Percepture is an experienced Pharma Life Sciences marketing agency with a track record of success. We’ve worked with clients ranging from Fortune 100 companies and pharma tech start-ups, helping both to dominate search engine results pages and build their customer base.
Part of our Pharma marketing expertise is understanding the differences between those clients and how to effectively market their brands. Some agencies might specialize in enterprise pharma clients or direct-to-consumer marketing. At Percepture, our team of digital marketing and PR experts have experience that runs the gamut.
A big part of that experience is understanding how to work with life sciences experts. We have team members with experience in digging deeply into everything from FDA marketing regulations to technical cases studies.
Let’s take a look at three different kinds of Pharma Life Sciences Marketing audiences, the tactics agencies use to reach them, and the companies who can benefit from those strategies.
Business-to-Business CDMO Marketing
A major element of Pharma Life Sciences marketing isn’t about drug products, but about product formulation, manufacturing, and distribution. This is often the case for Contract Development and Manufacturing Organizations (CDMOs, sometimes also known as a CMO) and Contract Research Organizations (CROs).
A Pharma CDMO is a company that offers services to other companies in the pharmaceutical industry on a contract basis, allowing them to outsource elements of drug discovery, drug manufacturing, and drug marketing. This is useful for companies trying to scale production or streamline existing offerings. Learn more about how CDMOs from Pharma Source.
Percepture is expert at CDMO marketing across Pharma Life Sciences as well as CMOs and CROs in other industries. We have a track record that speaks for itself – search dominance, brand development, and helping CDMOs close seven- and eight-figure deals with new clients.
A big part of our success is understanding the psychology of CDMO marketing and what that means for our tactics. When we are marketing CDMO services, we’re not just targeting individuals – we are speaking directly to the needs (and profit motives) of other businesses with their own multi-million dollar budgets and capabilities.
That means CDMO marketing involves modeling both identifying likely individual personas, which range from procurement directors to C-suit members, but also the target companies who would be in-market for CDMO services. And, CDMO contracts are often not “click here to get started today” offerings. They can be multi-stage negotiations that can take months or years to develop from an initial client to a signed contract.
Helping our CDMO clients sign those contracts requires a depth of marketing knowledge, but also a layered approach to tactics to ensure visibility, findability, remarketing, sales funnel management, and ample content marketing to communicate trust factors and social proof.
Here are a few of the key strategies we use to bring our CDMO marketing campaigns to life.
Enterprise SEO Power. When it comes to CDMO services, it’s important that you appear at the top of every search related to your company’s capabilities. Each search placement can make millions of dollars of difference to your company! And, these can be narrow searches with long tails of results, since CDMO and CRO services are incredibly technical and specific. Percepture has a history of dominating search for CDMOs through a combination of existing website optimization and content marketing with both new and repurposed content.
Sales Funnel Management. The sales cycle for CDMO services can be a lengthy one, with prospects converting over the course of months or even years depending on the complexity of the solution. Creating high-converting CDMO marketing involves working hand-in-hand with business development teams inside the CDMO. Campaigns need to align with existing CRM systems and practices, but they can also require building out new funnel stages and accompanying lead-nurturing strategies and content.
Audience Modeling. CDMO marketing success requires understanding both the companies in-market for CDMO services and the roles with decision-making power for each product. We use an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) approach to focus advertising on that unique, limited number of businesses who could be potential clients. While there may be limited number of businesses with the right size and scope to engage with a CDMO solution, there could be dozens of individuals within each of those businesses who can initiate a process that could lead to a contract. Those individuals often have a diverse set of roles, which means they can’t all be targeted with the same marketing messages. Getting campaign messaging and targeting right requires expertise in audience modeling, persona research, and content development
Medical & Academic Professional Marketing
For some Pharma Marketing campaigns, the audience is not other businesses or potential patiences, but health care professionals. That can include influencing doctors to learn about new treatment options or getting cutting-edge equipment into research labs.
This is often the case for our biotech clients, who offer novel technology to accelerate product development and regulatory approval. But, it can also be the case when it comes to launching a new branded medicine to market.
Of course, both of those types of marketing come with their own complex rules and restrictions. But, our expertise in marketing to health care professionals extends beyond understanding the rules and how to follow them.
Targeting medical professionals with effective marketing is a complex practice that requires years of experience. There’s no single website they all use and not just one conference where they all congregate. And, these professionals aren’t acting on their own behalf – they are influencing purchasing and prescribing decisions for companies, offices, hospitals, laboratoris, or entire health systems!
