Earning Attention in Pharma
Pharma buyers are among the hardest in B2B to reach.
They're senior, specialist, know their field inside out, and have little patience for direct marketing tactics.
Earning their attention takes patience, immersion and a strategy designed specifically for this specialist market.
Why most pharma marketing gets ignored
Most of it is aimed at people who aren't the buyer, tries to push action before you’ve gained awareness, and talks about the product rather than the problem the buyer has.
The firms that do get through are the ones already present in the places their buyers pay attention to, long before there's a live opportunity.
The Twenty One Twelve approach
We help our clients build a solid pipeline in pharma through our Growth Engine methodology. The premise is simple: understand what your audience truly values, create something genuinely useful, then build the route from attention to commercial opportunity.
Every engagement starts with strategic analysis: what's worked, what hasn't, where the constraint actually sits and what needs to change. From there, we apply whichever parts of the Growth Engine are needed to move the business forward.
Want to understand where you sit?
Book a complimentary growth analysis.
Every Client is a Case Study
​InfoDesk · Regulatory intelligence software, B2B
Enterprise software sold to senior compliance and regulatory professionals across insurance, pharma and manufacturing, with six month sales cycles and an audience that spots generic marketing instantly. After a strategic reset focused on authority and targeted access, leads increased 224% and MQLs grew 70%.
"One of the very best I have ever worked with."
Kathy Harvey, Senior Director of Marketing, InfoDesk
​NeoOptima · Pharma In-Field Enablement, B2B
NeoOptima is part of Cencora. Twenty One Twelve was brought in when NeoOptima faced increasing competition from new market entrants. To help NeoOptima stand out, we started by rebranding the company. Now we are moving towards marketing maturity by executing various aspects of The Growth Engine.​
​Accessus · NHS market-access for pharma and healthcare leaders, B2B
Accessus works with pharma and healthcare leaders trying to get products adopted by NHS England. Twenty One Twelve has supported Accessus’ commercial director Rachel Hemmings across her last two roles. Rachel has selected Twenty One Twelve to help build the Accessus brand and market share.
ProfitAbility · Game-based learning, B2B
Experiential learning programmes sold to Learning and Development directors at global enterprises including big pharma. Prior to Twenty One Twelve growth depended on three or four industry events a year which they couldn't scale past. We built a community-led model around peer-hosted experiences and thought leadership, which delivered 80% year-on-year sales growth.
"They are not afraid to challenge a process or plan to ensure better outcomes."
Graham Hutchings, CEO, ProfitAbility
Built for scrutiny
Financial services marketing has to survive more scrutiny than most. Your content may pass through compliance, legal, senior management and several other stakeholders before a customer ever sees it.
We understand that this is part of the job, not an inconvenience that appears at the end of it. Claims are evidenced, drafts are built for review rather than rewritten after the fact, and approval timelines are planned into the process from the start.
We're not your compliance function and we don't sign anything off. We build marketing with the realities of regulated businesses in mind.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you know our market? We know how to reach it, and we've been doing so since 2016. We've run forums for regulatory affairs professionals, marketed enterprise software into pharma, and built demand among audiences that ignore conventional marketing. What we don't do is pretend to be a subject matter expert in your product. That's what your people are for, and the work is better when we use them properly.
How much does it cost to work with you? Retainers start at £5,000 a month plus VAT. Project work, brand and website builds among them, is quoted separately.
Our buyers don't respond to outreach. Does anything actually work? Not cold outreach on its own, no. What works is giving them a reason to know who you are before you ask for anything: a forum worth attending, research they can't get elsewhere, a peer they'd trust telling them you're worth a conversation. Outreach then does a different job, and gets a different response rate.
Most of our budget goes on trade shows. Is that wrong? Not wrong, usually under-used. Most firms spend heavily on the stand and almost nothing on the six weeks either side. The meetings that matter are booked before the doors open, and the pipeline is built afterwards. We work the whole cycle rather than the three days in the middle. We’ve supported clients at pharma industry events such as L-Ten and Momentum.
Our sales cycle runs six months or more and there's a buying committee. How do you measure anything before the end of it? By measuring the things that come before revenue. Which named accounts are engaging, how many people inside them, whether the right job titles are showing up, whether conversations are starting. If four people from one company attend your forum, that tells you something a lead count won't. We agree on those measures before we start.
Our content has to get through our client's internal review. Can you work with that? Yes, and we plan for it rather than discovering it late. Claims are evidenced, drafts are built to clear review rather than be corrected after it, and we work to the approval timelines that exist. We're not your regulatory function and we don't sign anything off.
We sell into pharma, but also into other regulated sectors. Does that change things? That’s not a problem, many of our tech clients do. The key is understanding the nuances between sectors and that a one size fits all approach won’t work. Part of the strategic analysis is working out what genuinely transfers and what needs building separately, rather than paying twice for the same thing or once for something that only lands in one place.