Science never stands still, and nor does scientific marketing. Here, we take a look at the sales and marketing approaches that have proved successful over the past couple of years, and the likely challenges for 2026, including the ever-growing need to build customer trust, ways to leverage social media, and the transformative role of AI.

Emerging trends for 2026

Video podcasts – an increasingly popular way to reach your audience

Video podcasts are increasingly popular marketing tools. Unlike more traditional, audio-only podcasts, they allow you to repurpose short clips on multiple channels – for example, LinkedIn, X, TikTok, YouTube and Spotify – to drive people to the full episode. Whether people just engage with short clips or go on to watch to the entire podcast, it will grow awareness of your company or products.

 

Combine AI with the human touch to deliver your marketing messages

In terms of current trends, artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful tool that is set to transform the way businesses work, both internally and externally. It can generate considerable time savings compared to manual processes, with tools like clay.com massively reducing the time it takes to identify potential leads. AI is a very creative tool with great potential to analyse large amounts of data and accelerate content development by allowing personalised, one-on-one communications at scale. However, fully exploiting the potential of AI still requires human oversight. While AI can help structure content and provide ideas for articles, email subject lines and more, maintaining originality is crucial to broaden your appeal, grow your client base and enhance the customer experience; the human touch is essential to ensure unique content and build trust with your readers.

 

Winning strategies in life science marketing

Email marketing lives on

Millions of emails covering a plethora of subject areas are sent out every week, but how do you ensure that yours are read and interacted with, and not just consigned to spam or deleted immediately? It is crucial to analyse your data to see which subject lines and words generate the most – and least – engagement. It’s also important to be aware that only a small proportion of readers – around three to five per cent – are actually ready to buy at any given moment. But what of the other 95+ per cent? Get to know who they are and why they are not ready to buy yet, and don’t force-feed them product information right away. There’s a fine line between sending emails that provide content of value and being classed as spam.

 

Keep your life sciences marketing messages relevant

The life sciences audience is very fragmented and, although broadly interested in all things scientific and technical, scientists generally focus on their own particular discipline. One approach that has proved very successful is topic-specific newsletters containing high quality, original and relevant content that keeps readers up to speed with the latest scientific developments and addresses their needs.

 

Include an effective call to action

Whatever form your marketing collateral takes, prompting a response from the reader is essential. One way of doing this is to offer free, high quality content – like tips and tricks, or templates and protocols – to help labs achieve their objectives more effectively. Over time, this builds confidence and trust with readers, which ultimately pays off in the form of inbound enquiries.

 

Personalised communications – a powerful life sciences marketing tool

Whether it’s email marketing or sales prospecting, one of the biggest challenges is to work out how to stand out in a recipient’s inbox while avoiding your electronic communications being blocked. Cold outreach via sales-related templated sequence emails can be one of the fastest ways to get your messaging diverted to the spam folder, which will then affect client communications. However, there is still a place for cold outreach when done correctly. It has to be personalised to the person receiving it, problem-orientated and short, since nobody has time to read long messages!

 

Your customers know what they need – but do you?

You might think you know what your customers want, but have you asked them? All too often, companies fail to validate what they believe their customers need. Ask your customers what they want, then work out a content strategy to meet those demands. It’s also vital to look at the analytics to see what sort of content people are engaging with, as well as Google trends with regards to particular activities.

 

Scientists trust testimonials from other scientists

Organic content is powerful and, notably, LinkedIn posts from individuals tend to resonate more with audiences than those from a brand or company page. This can generate hundreds of thousands of impressions that companies would be unlikely to achieve without sponsored ads. Unlocking the creativity of your team, trusting them to post on LinkedIn and build their own brand, will allow you to see what resonates with others in the field, gain fresh insights and new ideas for use in your marketing strategies, and develop your brand alongside theirs.

 

But LinkedIn is just one of many social media platforms. With YouTube being one of today’s largest search engines, there is a lot of value in video content. A thought leader interview, for example, can be released as a single five to 10 minute video, and used as a series of shorts across various platforms. The key is to understand how people interact with different platforms, then deliver high quality, original content tailored to that specific audience.

 

We hope you find these insights of interest, and that they help propel your marketing forwards to achieve your goals.