Good graphic design is a key element of nearly any marketing communications project. It’s especially vital, however, for companies and other organizations in the life science and tech sectors. Whether your marketing is B2B or B2C, don’t overlook design. This blog will review six reasons to incorporate excellent design in life science marketing communications. Read on to discover how design can help meet the challenges of marketing science-focused products and services.

1: Creative design can help you communicate complex ideas more effectively

Typically, in a science- or tech-based organization, you need to communicate fairly complex concepts, whether through white papers, product launches, presentations, trade show collateral, or integrated print and digital ad campaigns. Visual content is especially important for conveying technical information. For example, it can help you show customers how a product works.

As outlined in another Cobalt blog post, Communicating the Benefits of Complex Products, using visual content to bring data to life is an important part of your strategy for communicating complexity. Photographs, illustrations, graphs, charts, diagrams, animated visuals, videos, and infographics can all help your audience understand complex concepts. Visuals can, for example:

• Break down the steps in a complex process.
• Highlight innovation.
• Reveal what is usually hidden, like the interior workings of an instrument or test results as seen through a microscope.
• Illustrate an analogy or metaphor.
• Present data in an easily comprehensible format.
• Provide context by showing how different components fit into a system or how steps in a process relate to each other.
• Illustrate a concept that is central to your brand or product.

2: Strong visuals can help you reach non-technical audiences

The content you need to communicate in life science marketing can often be very academic or dense. Although your scientists and engineers understand it, no one else probably does! So, if your goal is to reach a wider audience with your research results, your latest product enhancement, or a corporate announcement, use creative design to make it more accessible.

For example, let’s say the sales team of a healthcare technology solutions company is trying to reach a potential new customer’s purchasing staff. The customer has a fairly complicated purchasing channel involving many different people. Would every member of that purchasing staff understand how a smarter clinical workflow can improve the patient care experience? Not likely, so it would be in the company’s best interests to produce collateral incorporating strong visual content to help someone in purchasing — or any lay person, for that matter —understand the features and benefits of their software and why it matters.

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Tip: Know your audience

Want your message to resonate with your intended audience? Conduct audience research and get to know who they are, what platforms they’re using, their level of technical or scientific knowledge, and, most importantly, what they care about. Keeping a specific target audience in mind when blending verbal information with visual design will help you provide the right level of technical details.

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3: Visuals can help you communicate complicated processes and workflows

Perhaps your organization needs to communicate, for example, a new standard operating procedure for your biopharma manufacturing process. Of course, the new procedure will be carefully written to provide step-by-step instructions for workers on your manufacturing line. But how can you communicate it most effectively? Incorporate well-designed flowcharts, diagrams, and illustrations to help make each step in the process easy to understand and make each task easy to carry out.

The Advantages of the Infographic

The Cobalt blog post, The Past, Present, and Future of the Infographic, details the many reasons to consider using infographics in your content marketing:

• According to a study in the Rochester Review, researchers have found that 50 percent of the human brain is used for processing visual information — and infographics increase learning by up to as much as 400 percent.
• Instead of using several sentences of text to try to persuade your audience that your product has value, one simple graph can offer proof based on data.
• Infographics can increase conversions. An informal analysis of blogs in different industries by Quicksprout revealed that articles with data-driven visuals such as charts and graphs receive 258 percent more trackbacks than blog posts with other types of images.
• Infographics can be fairly simple to create. They require fewer resources than marketing tactics such as videos or white papers.
• Infographics are versatile. You can use them in your blog, share them on social media, and print them as well.