Human health, animal health, and plant science. One metro, one talent pool.
Eli Lilly, Roche Diagnostics, Elanco and Corteva all have global headquarters in the same city. That's rare enough that the region just gave itself a shared name for it.
Benchmarks in this market
- Qualified technical & recruiting inquiries
- +143%Qualified technical & recruiting inquiries
- Vendor and supplier RFP visibility
- +38%Vendor and supplier RFP visibility
- Time-to-fill on specialized technical roles
- -24%Time-to-fill on specialized technical roles
Illustrative ranges for engagements of this type, not verified Indianapolis-specific client data. Orientation, not a guarantee. Your starting point changes the range.
How we work here: Remotely from our Lahore office, with ET coverage for calls and travel for kickoffs. We don't claim a Indianapolis office we don't have.
Clients across every market
What's actually different about the Indianapolis metro
Eli Lilly has been based in Indianapolis since it was founded in 1876. It's still the metro's biggest private employer, with about 23,500 U.S. employees, and it's in the middle of a multibillion-dollar manufacturing buildout. That includes a $9B innovation park in nearby Lebanon to keep up with demand for its GLP-1 drugs, Zepbound and Mounjaro.
Lilly's growth is pulling the rest of the cluster along. Roche Diagnostics is investing up to $550M through 2030 in a 170-acre campus to make continuous glucose monitors. Elanco Animal Health moved its global headquarters downtown after buying Bayer Animal Health for $7B. And Corteva Agriscience moved its global HQ here from Wilmington, Delaware in 2020.
BioCrossroads, the region's life-sciences group, counts more than 52,000 biopharma, distribution and agritech jobs in Indiana, plus 17,000+ in medical devices. In May 2026, regional leaders launched 'BioHeartland' as one name covering human health, animal health and plant science. The bet is that the combination is distinctive enough to market as one thing, not three industries that happen to share a zip code.
The GLP-1 boom has made hiring urgent
Lilly and its suppliers are adding capacity as fast as construction and hiring allow. That makes recruiting, supplier visibility and vendor content more urgent here than in a typical pharma market. A slow campaign timeline fits this city worse than most.
Four regulated industries, one talent pool
Human drugs, medical devices, animal health and agricultural science each answer to different regulators and buyers. But they compete for the same scientists, engineers and technicians. Your content has to make sense to all four without sliding into vague 'life sciences' language that hides the regulatory know-how each one wants to see.
Nobody outside Indiana knows 'BioHeartland' yet
The name only launched in May 2026. So companies here can't count on the region's branding to do the work for them nationally. Each company still has to explain, in its own content, why this mix of industries in this city matters.
Strong market, weak national search presence
A Fortune 500 company moving its global headquarters here from Delaware says a lot about the market's depth. But national buyers still think of Silicon Valley or Boston for bioscience. Companies here have to work on purpose to turn real strength into search visibility.
What usually moves first in Indianapolis.
Based on what tends to be the binding constraint for companies in this market. Your audit may point somewhere else. We go where the numbers say.
Industry playbooks relevant in Indianapolis
The part clients actually remember.
Not the reports. The uncomfortable conversation that changed the trajectory.
Every agency before this one pitched us a better template. Digital Squad started by telling us our own locations were our biggest competitor in search, which was not what we expected to hear about our own website.
We'd worked with three agencies who all wanted to spend more on ads. Digital Squad was the first to open our P&L and tell us our hero product was losing money. That conversation was uncomfortable and it changed the business.
The repositioning work paid for itself in the first two closed deals. We stopped being the cheap option and started being the obvious one. Our reps say discovery calls feel completely different now.
Indianapolis questions, answered straight.
Yes, and it's often a better fit than working with the big companies directly. Their buildout is pulling in contractors, equipment suppliers and specialist service firms. All of them need to be found by purchasing teams and engineering leads searching for vendors, and that search is usually less crowded than competing for pharma brand visibility.
Other markets we work in
Let's look at your numbers.
A free 30-minute teardown of your funnel, ads, and site, run against what actually works in the Indianapolis metro. You keep the findings either way.