How to win at omnichannel

A ‘sizeable-sum’-dollar question is: how much content exactly is it needed for an ultimate omnichannel marketing strategy? On the one hand, as the content lifecycle is decreasing, the need to personalize is growing, not least of all, because of marketers’ shift to omnichannel. Figuring out the channels mix for the HCP audience is multichannel pharma marketing’s central task: as each physician has their own preferences as to the channel, and the message, of course, should be transmitted accordingly, be it via email, online meeting or F2F presentation. In terms of content, this means a lot of small adaptations and adjustments. So, the short answer is: a lot more content is needed.

The longer answer is: it’s not enough to simply make a lot of content. The output has to be valuable and engaging. It’s a very particular essence of life sciences content, where medical, legal, scientific information has to be combined with good storytelling and emotional adequacy – and still bring value to the decision-maker.

Does that mean pharma marketing teams will soon be swept with a content tornado? Well, it’s happening as we’re speaking: with 78% of marketers in pharma drowning in a moderate to enormous amount of digital content they produce. On the other hand, here comes the twist:

• While personalization is truly dictating the pharma content creation game to 66% of all marketers,
• only about a quarter of them have a fully functioning content management communication model. So it comes as no wonder that
• at the end of the day, only 11% of them actually manage to personalize their content.

So much content and still not personalized? It’s not hard to imagine how this dichotomy frustrates the teams working on making omnichannel strategy happen. What’s really stopping marketers from adhering to their personalization goals? To blame global compliance here is to dismiss the value of local initiatives. While the global offices’ “grip” on local creativity has tightened recently for the sake of increasing brand awareness, local initiative remains important even with the rising global control. And besides, while adhering to a unified branding and marketing strategy has its reasons and advantages, without putting themselves in their customers’ shoes all over the world, companies are missing an opportunity to earn nearly half of their potential revenue. Not even mentioning the chance for the impact to grow exponentially in terms of brand loyalty, customer centricity etc. In other words, if you want to avoid making this happen, don’t localize or personalize your content. Keeping compliant is not the reason.

So is it really all about communication? Well, partially. The problem is not in lack of technologies for communication in place, but rather in their unpolished potential. Getting even the greatest collaboration tool does not grant instant digital transformation. It’s symptomatic that 45% marketers say they have tools for content marketing, but don’t use them to their full capacity. It’s happening because, while there are great systems for managing the already approved and existing digital assets, plugging in development is a harder nut to crack. A non-mythical global-to-local collaboration done right is hard to find unless there’s integration with another global system involved, like Veeva or IQVIA.

So, well-tuned global asset management is ultimately what changes the rules of the content creation game. In other words, leveraging existing approved assets is prevalent in content creation practices, with templating approach taking the second place (74% following 72% of 2017 Accenture survey’s inputs). It just seems that for many reasons, the days of content creation from scratch at all times are becoming a “forgotten golden age” of HTML design – even in the rather slow-paced world of pharma and medical content. Don’t get us wrong, creating content from scratch is unavoidable at times. But in this brand new reality, content reuse is becoming the new norm. A today’s golden standard of content creation is a case when company already has some assets (already approved by the global office) and requests either building new content from these or modifying them to adjust to a market segment – both for personalization and localization purposes.

There needs to be a shortcut to provide seamless alignment for internal and external teams, a common ground for content managers, approvers and vendors, while reusing already existing assets. For pharma marketing specifically, there needs to be the way to integrate coding, design, legal and medical expertise even tighter into the processes; a place where people, channels and content meet.

So here’s that place, that ground, that shortcut. That’s how we have gotten to introducing a Digital Content Factory approach, a unique model of cooperation between a Global Marketing Team, Local Teams and Digital Agencies. What makes the DCF possible in its core is the eWizard platform for editing/reusing/creating interactive HTML5 content. It is already integrated with major systems, so that the flow of content from the “development pole” to “management pole” is uninterrupted. In this way, the principles of DCF approach are:

1. Templating – even for the most complicated interactive content types, and with great flexibility when needed (and only when needed). Centralized global control, decentralized local creativity. Brand consistency and personalization. Basically, having the cake and eating it too.
2. Expertize at hand when needed – (including medical, legal, translation/localization, design, coding, etc.) The smaller the permissible interval between HQ product launch and its localized versions, the more integrated your localization must be into the overall content generation process. You don’t want your localized content lag behind the product launch date. So why not try to make it simultaneous? Ask an expert!
3. Integration – limitless opportunities for creating and reusing content in all aspects. The keywords here are creating and reusing. In general, the whole system – DCF and, say, Veeva Vault – is meant to function like communicating vessels: whatever gets crafted in DCF environment automatically passes to Vault for validation and approval through integration, and whatever there is in the Vault can be easily edited in the DCF, which reduces manual processes to the bare minimum.

Speaking in practical terms, what you get from Digital Content Factory is a, for instance, one basic presentation on one product being created in HQ office, approved, shared and then repurposed as many times as it’s needed by teams in affiliates or local creative agencies. Since the content made in Digital Factory seamless “implants” into Veeva and IQVIA, it is a solution of a truly global scale, which ensures both unification and diversification of the message across the affiliates. This way, pharma will be able to plug the content creation processes into content distribution and serve as a firm ground for omnichannel orchestration and skyrocketing time-to-market. As a bonus, this approach fosters local initiative while keeping a watchful eye on it.

To see the Digital Content Factory in action, you can access a free demo right here or contact our team of experts – and make your content supply as powerful as distribution for excellent omnichannel customer experience. Keep your finger on the pulse of pharma marketing news: subscribe to Viseven newsletter!