Eli Lilly

Eli Lilly and Company is an American pharmaceutical company headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, with offices in 18 countries. Its products are sold in approximately 125 countries and is now the world’s largest manufacturer of psychiatric medications.

Lilly employs some 40 thousand staff and generates tens of billions in revenues per year.

Lilly’s notable achievements include being the first company to mass-produce the polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk, and insulin.

How we helped

The Lilly project involved working with a team of non-technical content specialists on content strategy to provide a more adaptable, scalable way of working.

Lilly was adding new channels and content requirements but not getting any additional resources to satisfy the new needs.

Channels included

• Google results pages, specifically the Google knowledge graph and rich snippets
• health-care professional extranet (offering web and automatically generated PDF versions from a single source), and
• a call-center intranet knowledge portal.

Lilly laid the foundations for omnichannel pharma experiences with planned future channels like AI chatbots.

The team was working in a traditional page-based model but had requirements for better delivery of content to Google rich search results, and customer-driven deliverables such as concise, targeted answers to physician questions that support a medical decision.

To address this, Urbina Consulting helped Lilly remodel their content to turn content effectively into “LEGO bricks” that could be reused and repurposed flexibly, across channels and formats.

What we achieved

The new specialised content model was based on customer journey analysis, and implemented “bite, snack, meal” flexibility, providing end users with the amount of depth they wanted on their channel of choice.

Because of the new writing methods and metadata strategy, the engagement also allowed Lilly to

• achieve content reuse in the remaining body of content of 77%, while also allowing local offices like Japan to mix and match global and local content more quickly and easily than before, and
• reduce overall content volumes by over 40%.

The project has been building up from the specialist-facing and customer-facing pre-and post-sale product and research information and, if it continues on its current trajectory, will grow to touch on support, marketing, internal knowledge, and other types of content going forward.

From their old base of multiple Word documents updated in parallel, the group has moved to a system that allows component-based reuse with automatic generation of multiple content formats, all underpinned by consistent, stream-lined copy guidelines.

The project has been building up from the specialist-facing and customer-facing pre-and post-sale product and research information and, if it continues on its current trajectory, will grow to touch on support, marketing, internal knowledge, and other types of content going forward.

From their old base of multiple Word documents updated in parallel, the group has moved to a system that allows component-based reuse with automatic generation of multiple content formats, all underpinned by consistent, stream-lined copy guidelines.

View the full case study presentation