Your audience knows more than you do

You spent 2 months crafting the perfect campaign, hit publish, and a senior scientist with 30+ years in the field reads the first paragraph and closes the tab. 

Over the last few weeks, I've been thinking about why scientists are so difficult to market and sell to, mostly off the back of client conversations on this exact issue.

I've always had my views on this as a kind of working philosophy, but never sat down to define them into clear, distinct reasons - ones we can act upon. Doing that properly, I've come to realise it comes down to several compounding issues, which I'll be covering in full over the next few weeks in this newsletter. 

One stands out above the rest: how do you sell and market to an audience that knows more than you do? It's not easy, and in science, it's almost always the case.

You're often selling to group leaders, principal investigators, professors, lab managers, and senior scientists who've spent thirty or forty years publishing papers and making breakthroughs in the exact field your product sits in. How do we provide them value, and how can you educate and engage them?

It's worth comparing this to B2C for a second. In consumer marketing, an expert can produce genuinely valuable, trust-building content that customers lap up, act on, and come back for. That's why medical influencer content works so well; a medical doctor simply discussing the science and benefits of the latest supplement to the general public. The knowledge gap runs the right way round.

Flip to a scientific audience and that gap runs in the opposite direction. A real uphill challenge.

This is the situation most of the marketing managers I speak with are experiencing, whether they've named it or not. They're writing to the scientists who wrote the textbooks in the first place. That gap is real, and no amount of skill or effort on the marketing side closes it alone.

Why the usual fixes don't work

When the product isn't selling, the content isn't landing, and the campaign is flopping, the instinct is almost always the same. Double down. Hire another digital marketing specialist. Bring in a consultant to audit the funnel. Throw more money at paid ads and hope volume buys what poor foundations couldn't. 

None of it touches the actual problem. A generalist marketer, however good at brand and channel strategy, still doesn't know why triple-checking a qPCR plate layout at midnight matters, because one mislabelled well ruins the entire run. A consultant can restructure your funnel without ever understanding why the messaging inside it doesn't land. More ad spend just gets the same unconvincing content in front of more scientists, faster.

What actually changes the content

CYTENA is a good example of what happens when the gap closes instead. I worked with them to refine their case study format, which had stalled for some time. We rebuilt it around what a scientist actually needs to see before they'll trust a claim, and around the real, daily frustrations those scientists deal with. It worked well enough that it became the standard template used across their entire parent company group, adopted by teams who'd never worked with us directly. (case study available on our website for anyone interested).

This gap isn't simply about vocabulary, jargon versus plain English. You can swap "upregulation" for "increase" and the content can still fail. Knowing what a word means on paper isn't the same as understanding what it actually signals to the person reading it. The real gap is this: your reader needs to see mechanistic understanding and practical, day-to-day frustration in the same sentence. They want to know how the technology works, at both the microscopic and the practical level, and in the same breath, whether it saves them from a specific irritation in their actual working day.

A scientist doesn't care that your product is described as best in class. They care whether it stops them recalibrating a machine every second run, or whether a reagent finally has a shelf life that survives a slow week in the lab.

We all love a failure story: I learned the importance of correct terminology properly, and painfully, during my first internship at Amgen, as an eager undergraduate student. I was reporting back at a department meeting on a microbial hold study, a 500-litre bioreactor tank, and I wanted to say the run had gone well. What I said instead was "everything is positive." In microbiology, that phrase carries a very specific mechanistic meaning, and it isn't good news. Half the room audibly gasped. For a few seconds, several senior scientists thought I was telling them that 500 litres of buffer was crawling with contaminating bacteria.

It wasn't. I knew the word. What I hadn't grasped was what it meant, mechanistically, to the room hearing it. That gap, between knowing a term and understanding what it actually means to your reader, is exactly the gap most scientific content falls into. Just with lower stakes, and nobody gasping out loud (hopefully).

What to actually do differently

Stop asking your writers "how do we simplify this for a general audience" or inventing some challenges you think your audience faces. Start asking "what would genuinely annoy me if I were the one running this experiment every day, and what could I say by accident that would land completely wrong to someone who actually understands the mechanism behind the word." That reframe changes what gets written. It moves the content from technically correct but forgettable, or worse, technically correct but accidentally alarming, to something a scientist reads and recognises as written by someone who understands both the science and the room it's landing in.

The challenge

If your content team has never been the person your product is trying to help, that's simply the wrong kind of expertise for this particular job. A marketing writer isn't going to build trust with a Head of R&D. What the work actually needs is someone who has stood where your reader is standing, who understands the mechanism behind every word they choose, and who will know within a sentence if you don't. 

Talk to your science team. Talk to your actual audience and customers. And get a scientist involved in the writing itself, not just the review.