Orientation Marketing Ltd
A Boutique Approach to Pharma Marketing

In their many years of working together at leading B2B media providers in the pharmaceutical arena, Chris Lawson and Gareth Pickering had clients informing them that they were working with an agency, but too few gaining any value-add whatsoever. Most agencies do not understand their clients’ needs or simply repeat a similar program year on year. The duo strongly believed that there needs to be a tangible benefit to working with an agency that hiring a dedicated resource cannot provide. And that was what they set out to achieve for their clients when they laid the foundation of Orientation Marketing in 2015—an innovative life science and pharmaceutical marketing agency operating within specialist B2B scientific sectors.

The Orientation Marketing team, with their extensive experience in the pharma and life science industries underpinned by a pharmaceutical media background, fully understand what to look for in media suppliers. “As we understand the needs of both our clients and media suppliers, we have built uniquely close and equitable relationships with media suppliers, which brings a number of advantages to our clients,” states Chris Lawson, director, and co-founder of Orientation Marketing. “These include premium positioning, preferential rates, editorial opportunities and added value opportunities.” Moreover, since the whole team understands the pharmaceutical research space very well, it translates to a very efficient service while also allowing them to be proactive and identify clients’ opportunities that other agencies might not.

The company is uniquely positioned to offer clients several services that complement each other alongside full-service marcomms support. Their expansive service portfolio includes media planning, buying and campaign management, inbound campaign management, pay-per-click, creative services such as ad campaign concepting and design as well as content creation, including writing for blogs, whitepapers, technical articles and talking heads, video production, event management and hosting. Orientation Marketing takes a holistic approach to client campaigns where they fill in the gaps within a client’s skill set or delivers the campaign in its entirety if it is a new venture for them.

When we manage the lead nurture process and create the content, we can pay for audience access with selected vendors and nurture leads from different media sources, which is much more efficient from a lead generation and cost perspective

As a Certified SharpSpring Gold Partner, , Orientation Marketing achieves both brand awareness, lead generation and nurturing marketing objectives for their growing list of esteemed clientele. Lawson points out that even as almost all vendors offer some form of lead nurture program, the challenge with this service is that companies have to engage in a comprehensive program with the vendor, and as each vendor owns the content, it cannot be used with other vendors. “When we manage the lead nurture process and create the content, we can pay for audience access with selected vendors and nurture leads from different media sources, which is much more efficient from a lead generation and cost perspective,” he adds.

Today, in the wake of the pandemic, the lack of physical events has had a detrimental impact on an organisation’s business development and marketing efforts. Against this challenging backdrop, Orientation Marketing’s in-depth knowledge of inbound and content marketing enables them to help their clients efficiently pivot to other marketing strategies.

At Orientation Marketing, the golden thread weaving success is their corporate culture. “We cannot expect our colleagues to go the extra mile for a client if we don’t for them,” points out Lawson. The team at Orientation Marketing has ample opportunities for growth and learning and is given ownership of their roles and get to engage with clients and see the benefit of their work first-hand. What sets them apart is they strive to genuinely understand their clients’ preferences, habits, and challenges to offer customised services and function as a virtual extension of their marketing team.

For the road ahead, the company has drawn ambitious growth plans to expand beyond North America and have recently opened a new office in the EU. “Our goal is to be the biggest and best agency in the pharmaceutical space offering the most effective marketing solutions so that our clients can meet their objectives,” ends Lawson.