One-size-fits-all paid media strategies rarely work for life science companies, where target audience sizes can be diverse and deal sizes range from $50 reagent orders to million-dollar CDMO contracts.
So, how can you build a paid media channel strategy that is optimized for your specific offering and target market to deliver the best possible results?
To unpack how to build a program that works, I sat down with three of Supreme Group’s most experienced paid media strategists: Irene Lecker, PhD, Director of Performance Marketing at Supreme Optimization; Mihaela Pupavac, PhD, EVP of Operations at Supreme Optimization; and Eric Southwell, Chief Growth Officer at Supreme Group. Between them, they have decades of experience in building effective paid media programs for life science and healthcare organizations.
Finding the Right Channel Strategy for Each Life Science Company
Paul: When a new life science client comes in, what info are you reviewing and auditing to decide where to start?
Irene: First, we look at the business goal and the target audience we need to reach. Then we audit the website and conversion path to check whether it’s well set up to convert the traffic we’d send, or if we would just be filling a leaky bucket.
From there, budget and audience size tell us what channels we can realistically use and how precisely we can target. We also look at the brand’s existing awareness and performance data, because if nobody knows you exist, awareness tactics may need to come before lead generation.
Finally, we assess the assets that are already in place, such as a whitepaper library, customer stories, and existing campaigns, to see what is performing well and what we can potentially repurpose or amplify.
In our experience, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy or perfect paid media platform for life sciences, only the best combination of platforms for where a company is, at that point in time.
Paul: When we say “life sciences,” we could be talking about wildly different businesses, from $50 reagents to $100,000 confocal microscopes to million-dollar CDMO engagements. How should paid media strategy differ across them?
Mihaela: There’s a lot of variability to account for, but the price point of the product or service is not what should drive the paid media strategy. The size of the company, the target audience, the overall budget, and existing brand awareness will influence the strategy more than the price point.
For example, in the CDMO space, deal values are typically much higher, often reaching into the millions. As a result, a lead costing $500–$2,000 can still represent strong value if it has the potential to convert.
For products such as reagents and consumables, the economics are different. Rather than focusing primarily on cost per lead, we would typically evaluate performance against return on ad spend (ROAS), with a target of approximately $2–$5 in revenue for every $1 invested in advertising.
Paul: In the past, capital-equipment companies have told me they can't run paid search ads because nobody's looking for their product. But what I'm hearing from you is that these tactics still work in a niche market, even at a high cost per lead, if the return justifies it. Is that fair?
Mihaela: Yes, it’s absolutely worth trialling paid search if the potential ROI is there. You just have to place your dollars strategically, test, and move budget toward what works.
Generally speaking, if you’re selling very large, expensive instruments, you’ll want to lean more into paid social lead generation, such as LinkedIn, then consider expanding into programmatic or Facebook. That’s because when there isn’t a lot of search volume to capture, paid social lets you target potential buyers by job title, company, and industry, rather than waiting for them to search.
Irene: I also think it’s important to note that, at Supreme, we recommend a funnel approach, where you’re going to need to hit multiple touchpoints across multiple platforms. You can start with awareness that builds trust, most likely on paid social, but eventually the audience will be ready to convert, and that usually happens through a search ad.
Is Paid Search Still Worth The Investment in 2026?
Paul: A lot of marketers say Google has simply become too expensive to bother with. Is that true, or is it a sign the campaign isn’t set up to maximize return?
Mihaela: I don’t think companies can say, “Oh, it’s too expensive to advertise.” It’s too expensive not to advertise. Cost per click has roughly kept pace with inflation, so it’s a little higher, but cost per lead hasn’t really moved.
Eric: Google is just a marketplace. A click is worth what someone will pay for it. If ten companies bid on a keyword, whoever can profitably afford the highest bid wins. What keeps it profitable is how well their website converts traffic into leads that deliver a return.
The real question marketing leaders should ask is not whether advertising is expensive, but whether they’re getting the return. When they’re not, it’s usually a website problem.
Irene: I would also say that Google is cheaper than most platforms, and when you’re targeting a niche audience a $10 click is worth it if it’s the right person and they’ve shown genuine intent. We have a rigorous process for finding the right keywords, so it’s worth bidding more on the right keywords to reach the right people that matter and drive conversions.
Paul: So, if you had a limited budget and had to pick one channel to test first, where would you start?
Eric: It really depends on the nature of the organization, their goals, and the state of their website. In short though, if you have an awareness problem, I’d recommend LinkedIn. If your awareness is already strong, I’d recommend Bing.
The cost per click for Bing is typically about half what you’d pay on Google, and we know many researchers and scientists are required to use PCs for any search they do, whether that’s products, reagents, or anything else. On a university laptop you often can’t download external software like Chrome, so the Edge browser and its default search engine Bing are what you’re left with.
Mihaela: There’s an AI citation benefit for Bing too: a lot of research now happens in Copilot, and running Bing Ads makes you eligible to appear there.
Proving ROI & Winning Internal Buy-In
Paul: Let’s talk about the really hard part, proving it works. What’s the state of attribution in life sciences marketing in 2026?
Mihaela: It’s evolved a lot in our ten-plus years of running paid ad campaigns. The biggest change is that most clients now have at least some CRM integration with their ad platforms which really helps them to track and see the value.
