Create, approve, deploy: supercharging communications with modular content

Each year, pharma and life sciences invest large amounts of time and money in creating content designed to attract HCPs and call them to action. However, it’s no secret that the landscape of healthcare communications has undergone a substantial transformation in recent years.

The accelerated adoption of digital channels – combined with the ongoing disruption caused by COVID-19 – has changed the way that customers seek out and engage with content.

“We have changed as consumers,” explains Viseven CEO Nataliya Andreychuk. “Our attention span has changed, and so we are consuming information differently. Instead of spending a lot of time reading articles and sticking to one source of information, we now spend less than one minute looking for an article and searching through several channels, all from the one device.”

Modern marketing requires a much more agile approach than the industry is used to. We have come to expect seamless, dynamic, and personalised engagement experiences across a variety of channels, and healthcare providers are no exception. Targeting audiences across numerous channels requires marketing teams to create large volumes of content, as well as a unique personal content experience for every target audience. As such, demand for greater volumes of personalised digital content has skyrocketed.

For an industry such as pharma, which must adhere to strict legal and regulatory procedures, creating an agile communications strategy can be a complex challenge. This, Andreychuk says, is where modular content can provide a highly effective solution to help teams address some of the biggest content marketing barriers: resource limitations, speed to market, and consistency.

Building a ‘library’ of approved content blocks

Modular content has often been likened to using reusable building blocks. Each ‘block’ or module is a pre-approved piece of content – such as product claims, logos, copy, videos, or graphics – that can be quickly assembled or repurposed into a ready-to-deploy asset.

“Modular content breaks a big document into meaningful chunks that are well structured, semantically categorised, and ridged,” says Andreychuk. “They are really designed to be discoverable, reusable, not just across the different channels, but across different information products, different families of information products, and across different audiences as well.”
In contrast to traditional methods of communications, which require lengthy turnaround and approval times for each specific use, with a modular approach, each ‘block’ can be predefined and organised according to the main content requirements and used in various forms, from SMM content and emails to interactive presentations like an eDetailer.

“With modular content, we un-prison content; we unlock the format. We do not stick to some format, which is feedable to only one channel or informational product. Modular content breaks this paradigm, and by breaking it, helps to serve the innovation, which is omnichannel communication,” explains Andreychuk. “What is most important is that it is trustworthy content. It is validated. It is approved.”

For pharma and life sciences companies, modular content can help to address a significant barrier to agility – bottlenecks caused by lengthy medical, legal, and regulatory review processes. Given the nature of the industry, each piece of content must adhere to the rigorous compliance requirements demanded of certified healthcare communications. While this process does reduce the risk of distributing incorrect or harmful information to customers, it has the knock-on effect of impeding agile and dynamic communications, as every new piece of content must be individually analysed and approved.

With modular content, pharma companies approve each ‘block’ individually, meaning that any claim updates or changes can be made to the module directly rather than requiring teams to recreate or reapprove the whole completed asset. As such, teams can piece together and publish assets faster and safely in the knowledge that the content is appropriate and meets the mandatory requirements for external release.

Creating a ‘Single Source of Truth’ for dynamic content

With numerous components, stakeholders, and teams involved in creating, reviewing, and distributing content, it is important that companies invest in an effective way to govern all assets.

As Andreychuk explains, digital asset management (DAM) systems act as the backbone of modular content and, in turn, omnichannel communications.

Large corporations, such as pharma companies, produce large volumes of data and information, which have been traditionally housed in siloed content libraries. As such, visibility is limited, and teams across departments often end up creating duplicate content for different channels and uses.

A global DAM system unites all teams under a ‘Single Source of Truth’. In this central hub, teams can easily store and access all of the company’s pre-approved modules.

“Modular content only has to be created once, approved once, and retired once,” says Andreychuk. “The metadata assigned to one module will not only help to reuse it and repurpose it through different channels and information products, it also will help us to track it, to trace the approval status, if it is approved, and when it was approved.

“[We can also track] the expiration date, so when any of the resources used in this model will expire, for example, if a module includes a call to action, such as opt-ins connected to consent, we can see if this consent status was taken.”

Through metadata, teams have access to a comprehensive auditory trail for each asset. However, as Andreychuk highlights, it can take time to build the necessary ecosystem to govern this system.

“Every piece of content has to be tagged, and there needs to be a taxonomy system in place,” she says. “All of these data connections must be well orchestrated and work together to ensure that once we reuse this piece of content, then we can really see all these statuses, highlights, and we will be directed into the right area if marketing review is needed.”

Laying the foundations for tomorrow’s communications

Although pharma and life science companies have, understandably, lagged behind other industries when it comes to digital adoption, it is evident that omnichannel marketing and modular content are here to stay. To survive – and thrive – in this evolving environment, organisations need to evolve alongside their customers.

For Andreychuk, to maximise the success of modular content strategies, it is important that companies establish clear goals and expectations, which are then communicated to the wider organisation. With defined objectives in place, teams can afford to move faster, creating supporting materials that seamlessly slot together underneath the broader concept strategy.

To remain competitive and relevant for the next generation of digitally native customers, the pressure is on pharmaceutical companies to adapt – or risk falling behind. This is not one step, she notes, but a series of smaller achievements that should be celebrated along the way to achieving true omnichannel, personalised engagement.

“It’s really not a trend or some modern occupation; it is really the necessity,” she concludes. “Making your content modular, intelligent, connected, and personalised, I would say, is the backbone of marketing and content strategy for today and tomorrow.”

As a digital marketing professional with over ten years of expertise, Nataliya Andreychuk has contributed to developing advanced digital solutions and software for clients in more than 70 global markets.

Andreychuk is also of Ukrainian background and witnessed the start of the war. However, being a global company leader, she had the hard task of balancing communication with clients and her staff, some of whom needed help relocating to safer areas. She was there at the beginning of digitalisation in life sciences and pharma marketing.

As part of her job as the CEO at Viseven, a global MarTech provider, she is bringing marketing interactions in pharma to the next level by introducing new methods to more companies.

Viseven is a global services provider for the Life Science industry, operating in MarTech (Marketing Technology), which offers end-to-end tailored-made solutions to build omnichannel excellence from any point and level of digital maturity.

Our team consists of 700+ industry professionals who work toward the same goal – to implement the best-in-class omnichannel projects and communication strategies for the global pharmaceutical market.

Don’t miss your complimentary subscription to Deep Dive and our newsletter