Life Science Marketing
For Companies Selling Into Pharma and Biotech

Lab construction, instrumentation, software, and specialist services all sell to the same buyer: a technical committee at a pharma, biotech, or research organisation that will not be rushed. We market to that buyer for a living, and three of our clients sell into it.

Talk About Your Buying Committee See How It Works

What is Life Sciences?

"Life science marketing is B2B marketing aimed at pharmaceutical, biotech, and research organisations, or at the suppliers selling into them. It is characterised by technical buyers, long procurement cycles, committee decisions, and claims that have to survive scientific and regulatory scrutiny."

Sound Familiar?

What suppliers to this sector tell us:

Your Site Does Not Survive Technical Scrutiny

A lab director, a facilities lead, and a procurement manager all land on the same page. One wants specifications, one wants compliance evidence, one wants a number. Most sites serve none of them.

The Sales Cycle Outlasts Your Attribution

A capital purchase or a facility build takes nine to eighteen months. By the time it closes nobody can say which marketing produced it, so the budget gets argued about every year.

Every Claim Needs Review

Content passes through technical and sometimes regulatory review before it goes out. So it does not go out, and the site goes stale while competitors publish.

You Sell to a Committee, Not a Person

Scientific, facilities, quality, and procurement all hold a veto. Marketing that speaks to one of them stalls at the other three.

Your Category Has Almost No Search Volume

Nobody searches for what you actually make. They search for the problem, the standard, or the application, and generic keyword work never finds those terms.

Marketing Is Somebody's Second Job

Direction exists. Capacity does not. Work gets scoped, half-built, and shelved when the quarter gets busy.

What We Do for Life Science Companies and Their Suppliers

Built for a technical buyer and a procurement cycle that will not be hurried.

A Site That Answers Technical Questions

Specifications, standards, applications, and project evidence organised so a scientific evaluator and a procurement lead can each find what they came for.

Search Visibility on Application Terms

Buyers search the problem, the standard, or the application rather than your product category. We find those terms and build the pages that answer them.

Content That Clears Review

Written to be accurate first so technical and regulatory reviewers approve it rather than rewrite it. Getting published is the point.

Attribution Across a Long Cycle

Tracking wired from first touch through to CRM outcome, so a deal that closes fourteen months later still points back at what created it.

Campaigns Aimed at the Committee

Paid and organic targeted at the specific roles that hold a veto, rather than at a job title that happens to be easy to buy.

Design That Reads as Credible

In this sector, polish that looks like consumer marketing works against you. Credibility is the design brief.

How We Work With Life Science Suppliers

Built around a committee with four vetoes and a long procurement cycle.

Committee and Evidence Audit

We map who has to agree, scientific, quality, facilities, and procurement, and check what your site currently offers each of them. Most sites serve the first and assume the rest happens on a call.

Build the Answers They Each Need

Specifications, validation and compliance support, installation reality, and commercial detail, each findable independently rather than bundled into one overview page.

Reach the Specification Stage

Application and standards content plus targeted paid, aimed at the research phase when the specification is still open, with attribution wired before the cycle starts.

Built For

This fits companies selling into pharma and research:

Selling into pharma, biotech, or research: lab construction, instrumentation, consumables, software, or specialist services

A life science organisation where someone owns marketing direction and the gap is execution capacity

Losing deals you never knew were open, because buyers shortlisted before contacting anyone

Unable to connect marketing spend to deals that close a year or more later

Publishing nothing because everything is stuck in technical review

Competing against larger suppliers with more visibility and a worse product

What life science marketing has to account for

Marketing into pharma, biotech, and research is not ordinary B2B with more jargon. Four things behave differently, and most programmes fail because they were built as though they do not.

The buyer is a committee with vetoes, not a champion with a budget. A scientific or technical evaluator judges whether it works. Quality or regulatory judges whether it can be used in a validated environment. Facilities judges whether it can be installed and maintained. Procurement judges the commercial terms. Any one of them can stop the purchase, and they are persuaded by different evidence. Marketing aimed at the champion alone generates enthusiasm that dies in review.

The cycle outlasts the reporting period. Capital equipment, facility builds, and platform software commonly take nine to eighteen months from first research to signature. Marketing that is judged quarterly against a cycle that long will always look like it is failing, which is how good programmes get cancelled in month seven.

Claims are load-bearing. In most sectors a marketing claim is a promise. Here it is something a scientist will check, and being caught overstating is worse than saying less. This is why content moves slowly through review, and why the fix is writing accurately from the outset rather than negotiating afterwards.

Search volume understates demand badly. The terms buyers use are applications, standards, and problems rather than product categories. A keyword tool reports these as too small to prioritise. They convert at rates that make the volume irrelevant.

Why the buying committee changes what you build

Once you accept that four people have to agree, the site stops being a brochure and becomes a set of parallel answers.

The technical evaluator needs specifications, methods, tolerances, and evidence the thing performs. The quality or regulatory reviewer needs standards, validation support, and documentation. Facilities needs dimensions, utilities, and installation reality. Procurement needs comparables and a defensible number.

Most sites in this sector serve the first of those and assume the rest happen on a call. The result is a shortlist you never entered, because two of the four could not find what they needed and moved on. The practical fix is unglamorous: give each of them a page, and make those pages findable independently.

