Feel light for summer. The 7 answers to the 7 Q’s. any Pharma marketer should ask themselves.

The Life Sciences industry is a very competitive market where Pharma companies make significant investments in building and developing promotional and educational content to HCPs. To help you hit the ground running after the summer holidays, we have compiled a list of 7 questions that every Pharma marketer should ask themselves to achieve a high level of engaging content.

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The Questions Box

1. Is my content impactful?

Behind any impactful content, there are multiple steps and strategies involved. It all begins with a framework. A marketer must know and apply content development best practices to ensure the message is conveyed in the right way for each communication channel.

One of the increasingly important components of high-quality, impactful content is the way it is structured.

Having a well thought structure and an appealing visual identity is something that will greatly support your content marketing efforts.

For instance, a digital sales aids that applies the screen design rules increases the interest of the HCP in the messaging, ease the reading and the delivery of the message. Poor screen structure does not invite the HCP to stay focused nor grab their attention.

The look and feel of your digital assets, is the first layer to a successful digital strategy.

Each communication channel is different, and so are the content design rules for for each of them. To improve the results of your digital content marketing efforts, you have to ensure that HCPs always have a good experience with the delivered content.

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2. Is my content engaging HCPs?

Creating engaging content starts with campaign management.

Pharma marketers must ensure that they create content that HCPs want to see based on their needs and interests. This is all set up during the campaign management phase which we developed in previous blog posts that includes personas, segmentation, customer experience journey, etc.

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One of the key aspects usually missed is the selling process, the narrative upon which the story is told to the HCP. Most of pharmaceutical companies have their own selling process.

However, most brand teams do not structure their content according to it. This is usually left to the sales representatives during their calls.

If you think about it, how is a sales rep supposed to follow the organization's selling process if the content itself is not aligned with the sales narrative?

Another key aspect to create engaging content is that HCPs should be sufficiently stimulated and be offered the opportunity to act on your communication. Including CTA (call-to-actions) within your digital promotional materials not only in emails but within content for all type of communication channels. Remember, communication channels must feed each other.

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Also, digital marketing gives Pharma Brand teams the opportunity to ask questions to know more about their needs, what subjects they’d like to discuss, their prescribing habits, their challenges. It will narrow your segmentation, feed your database to provide added value content and lead to an engagement. Don’t limit yourself, use surveys!

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Finally, never forget about the emotional aspect when speaking to your audience. In fact, HCPs are dealing with patients not robots. Storytelling is a must-have.

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3. Is my content tracking data? (analytics)  

Data collection is now well established as a very valuable resource for marketers. Analysis of customer data and actionable insights help marketers understand HCPs preferences, interests, habits etc.

But data starts at the creation of the digital content.

To use data efficiently, we must think of few things while producing digital content:

• Get to know the metrics that are available within your organization like as an example the adoption rate of a digital sales aid.

• Ask what type of information should be tracked and embedded within your content through the creation process of your digital assets. As an example, for a digital sales aid it could be the product name, the chapter name, the screen name, the key message etc.
However, take into account your CRM system. Not all CRM systems are alike, meaning they have their own way of tracking interaction data. The way your CRM is configured impacts the way to collect data.

• Ensure the data is actually captured and collected within your CRM system through testing your digital content in field conditions especially qualitative data from surveys for instance.

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4. Does my content fit to the reality of the field?

Content creation has to tick all the boxes for both marketing and sales.

Take into account Sale’s rep call characteristics: average duration of calls they make with HCPs for each channel (remote, in-person visits), the positioning of the product especially when sales reps need to present more than 2 products during their calls and indeed the type of channel.

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This information is important when creating content because content should be adapted to the duration of a call.

A 100-slide digital sales aid for an average 5 minutes call makes no sense (we see that a lot actually).

Break it down, using schedule message management, and other strategic tools during the campaign management phase.

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During a long call, especially in remote detailing, you need enough content to keep the call going, but that doesn't mean you have to produce a 100-slide sales aid. There are various options to keep HCPs interested along the way such as including interactivities while keeping an average of 15 to 20 slides.

5. Am I using approved, compliant assets?

Within a regulated environment, compliance requirements can be quite complex.

Look for clear content guidelines and policy before creating content and deliver it to your agencies too.

It is important that creative designers know what assets are available to them in order to ensure compliance and consistent brand experience when producing content. Search for the right color palette, imagery, graphics and corporate fonts. Most of the time things are available but not everyone knows about it or search for it. It will save you time and also money.

There is a cost of ineffective brand compliance. For that reason, centralizing assets in a DAM system should be considered at some point: a place where approved files and product media can easily be pulled from, to be used and shared with Brand teams or creative agencies.

It should also be noted that whatever the channel, an effective Global to Local process facilitates content creation and ensures compliance across markets too. If your content development model is not centralized, you can make content templates available to countries.

6. Is my workflow adapted to my content development needs?

Part of the creation process is execution. We must know that content development is not easy. During the development phase, it is important to understand every step of the digital content creation and pay attention to each one of them. It is only when you start thinking of it that you may try to enhance or cut some of the steps that are time-consuming or too expensive.

Indeed, today you need to create more and more digital content for more personalized customer experience and various communication channels. So, if you are not equipped to keep up with the pace, you will soon be overwhelmed or limited.

Successful content development requires you to streamline and simplify your process.

Once you have the right creation process in place, your organization becomes a content delivery machine. This leaves you free to focus on higher value-added tasks rather than operational content development tasks and create as much content as you need to.

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An agile content development system also prevents you from missing submission deadlines. We know how much frustration this can cause you. It also eliminates mistakes, useless back and forth and other tasks that steal time away from creating high-quality content to HCPs.

At the end of the day, you should ask: do we have what it takes for marketing and commercial effectiveness? The right technology, process and resources.

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