Marketing for biotech
Your audience is small enough to write down and your deals are large enough that one conversation can change the company. Sessions were always a proxy. Here is what to measure instead, and what your current spend is actually leaving behind.
The short answer
That has always been true. What changed is that the first screen of the search now frequently returns one paragraph naming three companies instead of ten links, and nobody on a two-person marketing team has a way of knowing whether they were one of the three.
Side by side
Most marketing advice is written for a funnel with thousands of entries. Applying it here produces a lot of activity and very little that a partner would notice.
| B2B software | Biotech | |
|---|---|---|
| Buyers who matter | Thousands. The funnel is a statistical object. | Often fewer than fifty people worldwide, and you could write most of them down. |
| Value of one conversation | A deal, repeatable, forecastable. | Potentially the company. Partnership and licensing terms are not a pipeline line item. |
| Cycle | Weeks to quarters. | Quarters to years, with diligence that revisits the same public record repeatedly. |
| What a win looks like | Signups, pipeline, attributable revenue. | Being on a shortlist you were never told existed, assembled by someone you never met. |
| Useful metric | Sessions, conversion rate, cost per acquisition. | Whether you are named when a buyer describes the problem, and whether the description is right. |
| Where the record lives | Mostly your own site and your own product. | Mostly elsewhere: registries, databases, wires, abstracts. You control a minority of it. |
Where the money goes
None of this is an argument for cutting any of it. It is an argument for knowing which parts leave a record an engine can read, because that is the part that keeps working after the quarter ends.
| Spend | What it is good at | What it leaves for an engine |
|---|---|---|
| Partnering conference | The meetings. Still the highest-value thing most biotechs do. | Almost nothing durable, unless a session, abstract or write-up ends up indexed. |
| Website refresh | Credibility with a human visitor who already arrived. | A great deal, if the asset detail is in the page text. Nothing, if the pipeline became a graphic. |
| Wire release | A dated, quotable fact in a source engines read and trust. | Strong for a while, then stale. It records what happened, not what is true now. |
| Posters and publications | Technical credibility that nothing else buys. | A lot, but often filed under author names and compound codes that never join up with the company record. |
| Reaching named individuals you already identified. | Very little. It is largely closed to the crawlers and it scrolls away. | |
| Registry and database hygiene | Nobody’s favourite afternoon. | More than any other line here, per hour spent, and it is usually nobody’s job. |
If there are two of you
Not keywords. The sentences a partner, a scout or an investor would actually type, in their words, describing their problem rather than naming you. If business development cannot produce that list in an hour, that is itself the finding.
Put them to the engines and record whether you were named, what was cited, and who was named instead. One pass is a sample rather than a measurement, but it will tell you within an afternoon whether you have a problem worth spending on.
Asset names, stages and indication wording, in the page text, matching what the registries and databases already say. New content on top of a contradictory record mostly adds another version for an engine to choose between.
Pick them before you start and never touch them. When the numbers move six months later, the untouched set is the only thing that can tell you whether it was you or the market. It costs nothing and it is the only honest answer to “did this work”.
That fourth step is the one everybody skips, including most vendors in this category. It is also the only one that turns the rest into evidence — we wrote the method down in full.
Questions
Most companies at this stage run one or two people, often with another job attached. That is not the constraint people think it is. The audience is small enough to name, so the work is closer to business development support than to running a demand funnel, and the leverage is in the record rather than in volume.
Indirectly and weakly. The conversations are the point of a booth, and they are worth it. But a booth leaves almost no durable public record, so it does very little for the question an engine answers six months later. A session abstract or a poster that ends up indexed does more for that, and costs less.
Yes, with a short memory. Wire releases are read by the engines and they do get cited, which makes them one of the few reliable ways to put a dated, quotable fact into the public record. What they do not do is stay current. A release is how a fact enters the record, not how it stays true.
Whether you are named in the answer to the questions your buyers actually ask, how that moves over time, and whether the movement came from your work rather than the market. Sessions measure a channel that was never the channel; for a purchase with a dozen buyers, a mention is closer to the thing you are buying.
Related reading
The technical half of this page: the five records an engine reads about a pipeline, and the four disagreements that cost a mention.
What changes when the buyer is a licensing scout and the product is one preclinical asset.
Our own measured numbers for the measurement itself, and an honest account of what the rest costs.
The holdout in full, including the three things it still cannot tell you.
Start here
The free diagnostic: how public sources describe your company and your main product today, where they disagree, and which disagreement to fix first. Every line links to the page we read it from. Nothing is published anywhere without your written approval.