Human health, animal health, and plant science — one metro, one talent pool
Eli Lilly, Roche Diagnostics, Elanco, and Corteva all run global headquarters within the same city — a life-sciences concentration 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 San Francisco 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 headquartered in Indianapolis since its founding in 1876 and remains the metro's largest private employer at roughly 23,500 U.S. employees, currently mid-way through a multibillion-dollar manufacturing buildout — including a $9B innovation park in nearby Lebanon — to meet demand for its GLP-1 drugs Zepbound and Mounjaro. That single company's expansion has pulled the rest of the cluster along with it: Roche Diagnostics is investing up to $550M through 2030 to build a 170-acre continuous-glucose-monitoring manufacturing campus in the metro, Elanco Animal Health relocated its global headquarters into downtown Indianapolis after its $7B acquisition of Bayer Animal Health, and Corteva Agriscience moved its global HQ from Wilmington, Delaware to a Zionsville Road campus here in 2020. BioCrossroads, the region's life-sciences development organization, counts more than 52,000 biopharma, life-sciences-distribution, and agritech jobs in Indiana plus another 17,000+ in medical devices — and in May 2026 regional leaders introduced 'BioHeartland' as a shared identity spanning human health, animal health, and plant science, betting that the combination is distinctive enough to market as one thing rather than three separate industries that happen to share a zip code.
A GLP-1 manufacturing boom is creating hiring urgency most marketing hasn't caught up to
Lilly and its supply chain are scaling capacity as fast as construction and hiring allow, which means recruitment marketing, supplier visibility, and vendor-facing content all carry more urgency here right now than in a typical pharma market — a slow-moving campaign timeline is a worse fit for this metro than most.
Four different regulatory worlds share one talent pool
Human pharmaceuticals, medical devices, animal health, and agricultural bioscience each answer to different regulators and buyers, but they compete for the same scientists, engineers, and technicians in one metro — content and employer-brand positioning has to be legible across all four without collapsing into generic 'life sciences' language that undersells the specific regulatory fluency each sub-sector actually needs to see.
'BioHeartland' is a brand new regional identity nobody outside Indiana knows yet
The unifying name only launched in May 2026, which means a company here can't yet rely on the region's own marketing to do positioning work for it nationally — the burden of explaining why this specific combination of industries in this specific metro matters still sits with each individual company's own content.
Corteva's move from Delaware validates the metro but doesn't yet show up in national search behavior
A Fortune 500 agriscience company relocating its global headquarters is a genuine signal of the market's depth, but national buyers still default to Silicon Valley or Boston associations for bioscience — a company here has to work explicitly to convert real market strength into the search and content visibility that strength should already command.
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 anchor companies directly. Their manufacturing buildout is pulling in contractors, equipment suppliers, and specialized service providers who all need to be findable by procurement teams and engineering leads doing vendor searches — a different, usually less contested, search landscape than competing for pharma-brand visibility directly.
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.