Example Personalization Strategy for Stress-Reducing Pharmaceuticals

TherapeutiX is a made-up brand with a common challenge. Despite achieving top trial performance, TherapeutiX has declining customer acquisition and retention rates for its TX-C adaptogenic line. Our imaginary project goal is to boost TX-C line script lift by 10% with enhanced personalization of patient & prospect experience.

The slides below are a fictitious example of a team prep meeting for a new client.

The techniques outlined are based on our real experiences with MarTech and campaign performance optimization.

We outline an example approach for a starter 3mo project including:

Build & prioritize a relevant capabilities roadmap
Improve a compliant personalization framework that aligns with the ideal customer buying journey
Increase prospect awareness of the brand
[Background information: Elizabeth, client champion, is proposing D2C/C2C web & social vs. previous B2B2C & B2C HCP & traditional media approach]

📸Images generated using AI tools including DALL-E and Microsoft Designer.

Personalization Roadmap & Presentation Script

Hello Everyone and welcome. As you heard in our update last week we have a new client, TherapeutiX!

TherapeutiX has a product line called TX-C. These are semi-personalized adaptogens intended to help “discover your calm.” This was a campaign tagline that we brainstormed with Elizabeth, our client champion, as part of our pitch to her leaders. We met at MozCon last year and she is the new SVP of MarTech and Customer Experience at TherapeutiX. You’ll learn more about her and the team we are working with at the end of this presentation. “Discover Your Calm” is also a core element of the campaign that will manifest as a survey patient onboarding tool.

TherapeutiX is seeking our help to maximize the potential of their product with modern, digital, and personalized tactics.

We are having our kickoff meeting next week so I wanted to bring the project team together to:

Introduce TherapeutiX and their goals
Frame our minds towards their ideal customer profile
Understand their legacy tech stack
And review the high-level program plan as discussed with Elizabeth

So, what’s the problem?

TherapeutiX has a top-performing product that is facing declining customer acquisition and retention rates.

Their current go-to-market strategy relies on healthcare providers deciding to share a brochure with patients that promotes their synthetic anxiety medication alternative. I have requested that they mail us their collateral. We’ve got their physicians’ drug guide which details the over 300 solutions they offer. And their patient brochure. You can see their current imagery is quite scientific and as we know from our own experience, these assets create friction to adopt.

As for prompting awareness among the patient community - they have been running TV and print ads which haven’t seen much success. Science backs their claims, but customers are more aware of and moving to purchase from emerging startup competitors that offer less effective or even placebo options.

I want to stress that adaptogens are naturally formulated substances that can have both the impact of easing the symptoms of anxiety right now as well as improving the body’s resilience to cortisol over time. This is beneficial as compared to synthetic medication which can have extremely negative side effects, especially when taken with a cocktail of other synthetics. This often leads to customers needing to choose to live with one or more of their pains because of this conflict. Helping TherapeutiX succeed aligns with our mission to unlock the human potential of their customers too.

Alright, so what can we do?

Our goal is to boost their healthcare provider script lift by 10% with enhanced personalization.

We know we can achieve up to 25% boost in script lift with long-tail action on scaling these programs. For now, we aim to prove that 10% is possible within the bounds of our 12-week engagement. We have a 3-pillar approach reliant on: a prioritized capabilities roadmap, a compliant personalization framework that meets the customer on their ideal journey, and increased brand awareness through web and social.

Elizabeth, our champion, specifically requested a D2C and C2C approach with web & social. They have previously been reliant on B2B2C and B2C approaches through healthcare providers and traditional media as mentioned.

It makes sense that they came to us, given their ideal customer of GenZ and Young Millennials.

Tactically, their target customers’ purchasing habits are misaligned with their current legacy TV and Print-based marketing approach. Through this infrastructure initiative, we aim to build a digital, mobile, and social-first journey that empowers customers to have educated agency in their purchase. They are ready to explore the science behind adaptogens and associate traceability with their own health & safety. By the time they contact their Healthcare Provider (HCP), they are not seeking more information, they need approval to buy. In fact, this is the case for 70% of buyers.

As I alluded, TherapeutiX is behind in its digital transformation.

They have limited and fragmented insights due to disparate data collection processes with siloed, in-tool analytics. Deriving insights is a laborious Excel process that takes up a week across multiple people each quarter. Even that is messy because there is no single source of truth, and point-in-time data only goes so far.

One aspect of this project will be a quick pass at cleaning and unifying their data to understand and report on the funnel we are building with Microsoft PowerBI. This will also help improve the trust, accuracy, and consistency of data insights, reducing their time to react from quarterly adjustments to two-week intervals. This will help the team more accurately spot trends. They’ll also feel more in control and open to innovation, rather than operating in survival mode. Elizabeth mentioned seeing a lot of frustration across the teams right now.

We are entering a project that has a high potential for long-term engagement but we need to be conscious of what’s possible within the 12-week boundaries of this first project. I haven’t seen their CRM yet, but I expect some large technical debt for the management of customer data. In the short term, we will need to hit the ground running and show results fast in order to truly implement a personalized customer journey for the long term.

