making inroads to a new market?
Does that come across on your website?

Creating a new website makes is the perfect opportunity to reflect on how you view yourselves as a business. Does what people see online reflect how you celebrate your business to new prospects and customers face-to-face?

Creating a new website isn't just a task in putting something up with new colours and images — a cut-and-paste of the current site. If done correctly using people with experience in your sector, it is a catalyst to organising the business around a tangible representation of your business aims and strengths.

Our process helps everyone in your business look at what you have already. We challenged you to consider new directions, unthought-of routes and innovative, creative ideas.

We can work with you to create a new copy, consistent tone-of-voice and compelling calls-to-action — all designed to support new market entry while keeping your current success prominent.

We can guide and help you to consider where you could be proactive versus reactive in your sales and marketing.

A new life science website project can help to coalesce everyone in the business around a clear vision. It helps to bring out assumptions, ignite discussions and help you to create solutions to maintain a foothold in one market while we branched out into new markets.

Don't miss these opportunities, let us partner with you to create a compelling new website.

During projects, we help you to create a shared understanding across all parts of your business. What you are aiming for, how and why.

#3 - New website content that doesn't get lost amongst your historic detail, easy to find and showcases your innovation

An exercise we did to set the brief for a new website was to try and find an essential piece of content that would be of interest to someone we met at a conference.
In one case, it took 8 clicks from the home page to reach valuable technical guidance on issues that affect data quality before any analysis by the product we developed.
As a result of looking to make a new website, we turned this into an e-book available with one click and a share of your email details from the home page.
The valuable technical guide had been created in the early days as a support resource for existing customers of one of the first products the company developed, sold and supported.
Over time new products had been made and sections added to the website. This meant a technical guide, with value to a broad audience, was right at the bottom of the site attached to a specific product for a niche type of analysts.

It was hidden below more recent product information that had been created, so we put that to the top of the site.

It’s tempting to think everything you’ve ever produced should be put up on the site. It may be you’ve had to do that because of the limitations in time and expertise you have on updating your existing website.

Creating a new website is a great exercise to make you look objectively and critically at what the core content is that it can really work for you. Is your unique business strength clear and easy for potential customers to reach?

In my experience, you can generate lots of pages, which had a purpose at the time, often in response to a specific event. Still, actually, 1/5 of what you have available is what you routinely share in nurturing leads.

If you think hard enough, you’ll always find a compelling reason why a certain content simply HAS to be there. But an audit of the existing website, completed as part of the new website project, showed that content we thought was essential was hardly visited.

Or maybe it could be rewritten with an updated perspective to present value and purpose that you’ve gained from customer interactions over the years.

The point is that creating a new website is an opportunity to streamline collateral and find the hidden gems that make your business really stand out from the crowd. The things that make you remarkable compared to your competitors and comparators.

World Leading Website Consultancy to Biotech
and Life Science Businesses

Being specialists in your sector enables us to rapidly understand your unique needs enabling us deliver powerful results quickly. Saving you time, stress and money and delivering the best ROI.

The Takeaway.

Websites are not a static thing.
They are no longer a build-and-forget activity. The pace of research and development within your business and the technical markets you operate in is rapid. Your website needs to reflect this. As an SME, primarily competing in markets against big companies, you have the advantage to be agile and responsive in how you present this pace of change via the website.
To say you have an out-of-date website doesn’t just mean that it looks different from the new colours in your print material or hosted on an old unstable platform. Three-years can be a lifetime in life sciences and technical markets. So even if it has the same look and feel as all your other company marketing, if you haven’t updated your website significantly in the last year or two and know how it’s performing, then you could be missing opportunities.
Can you easily add new content in response to a market story or competitor activity? And why wait for a significant event and respond to it. With a new website, you can lead the way and stay ahead of your competitors and comparators, not just react to them.

How do you make new content visible amongst the old? Do you have a way to archive old content and keep what visitors see fresh and engaging?

Creating a new website is an opportunity to look objectively at the resources you have that you may have forgotten about or that need replacing if market trends have changed since it was created.

The process of creating a new website is the perfect way to really focus on what your company objectives are. And reflect them as they change by updating your website.

Developing a new website is a catalyst to make the strategy you might be aware of internally visible externally to your customers. It challenges you to make your business focus and aims tangible and visible to the outside world. It makes you think about how you view your business and how others see you or how you want people to see you.

As an aside on this, it’s tempting when you get your new website to boast about it. To a certain extent, yes. The excitement of a new look website is something to share. But when you come to promote your new website going live, think about the message.

Does a customer care that you’ve build a new website? Isn’t it a given? And what they really want to know is what new content or activity have you got within that new website that makes it worth visiting and exploring.

You may be surprised that getting your website up to date may not always mean building a new one from scratch. Let us analyse your current site and talk about what you want it to reflect, and we can discuss options.

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Belinda White | Creative Director

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