YEAR:
2023
Vertex Pharmaceutical
CLIENT:
Vertex Pharmaceuticals
Social Media Co-Op · Engagement, evergreen content strategy, and social analytics · Cystic fibrosis portfolio
INTRODUCTION
Vertex Pharmaceuticals makes medicines for cystic fibrosis, a disease that affects roughly 100,000 people worldwide.
The social team carried one number for the year: 4 million engagements.
Most brands reach a number like that by publishing more. In pharma, publishing more is the one lever you don’t have.
CHALLENGE
Every post clears medical, legal, and regulatory review before it goes live. The queue sets the publishing ceiling, and no amount of ambition moves it.
The audience ceiling is just as fixed. Cystic fibrosis is rare, and the people following a CF brand are patients, caregivers, and clinicians. They can tell the difference between information and marketing instantly, and they only engage with the first one.
Then there’s the comment section. In most categories it’s a growth channel. Here it’s a compliance surface, where a patient describing a side effect starts an adverse event reporting clock and the wrong reply becomes a regulatory event.
Four million engagements against a capped publishing rate and a capped audience isn’t a content problem. It’s a throughput problem.
STRUCTURE
Stop treating cleared content as disposable.
The core shift was an evergreen content strategy. Rather than building campaign assets that ran once and expired, content was briefed from the start to stay true months later: education, community, and awareness pieces with no expiry date baked into them. Approved once, deployed repeatedly, across moments and platforms. Every redeployment was engagement the review queue never had to process twice. It turned a fixed approval ceiling into a compounding library.
Asana held the system together. Content calendars, revision tracking, SME and legal routing, and delivery dates ran through one platform coordinating designers, copywriters, and subject-matter experts across concurrent campaigns. The evergreen library lived there too, scheduled and visible, so approved assets stayed in rotation instead of disappearing into closed-campaign folders.
Analysis decided what got rebuilt. Campaign data was turned into regular reporting with insights and recommendations, correlating specific tactics against real audience behaviour. That told the team which evergreen pieces deserved another run and which paid tactics deserved more weight, informing planning across a multimillion-dollar annual paid budget.
Listening worked as radar and as defence. Brandwatch powered competitor analysis, sentiment tracking, and whitespace identification, surfacing the conversations the category wasn’t serving. The same infrastructure ran day-to-day community management and early crisis detection, where the response window is hours, not days.
RESULTS
The team hit 4 million engagements.
The evergreen strategy was the engine behind it, lifting total engagement 20% and continuing to perform long after the campaigns that produced it had closed.
Underneath that: data-led optimisation contributed to a 20% increase in paid engagement and a 15% lift in click-through rate. Whitespace opportunities identified through Brandwatch fed campaigns that drove a 25% increase in campaign engagement. Tighter collaboration across designers, copywriters, and SMEs improved conversions by 30%.
And three emerging crises were contained, caught through social listening and defused with proactive communication before sentiment turned.
In a category built to slow marketing down, the year’s target came in on schedule.
