Case study | Clinical trial supply | Pharma B2B
Finding pharma buyers in a market full of the wrong audience
Clinical Services International supplies the drugs and logistics behind clinical trials worldwide. Their buyers are a small, finite group of sponsors and CROs. The internet is full of everyone else. This is how we built acquisition that goes after the few.
The client
CSI provides global clinical trial supply services for Phase I to III studies and beyond: comparator drug sourcing, forecasting, quality and regulatory support, storage, and distribution, across the UK, US, Europe, and China. Their customers are pharmaceutical and biotech sponsors, and the CROs running studies for them. It is pure B2B, with long sales cycles, expert buyers, and contracts large enough that a single relationship matters.
The challenge
The loudest audience is the wrong one
Search demand around clinical trials is dominated by patients hoping to join a study. The people who actually buy clinical trial supply are a small, finite universe of sponsors, CROs, and supply-chain decision-makers. Any channel optimized for volume drifts toward the patient audience, because there are far more of them. Worse, every enquiry from the wrong audience teaches the bidding algorithms to go find more of exactly that. This is a structural feature of the category, not a mistake anyone made.
Paid search
Optimizing for the right lead, not the cheap one
We run the account on an explicit rule: lead quality outranks cost per lead. A qualified company-level enquiry is worth paying properly for; a cheap patient enquiry is worth nothing. In practice that means disciplined negative-keyword work as a strategic activity rather than housekeeping, tight match types that protect B2B intent, competitor and location queries treated as precision buys, and a conversion definition rebuilt so that B2B-qualified enquiries are counted separately from general enquiries. Until the machine is told what a good lead looks like, it will optimize toward the wrong one.
Organic and AI search
Content written for experts, and for engines
Sponsors and CROs research before they ever fill in a form, and increasingly they research through AI assistants as well as Google. We run an ongoing programme of expert guides on clinical trial supply topics, built to be useful to a specialist reader and structured to be quoted by AI engines. The same asset earns organic visibility, gets cited in AI answers, and gives the sales team something worth sending.
AI implementation
An assistant that qualifies at the front door
The same filtering problem exists on the website itself, so we attacked it there too. We built and deployed a retrieval-based AI assistant that answers questions from CSI's approved content, qualifies inbound business enquiries, filters misrouted visitors, and hands off the qualified ones with structured metadata attached. Because it operates in a regulated industry, it runs on a zero-retention model tier with UK hosting, and is built to decline anything outside its approved scope. It went through the client's legal review, not around it.
How we implement AI Pharma marketingHow we judge it
The honest measure in an account like this is not cost per lead, impressions, or raw conversion count. It is the share of enquiries that are real company-level buyers, and whether those enquiries reach the sales team with enough context to act on. That is the number we manage the account against, and it is the one we report to CSI. We do not publish a client's commercial performance data, and we would treat yours the same way.
What is fair to say publicly: this is a long-running engagement that now spans paid search, organic and AI search, an ongoing expert content programme, conference support, and a production AI assistant. In a category where a single relationship can matter for years, that continuity is the result.
Frequently asked questions
What does CSI do?
Clinical Services International (CSI) provides global clinical trial supply services for Phase I to III studies and beyond: comparator drug sourcing, forecasting, quality and regulatory support, storage, and distribution. Their clients are pharmaceutical and biotech sponsors and the CROs running trials on their behalf, across the UK, US, Europe, and China.
What was the core marketing challenge?
In clinical trials, the loudest search demand comes from patients looking to join a study, while the actual buyers are a small, finite universe of sponsors, CROs, and clinical-supply decision-makers. Any channel that optimizes for volume drifts toward the patient audience, because there are simply more of them. The work was to build acquisition that ignores the crowd and finds the buyers.
Why is lead quality the metric instead of cost per lead?
Because the economics are asymmetric. A single qualified company-level lead can become a long-running supply contract, while a high volume of patient enquiries has no commercial value at all. A qualified pharma buyer is worth paying properly for; ten cheap enquiries from the wrong audience are worth nothing and actively mislead the bidding algorithms.
What did you build with AI?
A retrieval-based assistant deployed on the CSI site that answers questions from approved content, qualifies inbound business enquiries, filters misrouted visitors, and hands off qualified enquiries with structured metadata. Because it operates in a regulated industry, it runs on a zero-retention model tier with UK hosting, and is built to decline anything outside its approved scope.
Is this engagement ongoing?
Yes. CSI is a long-running client. The work spans paid search, organic and AI search, content, conference support, and the AI assistant, and it continues to develop.
Recognise the problem?
If your category buries a small number of real buyers under a much larger irrelevant audience, that is the problem we are built for. Regulated, technical, long sales cycle, expert buyer.
