How Medical Illustrations Can Boost Your Start-Up Business
Medical illustrations are a great addition to support you on your journey as you build your companies brand. They offer great versatility in helping communicate who you are, your values and mission to a wider audience. But, what can they be used for and how can they help you?
>> Insights from our Now Medical Studios team
What are medical illustrations and why do I need them?
It may sound simple, but the term medical illustrations encompass more than just diagrammatic images. It can include static images like hyper-realistic renderings of surgical procedures to simple vector icons or it can also mean moving images like animation, motion graphics, or video. The choice of medium very much depends on the aims of the client requesting the commission.
As a start-up the process of branding and marketing yourself may seem a little foreign and also knowing what sort of illustrations you require can be overwhelming. Often we are approached by start-ups who want to create a more polished feel to their physical and online presence, but their ideas can be a bit muddled when it comes to requesting medical illustrations.
It can be easy to feel intimidated by the slick marketing campaigns produced by large healthcare, medical device or pharmaceutical companies. These larger companies often work with external medical communications agencies to create their campaigns. As part of this, these agents will often have close connections with preferred medical illustration and animation studios, like Now Medical Studios, who provide visual and design support to these agencies.
It’s a fruitful collaboration where everyone brings their specialised expertise to the table as they collaborate to help these companies develop their campaigns.
Smaller enterprises and start-ups may not have the large budgets to work with big medical communications agencies, but that doesn't mean they cannot produce similar content and achieve their goals. They can take a more cost-effective approach and work with experienced studios directly.
In this article, we want to share with you the various ways a medical illustration and animation studio can help you grow your business as a start-up or small business.
Case study
Take a look at how we created branded medical illustrations and redesigned our clients Nanoview Biosciences website.
Branding and Style
Depending on what stage your business is at in its development journey, you may have given a lot or very little consideration to your company's brand. Often, a start-up will quickly produce a logo to match their company name but haven't progressed beyond that point. Spending a bit of time thinking about your branding can give a consistent and well put together feel for any content or materials you produce that represents your company. This can be as simple as having a couple of specific brand colours and fonts that you use, to more a complex set of regulations for logo, colour, pattern, typography or supporting graphical elements - to name a few!
Having clear branding and a company style can help to communicate to the wider audience who you are, what you do, your values, aspirations and goals. Having a brand guide can then help ensure that this messaging is translated into everything you do, portraying consistent messaging no matter who is producing your content or promotional materials or representing your company.
Whichever way you decide to build your brand, medical illustration studios can provide an essential cornerstone of your company's messaging, by including the hallmarks of your brand and translating these into your content.
Branded medical illustrations
But what can you do to make sure that there is consistency in your brand? Using the services of a medical illustrator can help carry your brand into all the content that you use across all platforms, making sure that even the images you use are recognised as part of your brand before people see your logo or company name. Social media platforms are already saturated in content from companies competing for attention. Branded content can help you stand out from the crowd without being invasive, it can attract an audience in a more organically. It also helps to encourage loyalty and generate viewer engagement as you can create an emotional connection with people who can identify with your story or mission.
Medical illustrators can also take your brand identity and style guides and adopt these into your illustrations. At Now Medical Studios we have several examples of this in our portfolio, by telling your science story and combining this with your brand colours and style to create a look and feel that's unique to you.
Case Study
Find out more about how we created branded medical illustrations for the redesign of Entradas website.
Medical illustrations and diagrams can help explain your USP to your customers
Your company will no doubt have a clear unique selling point (USP), a product or service that you provide that is exclusive to you and the way in which you set yourself apart from the crowd. Your USP will likely form part of your key messaging on your website, but getting this to a wider audience can be challenging. Also, if your area of expertise is very niche then wordy explanations may cause your audience to switch off and quickly forget who you are. This is where medical illustrations or scientific diagrams can really help you.
There are many ways you can quickly explain your science—whether it's a drug's mechanism of action or how your medical device works—you can use illustrations or animations to onboard investors, patients, or even healthcare audiences to understand what you can offer and cement your USPs.
Standing out from your competitors
In a competitive marketplace, standing out from the crowd is important for the survival of your business, attracting a wider audience to understand what you do and increasing engagement is what you should be aiming for to take your company to the next level.
Branded medical illustrations can do this efficiently but also cleverly—helping to define who you are and differentiate your company from your competitors.
Using a striking and powerful image can also help you to be memorable to your audience making good quality illustrations an excellent investment. People can immediately identify your booth on conference floors or on social media thanks to your branded visuals.
Medical illustrations are also very versatile. In the beginning, you can invest in one "hero" graphic to help represent your business. Some medical illustration studios can cleverly repurpose one hero image across multiple channels: brochures, banner designs, posters, websites, and social media. This gives you a lot of return of investment (ROI), especially in the early days of your business growth. This can also prove invaluable at conference trade shows where your investment in medical illustrations will really be put to the test against your competitors.
Standing out to investors
Not only do you want to stand out from your competitors but you'll also want to attract the attention of your potential consumers and investors. If this is something that you want to do continuously through your website, or via your social media channels. But your medical illustrations will truly come into their own when you are preparing an investor pitch deck.
You'll be hard-pressed to find investors that are not tight for time, so you need to be able to explain quickly and efficiently what your technology does or the service is that you provide. Medical illustrations are a proven clear and engaging method of achieving this. We've all heard the phrase "a picture says a thousand words" but it really is true. Images and animations can help to quickly set the scene and get across your key messaging without wasting time verbally describing pathways or systems in great detail. Effective illustrations will give a highly polished edge to your presentations and help investors to buy-in on your ideas.
Marketing
If you are a small business then you may be undertaking a lot of the marketing yourself. This is normal for startups, but creating your own content can be risky and could potentially actually, be damaging to your brand. Inaccuracies or low quality work will leave a long-lasting and negative impact if you don't strike a good first impression.
Your budget may not allow you to take on a marketing team just yet, but commissioning a series of illustration assets that can be repurposed and used across online and print materials can be a very cost-effective solution and yield a great return on your investment.
Helpful medical illustration studios will set you up with tools and templates that you can edit yourself. This gives you more flexibility on your end and it also means that you don't need to commission them for a change or a small edit each time you need a new marketing blast.
Who can help?
Bringing a studio onboard in the early days gives you the added advantage that you can gradually add to your visual library marketing toolkit. The studio and your company can form a solid partnership, meaning as your brand grows and changes, your chosen studio will have a deeper understanding of your development and can more efficiently tailor your marketing materials to suit every step of the way.
If you found this useful and think your start-up could benefit from some medical illustration work, feel free to reach out to us to start a discussion on how we could help your project.
