Xolair
Defining a content strategy to empower patients to talk to a doctor and successfully stay on treatment.
Role: Freelance senior content strategist
Agency: POSSIBLE
Client: Xolair
Third-party Partners: Geometry, Melt
The challenge
Xolair is a black-box injectible treatment for severe chronic hives as well as allergic asthma. Choosing to be treated with Xolair is a serious decision:
Patients must receive monthly injections in a medical setting.
Treatment costs approximately $30K a year.
Any injection can trigger patients' airways closing (in the worst case scenario, leading to death).
But, for patients that have tried many other treatments and suffered for years, the time, cost, and risk are worth a chance to a return to normal life.
Prospective and current patients were not finding the answers they needed on Xolair.com to help them decide if they were ready to seek treatment or if they could afford to stay on treatment.
The solution
Possible's strategy leads completed discovery and user research by formally setting goals for the project:
Motivate patients to take action from each stage of the treatment journey.
Shorten the path to valued actions for patients (speaking to their doctor, pursuing financial assistance).
I then translated these goals to a content strategy. We needed content that:
Provides clear paths of valued actions to move from diagnosis to treatment–particularly clear calls to action and keeping navigation relatively shallow.
Answers patients' questions in a clear and easily understandable way–e.g., simplifying language and sentence structure.
Offers emotional motivation through stories and testimonials.
Supports patients' treatment and helps them continue it.
To achieve this, the content strategy required a close understanding of the existing site, SEO, and medical/pharmaceutical readability research. Then, I could create:
The new site map
Content user journeys structured to always bring patients to an action
New content suggestions, including:
Updating the doctor discussion guide using questions surfaced by Google's Knowledge Graph
Adding third-party agnostic resources
A page-level content outline by site section
Preparing the Creative Team
Possible New York was responsible for the strategy, but the account's creative was still owned by Geometry. To help another agency see their past work with fresh eyes, I worked with our creative director to create a quick visual style, tone and voice document.
This allowed both teams to align on the visual and copy style that would be delivered in more detailed work to come.
Handing Off the Content to Geometry
To ensure that the content strategy was easy to follow and the messaging architecture was adhered to, I created a full content manuscript with much greater detail than the content outline.
Although we were handing work to another agency partner, and a content manuscript is generally used with clients who are writing their own content, I hoped it would ensure old content wasn't simply migrated to new templates.
Geometry's creative team reacted positively to having a working copy deck ready for them. The content manuscript became a collaborative Google doc that was used throughout the copy creation and review process by the entire team.