That makes these campaigns B2B marketing with a B2C spin – because the individual personas of these consumers are as important as their employers!
An expert Pharma marketing agency will understand how to model these potential customer contacts as well as their targeted companies. A huge part of that is understanding the idea of “expert-to-expert marketing,” which leverages industry-specific vocabulary and technical terms to communicate complex topics directly to the audience who will best understand them.
Expert-to-Expert Marketing. When crafting campaigns that target medical professionals and academics, the messaging should be by experts for experts. This audience wants information – and they want it delivered efficiently. Where you might typically avoid jargon or industry-specific language in an ad campaign, that language helps your expert audience understand an ad is speaking directly to them and their subject matter expertise. Campaigns with the highest clickthrough rates (CTR) are often closely linked with a content marketing approach that offers fact sheets, case studies, and webinars in exchange for a click or conversion.
Cross-Platform Audience Demographics & Targeting. Much like in CDMO marketing, an ABM approach to marketing helps these campaigns find success. Campaigns targeting medical professionals and providers aren’t your typical broad ad campaigns that can run based on keyword targeting! Making sure ads can be seen by these specific professionals involves modeling their personas and job roles, as well as the companies where they work and sometimes even their physical locations. Then, that demographic targeting can be applied to audiences on social media networks and in programmatic advertising tools.
Lead Nurturing & Conversion. It’s often the case that the products or services in these campaigns aren’t simple “click here to purchase” transactions. In order to turn an ad conversion into a sale, the sales funnel needs a steady cadence of lead nurturing that includes compelling content as well as a opportunities for human connection to internal subject matter experts experts. That involves integrating the advertising approach with internal teams behind just business development to fine tune every step of the lead nurturing process.
Direct-to-Consumer Pharma Marketing
A major trend in Pharma Marketing in the United States in 2025 is the power consumers have over their own health.
We’ve seen an explosion of direct marketing to consumers, especially in categories where people want to take control of their own health rather than wait for a diagnosis from their primary care physician.
A major part of this trend is Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs for weight loss being marketed directly to individual patients. Some people go to their own health care providers for prescriptions, while others engage with boutique brands that offer telehealth prescriptions. The same is true for medications to combat hair loss and to support fertility and sexual health.
That means there’s a new, wider range of pharma life sciences companies engaging in direct-to-consumer marketing. Not only are drug manufacturers marketing their brand drugs – both prescription and OTC – but providers and health systems are also directly marketing themselves as potential prescribers.
In a market with a renewed focus on pharma brands reaching their consumers directly, it’s important to understand what’s possible and what’s legal based on guidelines from agencies like the FDA, the CFIA, and the EMA. The rules are not the same in each country – and regulations and legal challenges are changing all the time.
Here are some of the tactics an experienced agency brings to the table for these clients in an ever-shifting landscape:
Regulatory Environment Awareness. Direct-to-consumer pharma advertising can be a minefield when you don’t have a partner experienced with running ad campaigns in a highly-regulated vertical. Ad language, imagery, and disclaimers need to be reviewed with legal and regulatory guidelines in mind, and those guidelines can differ by product, by physical location, and by advertising network.
Remarketing & Protected Health Information. When it comes to sensitive decisions about their health, people aren’t ready to make a change after seeing just one ad or piece of content. Pharma Marketing campaigns often need multiple touches on a prospect before they are ready to engage in a sales process. Even once they begin the process they might need active lead nurturing to keep them engaged and move them downfunnel towards a conversion. Getting this right isn’t only about understanding buyer personas. It also involves understanding Protected Health Information (PHI) and the rules around how to communicate about medical conditions and treatment – which affects everything from the language in follow-up comms to the technology required in a CRM.
The Power of Branded Experiences. Successful Direct-to-Consumer pharma marketing often hinges on trust signals and social proof. Especially when it comes to new treatment options or telehealth, prospects expect a high standard of transparent communication to put them at ease. That means a D2C pharma marketing campaign needs more than just ads – it must be backed with content that might include video testimonials, FAQs, interactive tools like calculators, and even mobile apps that speak in the voice of your brand.
Work with an agency that understands Pharma Life Sciences Marketing
Whether you work for a CDMO trying to expand your client base or are focused on bringing a new drug to market, you need an agency partner with experience in communicating directly with the audiences who drive your business.
Percepture is an experienced Pharma Life Sciences Marketing Agency with a substantial record of helping our clients with major wins – everything from website relaunches to search dominance to securing multi-million dollar contracts. Get in touch today to learn more about the strategies we would use to help your business succeed.