We are working with Salesforce, Marketo, and Drupal, all pretty development-heavy, so we will rely on the low-hanging fruit of building a funnel through social networks, automation of audiences and email, sales enablement, and updating their analytics to trace performance through these tactics. Again, we are tackling what’s possible right now, in the long term we’ll strive to alleviate the need for engineering support.

Alright, so what are we about to do?

To better understand their patients, we have requested some client prework. The TherapeutiX team is sorting relevant reviews, gathering 30 all-party consented telehealth script recordings from their Healthcare Provider partners, as well as data from their previous campaigns for comparison.

Our short-term 12-week plan is split here into 2-week sprints of execution and reporting.

Weeks 1-2: Starting next week, we will assess the current state of their funnel including people, processes, and technology. We already have some idea of their MarTech stack as I shared on the previous slide, but we’ll need to validate our plan and prioritize our opportunities.
Weeks 3-4: We will then go into build mode with a scientific approach towards adding personalization elements. I also anticipate we’ll need to do some data cleanup.
Weeks 5-6: So while we work with IT and marketing operations on building internal audience segments… In weeks 5-6 we’ll focus on honing the language of our promotions and then the visuals by utilizing in-platform demographic characteristics for audiences.
Weeks 7-8: We will then conduct our first trial of personalized content utilizing the enhanced customer audiences in weeks 7-8. We will retarget engagement actions such as visiting the website through our previously deployed ads to serve up influencer shorts. For existing patients, we can cross-sell by utilizing reviews where a customer added TX-C to their supplement stack. When we acquire new patients, we can leverage that energy by encouraging them to refer a friend. Personalized emails by product purchase is also something we can build a whole project around in the long term. All this should show an initial boost to script lift.
Weeks 9-10: The closing phase of our project is about seeding data to build a truly immersive and generative long-term commitment. As I mentioned earlier, we’ll be driving inbound to a “Discover Your Calm” survey. This is an onboarding tool that gives customers a sense of self-directed agency in their decision-making. It also automates the sales process and serves to structure consented personal data for a truly unique and immersive AI-backed customer journey down the road. For future projects, this could be a key input to chatbot service workflows and mParticle for example, and something we can scale across their product portfolio for holistic patient identities and a centralized experience with their core brand.
Weeks 11-12: We’ll build and present our final report. At the end of this project, TherapeutiX will have a solid baseline opportunity pipeline for TX-C that that meets our 10% script lift goal and should continue to see returns through the next phase of client project extension discussions.

This is a detailed overview of our bi-weekly project tasks.

I’m not going to read it right now but if you haven’t reviewed the deck yet, please do so ahead of next week’s meeting. You can see that we are starting with basic understanding, testing, and then iterating on aspects of our infrastructure before scaling audiences and elements of our pipeline. We are also focusing on achieving quality performance on one platform first before scaling to others. This helps to focus on what’s working and minimize waste as we scale.

Another element I’d like to mention is the organized placement of key evergreen web assets. We want to make sure we are checking the boxes of content that prospective patients are looking for. This includes showcasing science-backed findings, reviews, and the real humans behind the TherapeutiX brand more prominently on their site. The last phase of execution also involves deploying new guidance materials to healthcare providers to make sure they are enabled with the highest performing scripts and informed of the mindset change from sharing information with patients to more quickly facilitating prescriptions.

In the spirit of personalization, keep in mind that we are also personalizing the experience the TherapeutiX team is having with us by facilitating some unique experiences at the kickoff meeting next week as well as a celebration at the end of our project. I’ll be reaching out for some feedback and soliciting some ideas for this celebration from you all at a later time. So, think about something fun to do with them as we get to know their interests better.

Next week, we have our kickoff meeting!

I’ve shared our agenda here. We’ll start the meeting with Elizabeth. As mentioned, she is the new SVP of MarTech and Customer Experience for TherapeutiX. Really excited to have a transformational leader as our champion. She’s open to some big and innovative ideas but again, we need to make sure each contract extension balances short-term gains while nudging a legacy ship towards the ultimate goal of a fully immersive, personalized experience.

Kevin, I know you love games. I thought you would enjoy kicking off two truths and a lie. Feel free to suggest another bonding activity if you like as well. Mainly, we want to build a foundation of trust, communication, and help the team feel seen personally - just like we are doing for their patients with this project!

The core product marketing team responsible is Mark, Malika, and Raul. They will be with us in meetings every week. After we review the details of the project with them, we want to make sure that some key stakeholders are informed of their contributions to this project.

Thankfully, we have dedicated support from IT! We will work with Arjun to onboard to their MarTech stack and enrich data in the first month of the project.

Robin, SVP of Sales & Partnerships, will be engaged throughout to give feedback on findings and then more heavily towards the end as we implement the informed process and material changes to their relationship with their healthcare provider partners.

Some housekeeping: one of Elizabeth’s first actions was getting their team onboarded to Asana for project management. That’s great, we can work with Raul to create some structure and automation for our tasks. We also need to work with Arjun to onboard to their OneDrive and get access to their internal ticket request process for any technical updates or integrations that we’ll need to make.

Last action item - please connect with the team on LinkedIn. Send them a thoughtful message “Hi, I’m part of the team that you’ll meet next week. Looking forward to working together!” This helps them feel welcome to our collaboration.