THE CHALLENGE

Pelago Bioscience helps drug discovery teams make earlier, more confident decisions. Their core technology, CETSA®, allows scientists to see what’s really happening between a compound and its target under native biological conditions, so teams can progress, pivot, or stop their programmes with real evidence behind the decision.

In a crowded market, CETSA offers something unique. But a lot of their content wasn’t making that USP felt. It was accurate and safe, describing what CETSA does and how it works, rather than what it means for the person using it.

Their three core audiences of strategic decision-makers, R&D scientists, and project leads each come with different pressures and questions they have to answer. And this means each needs different messaging to build trust.

The Pelago Bioscience team wanted strategic content that could move a hesitant lead toward a confident decision, not just explain the features of their technology.

But they didn’t come to us with a fixed content brief. They came with a bigger question: how do we say this in a way that actually lands?

OUR APPROACH

We started with a strategic messaging workshop to help the team move from simply describing what they do to thinking about what prospective buyer personas need to feel to trust them.

We then unpacked their audiences, content pillars, and the emotional territories each one needed to hear – confidence, clarity, relief, trust – working through our ‘Features to Feelings’ framework.

From there, we built a messaging matrix that aligned each persona’s real questions to the right message, proof point, and tone. This became the basis for a phased programme of high quality science-led content with campaigns built around a single emotional throughline and prioritised against Pelago Bioscience’s wider business goals.

We’ve produced a broad range of content for them over the retainer, from top-of-funnel blogs and LinkedIn assets that focus on building awareness, to email nurture sequences and in-depth case studies that nurture hesitant leads and give them the evidence to move forward.

Instead of a fixed package delivering an agreed number of assets against a set brief, we support their content creation through our flexible points-based retainer. This provides their stretched marketing team with the confidence that we’re always there to help them, along with the flexibility to deliver a variety of activities as and when needed.

This means we’ve been able to adjust direction as priorities shift quarter to quarter, reprioritising campaigns, shaping a new format, or responding to something that wasn’t on the plan six months ago.

When Pelago Bioscience then made the strategic acquisition of medicinal chemistry and synthesis experts RG Discovery, that flexibility meant we could step straight into supporting them with the new content they needed straight away, without starting a new process from scratch.

KEY RESULTS

Messaging matrix adopted as single source of truth across sales, marketing, and CRM

4 campaigns created across 6 months, as well as standalone assets

Retainer relationship extended into new work as Pelago Bioscience’s business grew

WHAT THEY SAID

“First Create the Media has become a trusted extension of our marketing team. We really enjoy working with them. They understand our science and our business, and the customer stories they’ve created for us really capture what we want to say.”

Maria Hjortsmark

Head of Marketing & Products, Pelago Bioscience

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