That being said, while many marketers understand the importance of funnel and awareness work, proving it to leadership has always been hard. Attribution tools now show more of the cross-channel journey and that really helps with demonstrating the overall ROI of marketing activity. I would say bottom-of-funnel attribution is largely solved, but the upper funnel is still a challenge.
Paul: What, specifically, makes the upper funnel more challenging?
Irene: When it comes to top-of-funnel activity, there are lots of things you can’t easily measure like brand perception and awareness, so it may feel like they’re not important, but they are. If your total addressable audience is 20,000 people worldwide and the right person saw your ad and messaging, that impression counts for something, even if you can’t easily track it at the individual level.
This gap in attribution creates tunnel vision and when one channel shows a strong ROI, the instinct is to pour everything into it. We’ve seen long-standing clients reach that point with Google and assume it’s carrying itself, when in reality it’s been fed by years of full-funnel awareness work. If you switch that off it will keep performing for a while, but eventually it collapses.
Much of what looks like search performance is, in effect, retargeting. Buyers end up on Google to search for a product they have already heard of, but only after you’ve reached them everywhere else first. That’s the core challenge with attribution, many companies only optimize for what they can measure.
Paul: So, how do you help a client defend that top-of-funnel spend to their leadership?
Irene: I spend quite a bit of time educating them so they’re armed with the same knowledge I have, to go and make the case internally. The reports we produce are easy to share with exec teams and turn the in-house marketer into an ambassador.
Eric: We also eat our own dog food at Supreme and invest a lot in top-of-funnel thought leadership marketing activity, for example with this podcast, the Supreme Pod, which we then use to create thought leadership content for multiple channels and amplify with advertising.
Paul: If thought leadership moves the needle, why aren’t more companies doing it?
Irene: Thought leadership absolutely works, but ideally it has to be a person, and it can be really hard to find somebody willing to get involved. But when a company does find someone willing to be an external SME, the results follow. The SMEs often get direct messages from ideal customers, and that trust makes the sale easier. Some of our best LinkedIn deals came from SME thought leadership on social.
Solving An Awareness Problem
Paul: So many life science brands say their real problem isn’t competition, it’s that nobody knows they exist. How do you approach that?
Eric: When it comes to building awareness, life science companies often default to trade shows, which have their place. But if your budget is limited, LinkedIn can offer more targeted awareness for the same budget. At a conference, you pay for flights, hotels, a booth, and creative, then reach only those who attended. With LinkedIn, you can run an always-on trade show, 24/7, targeted to exactly the right audience.
Irene: Video content is also a valuable awareness asset and it can be used across multiple formats and channels. People may not click, but it brings your story to life in a way that builds trust and engagement. Previously, high-quality video was very expensive to produce, but now the use of AI is making it much more accessible.
As a recent example, we had a client with a great story but zero bandwidth. Luckily, we had recorded the CEO on the kickoff call, speaking about the product’s mechanism, the company’s origin, and the first patient. We were able to cut three awareness videos just from that rough recording. With the CEO’s permission, we cloned his voice using the AI software ElevenLabs, tidied the script, and set it to stock footage and simple animation. The videos are performing well. We grew the LinkedIn following from around 500 to 5,000 in five months, just from this video content and amplifying it with paid budget.
Paul: Looking ahead, where do you see the next untapped way to build awareness on a small budget?
Irene: It’s always worthwhile looking at B2C trends to see what might be the next big opportunities in B2B. Influencer marketing is a good example because people trust people more than brands. In my view, grad students and postdocs posting day-in-the-lab content are an untapped opportunity for life science brand partnerships, because those researchers buy and influence everything in the lab, from reagents to equipment.
Programmatic Advertising, Demystified
Paul: What exactly is programmatic advertising and when is it the right fit for a life science company to test it?
Mihaela: Programmatic advertising is the use of automated and algorithmic tools to run an ad on any digital surface that exists in the world, whether that’s a billboard in Times Square, an Uber screen, or standard web and mobile displays. The reach is huge, the targeting options are very granular, and we’ve seen strong results for our clients.
Programmatic is a good option to consider when you want to expand reach for a small, high-value audience and to be in front of them everywhere. But it’s not a starter channel, more like the third or fourth channel you would add to your paid media mix.
Irene: I always cite the Minority Report scene where Tom Cruise walks through the mall and the ads are calling out his name. That’s the kind of experience programmatic can help achieve for our clients’ customers. The approach can provide a constant reminder of the brand, across different platforms, services, websites, and plenty of places that aren’t digital at all.
The Key Takeaways From Our Conversation
No single channel or strategy is the answer to life sciences or healthcare paid media, but organizations can lean on a few core principles:
Fit the strategy to the company: Size, budget, goals, and vertical should drive your strategy. There is no perfect, one-size-fits-all platform approach.
Don’t focus on the cost, focus on the return: Judge every platform on the return it generates, not the price of a click or lead, and fix the conversion path before you blame the platform.
Lean into video content for awareness building: AI has made it affordable even for small teams with limited time and budget, and video content works across multiple platforms.
Don’t let bottom-of-funnel ROI create tunnel vision: If you starve the upper funnel, the whole funnel collapses. Make sure you still assign adequate spend to the parts of the funnel that are harder to measure.
Thought leadership shortens the sales cycle: Build trust and awareness with thought leadership content, amplified by paid.
Programmatic isn’t just a buzzword: It puts your brand on almost any digital surface, which makes it a powerful way to stay in front of small, high-value audiences.
