Zentiva: Accelerating digitalization in the pharmaceuticals industry

How we developed an all-encompassing digital go-to-market strategy with Zentiva

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About Zentiva

Zentiva is a dominant player in the German and international pharmaceutical markets, developing, manufacturing, and providing high-quality and affordable medicines to more than 100 million people in Europe. Zentiva's mission is to ensure the supply of high-quality and affordable medicines to the people who depend on their products daily. Producing a vast array of medications, they achieved a remarkable revenue of over €248m in 2021.

In 2022, Zentiva acquired the heritage brand Finalgon from Sanofi, to further strengthen their OTC portfolio in the category “pain”. To successfully develop and execute a digital go-to-market strategy, OMMAX partnered with Zentiva and fully digitalized marketing and sales activities.

The Opportunity

Organic Acquisition
 

  • Severe decline of organicranking performance after relaunch (organic impressions of finalgon.de in Google dropped by -83.6%)

  • High keyword gap compared to competitors and market demand, also for important “money keywords”

  • Opportunity to increase digital visibility and rank for relevant keywords

 

E-commerce
 

  • Already today 20% of pharmaceuticals are sold online – DocMorris, ShopApotheke, and Amazon as key marketplaces, with strong growth rates

  • Opportunity for Finalgon to optimize its presence on relevant marketplaces to facilitate online sales

 

Paid acquisition
 

  • Finalgon is known as a heritage brand in a best-ager target group (+60 years)

  • Opportunity to expand the existing customer base by targeting a younger/active/sporty customer segment with a high product fit through paid advertising initiatives

 

Operational excellence
 

  • Third-party marketplaces do not share comprehensive customer data that allows end-to-end tracking for digital marketing and sales campaigns

  • Opportunity to implement tools (e.g. ApoNow) and complex tracking schema for closing the data gap

Project Milestones

Q1 2023: Go-to-market strategy development
 

  • Comprehensive market, competitor, customer, and brand analyses
  • Digital status quo analysis
  • Development of digital ‘to-be’ customer journey
  • Conceptualization of brand transformation strategy, incl. creative directions
  • Derivation of ROI-driven digital go-to-market strategy (incl. business case and implementation roadmap)

 

Q2 2023: Digital pilot
 

  • Set up of a lean pilot to achieve a quick go-to-market, collect data, and test mechanisms along the digital customer journey (by launching three Google Search pilot campaigns)
  • SEA pilot as proof of concept and blueprint for later implementation of strategic full-funnel approach including GoogleAds and Meta

 

Q3 2023: Digital scaling
 

  • Tapping into growing search volume (i.e., demand) by increasing organic visibility and closing the gap to competition with new content strategy and website architecture
  • Targeted ad campaigns to approach new customer groups
  • Set up of state-of-the-art digital presence to increase conversions and build the brand

 

Q4 2023: Further improvements
 

  • Infrastructure set-up around online pharmacies (e.g., Doc-Morris, ShopApotheke), local pharmacies (using ApoNow for full-funnel tracking), and Amazon to create a digital “omnichannel” experience and increase sales
  • Ongoing conversion rate optimization (CRO) on new website and digital marketplaces
  • Implementation of tracking scheme to track customers along the sales funnel

Our Approach and Results

Four workstreams paved the way for digital success – organic and paid acquisition to generate leads and sales, e-commerce to facilitate conversions, and infrastructure as an enabler.

 

1) Organic acquisition

 

  • Derivation of a long-term content strategy and new website architecture to increase visibility and traffic from search engines

  • Optimized organic performance significantly and measurably

  • Optimization of 6 existing website pages and implementation of 27 new SEO-optimized pages

  • Keywords ranking in the top 10 increased by 198%

  • 10 times more impressions and 4 times more clicks

 

2) Paid acquisition

 

  • Proved potential and collected data in eight weeks' SEA pilot phase for strategic full-funnel digital marketing strategy including Google Ads, Meta and Amazon

  • More than 9.7k conversions were generated, resulting in an increasing CR of 12.86%

  • ~10k conversions to digital PoS within 8 months, even with limited product availability

  • Impressive ~13% conversion rate quickly after launch

 

3) E-Commerce

 

  • Set up of convincing landing pages embedded in new website architecture with clear call-to-actions

  • Collaboration with ApoNow to include local pharmacies with a “pay online – pick-up offline” option

  • Development of Amazon and online pharmacies (e.g., DocMorris) concept (considering keyword research, ranking performance factors within the platforms)

  • Set up of Amazon account with partner pharmacy for Finalgon

 

4) Infrastructure

 

  • Development of conversion rate optimization strategy and tracking schema for on- and off-page conversions

  • Conduction of heuristic UX and CRO analysis of Finalgon website and identification of 30 optimization measures (incl. prioritization)

  • Successful tracking setup despite complex commercial and legal limitations

  • Steering of external marketing agency and ongoing optimization

Together, we achieved:

  • 88% uplift of organic visibility

  • 10,000 conversions in the first months after the new OTC launch

  • +13% conversion rate to digital PoS such as online pharmacies or Amazon

"It's been truly gratifying to support Zentiva in planning and executing a digital go-to-market strategy. Witnessing the dedication and successful execution of the digital agenda by the Zentiva team was very impressive."

Dr. Anja Konhäuser Partner & Co-Founder at OMMAX

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