Selling into pharma, biotech, and research

This is where our own work sits, and it is a distinct discipline from marketing a therapeutic.

Suppliers to the sector, laboratory construction, instrumentation, consumables, software, and specialist services, share a problem that the life science companies themselves do not have. Their buyer is highly sophisticated about the science and often completely unsophisticated about the supplier category. A lab director knows exactly what containment level the work requires and has bought a cleanroom perhaps twice in a career.

That gap is the opportunity. Content that explains how the purchase works, what determines cost, what goes wrong, and what to specify will outperform content about your company by a wide margin, because it meets a buyer who is genuinely trying to learn. It also happens to be the content nobody writes, because it feels like educating people out of a sale rather than into one.

The second difference is that these deals are usually project-shaped. There is a facility being built, an assay being brought in house, a platform being replaced. Marketing that catches the project early, while the specification is still being written, is worth several times marketing that arrives at the quotation stage. Practically, that means targeting the research phase and the standards, not just the buying phase.

What we actually do here

The work splits into four, and most engagements use two or three of them rather than all four.

The site, rebuilt so each member of the committee can find their answer and so the technical content is indexable rather than trapped in a PDF. See web development for how we build, and website maintenance for keeping it current afterwards, which matters more here than in most sectors because specifications change.

Organic and content, aimed at application and standards terms rather than category terms, written to clear technical review the first time.

Paid search and paid social, where paid search captures the specification-stage research and LinkedIn reaches the specific committee roles by title and organisation. The audiences here are small enough that precision matters more than reach, and small enough that creative fatigue arrives fast, which is why the design sits in the same team.

Marketing engineering, which in this sector is not optional. If the cycle is fourteen months, the only way to know what worked is to have wired CRM outcomes back to first touch before the cycle started. Retrofitting attribution after the fact does not work, and this is the single most common thing we are brought in to fix.

Where we are not the right fit

We market companies in and around life sciences. We are not a scientific communications agency.

We do not write regulatory submissions, clinical trial materials, medical education, or promotional content subject to FDA or EMA promotional review. Those are specialist disciplines with their own compliance regimes and the correct answer is a specialist firm.

We are also not the right choice if what you need is investor relations or fundraising communications for a clinical-stage company. That is a genuinely different job with a different audience.

Where we do work: the commercial marketing of products, services, and capabilities sold into pharmaceutical, biotech, and research organisations, and the marketing operation behind it.

How engagements usually start

Most begin with one function rather than everything at once, because that is how trust gets built in a sector where the sales cycle means you will not know for a year whether it worked.

A single capability on retainer, the site, paid, organic, or the technical layer, runs $4,000 to $6,000 per month. A multi-function build, where the site, the tracking, and the campaigns are set up together, runs $8,000 to $12,000. Running the full marketing operation against a pipeline number runs $15,000 to $25,000. Where the scope is bounded and well defined we sometimes start with a paid pilot instead.

Three months minimum, then month to month. In a sector with an eighteen-month procurement cycle, anyone offering you a thirty-day proof of concept is selling something they cannot deliver.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you actually know this sector?

Three of our clients sell into it: two in specialised laboratory construction and one in software for pharma and life sciences. That is where our credential is, and it means we know the buying committee, the procurement cycle, and the evidence a technical evaluator asks for. We are not a scientific communications agency and we do not write regulatory submissions or clinical content.

How long before we see results?

A rebuilt site or new campaigns go live in 60 days. Search visibility usually moves within 90 days. The honest caveat specific to this sector is that a procurement cycle of nine to eighteen months means pipeline created now may not close inside your fiscal year, which is exactly why the attribution has to be wired properly from the start.

What does this cost?

A single capability on retainer, the site, paid, organic, or the technical layer, runs $4,000 to $6,000 per month. A multi-function build runs $8,000 to $12,000, and the full marketing operation against a pipeline number $15,000 to $25,000. Where the scope is bounded and well defined we sometimes start with a paid pilot. Three months minimum, then month to month. In a sector with an eighteen-month procurement cycle, anyone offering a thirty-day proof of concept is selling something they cannot deliver.

Agencies keep producing content our technical team rejects. Why is this different?

The common failure is an agency producing volume that your technical reviewers reject, then blaming the review process. We write to be accurate first and treat review as a design constraint rather than an obstacle. We are also engineers, so the tracking that proves any of this worked gets built rather than promised.

Our category has almost no search volume. Is SEO worth it?

Usually yes, but not on the terms you would guess. Nobody searches for a product category they cannot name. They search the application, the standard they must meet, or the problem they are solving. Those terms are lower volume and far higher intent, and most competitors are not targeting them because a keyword tool ranks them as too small to bother with.

We have someone running marketing internally. How does that work?

Alongside them. In this sector the internal marketer is usually managing conferences, collateral, and a review process that consumes more time than the writing does. We take the site, the content production, and the technical layer, and we work inside your review workflow rather than around it, which is the part that most often breaks when an outside agency is added.

Losing deals you never knew were open?

In this sector most of the evaluation happens before anyone contacts you. Tell us who you sell into and we will tell you what a committee cannot currently find.

Built for a committee, not a champion
Content written to clear technical review
Attribution across an 18-month cycle

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Life Science Marketing For Companies Selling Into Pharma and Biotech