The question we get most often from life sciences marketers is, “How can you help make my brand stand out in a sea of sameness?” That’s exactly the type of challenge we take on every day through our Future State Strategy, an integrated approach that starts with a defined end goal and works backward to align content, public relations, digital marketing, website development, and strategic storytelling. Let’s take a look at what that means, and how we’ve used this approach to help our clients reach their goals.
What is Future State Strategy?
At its core, Future State Strategy is about defining where a client needs to be, and then mapping the most efficient path to get there. We identify the gaps between what exists today and where our client needs to be tomorrow, and determine the right strategic mix to bridge those gaps with an optimized marketing and communications plan. Throughout this process we guide clients on positioning, perception, and industry leadership in biotech and life sciences, aligning every decision with their long-term business goals.
This approach goes beyond delivering individual cookie-cutter tactics, such as websites, media relations, or brand development.
Because no two companies are the same, each program is tailored to a client’s specific goals, and designed to bring the right capabilities together in a coordinated way.
For example, instead of just designing a website for a biotech innovator, we might craft a strategic narrative that accelerates partnerships with big pharma, using multiple tactics — including the new website, public relations, third-party media, social channels, and more — to support that narrative. By combining evidence and industry insight with creativity and imagination, our approach delivers efficient, high-impact strategies that help clients achieve their desired “future state” faster.
Putting it into practice
The following example highlights the content-focused elements of Future State Strategy, illustrating how targeted content and media tactics can work together to drive measurable results. Our client, a global biotechnology provider, was facing a crowded market, a decline in high-quality leads, and eroding brand awareness. It needed a plan of action to secure market recognition, promote lead generation, and stabilize its position as the first-to-market leader. To do this, we built a communications and media strategy that firmly positioned the company as a recognized authority within its industry.
Our first step was to assess the competitive landscape to identify the most advantageous positioning for our client. We used a proprietary method of industry, competitor, and audience auditing to find content expertise “green space”: critical industry concerns that our client’s competitors were completely ignoring, including topics, sentiment, points of view, and format diversity. Additionally, we identified areas of expertise important to the client, such as key business differentiators, subjects with high relevance to their products, and known customer pain points.
Once these strategic elements were identified, we built a content engine around them, developing a highly diverse campaign of premier and supporting assets — everything from technical whitepapers to interactive ebooks and top-of-sales-funnel blogs. Each piece of content was developed with a topic and format targeted to a specific audience to maximize its relevance to potential customers.
We then mapped the content to the specific stages of our client’s customer journey and known purchasing criteria. We deployed a lead generation campaign leveraging this compelling content through a precision, omnichannel media plan, targeting specific decision-makers within key audience segments, such as big pharma and contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs). We prioritized placement with trusted media partners that potential customers view as credible sources, maximizing engagement through high-quality visibility. Each element was tailored to the client’s competitive landscape, audience, and objectives to drive measurable results.
Exceeding goals
The end result of our integrated program surpassed expectations. Over the course of the campaign, our client’s content output greatly outpaced that of its competitors with a wider variety of topics and formats, enabling content to reach a broader audience where and when they were looking to engage. This content was also strategically planned to meet our client’s business objectives — for example, increasing content volume aligned to key purchasing criteria by 28%, and strengthening its positioning within the industry.
Thoughtful, data-driven planning that was logically tied to business goals and measurable outcomes made an appreciable impact.
We saw a 225% increase in high-quality lead generation, with more leads coming from large multinational and regional pharma companies and CDMOs.
Our efforts reached the right individuals within those organizations, with high engagement from decision-makers in R&D, manufacturing, and regulatory. Additionally, our multichannel approach showed strong engagement across all tactics, including an email click-to-open rate that was 50% higher than the industry benchmark. Ultimately, these results show that we didn’t just get our client back into the race, we put them in the lead.
A path to the future
HDMZ’s Future State Strategy is a roadmap designed to help life sciences brands create the future faster. It can be adapted to navigate the path to almost any objective, from visibility and engagement to brand transformation and digital integration. That’s why we ask life sciences companies: “Don’t just send us your brief. Tell us your problem.”
