Digital Content Production: Cutting Pharma Costs and Ensuring Compliance

PUBLISHED

September 18, 2024

The Cost Challenges in Pharma Content Production

The content cost in pharma is much higher than that of other industries. What causes this? Let’s review some of the biggest cost challenges in producing pharma content:

Complex regulatory environment

Pharma content must comply with industry regulations regardless of its scale and format. This adds an additional layer of compliance checks, legal reviews, and delays that increase the price of the content production process. Moreover, pharma content must be regularly updated, as whenever regulations or product offerings change, content must be revised, adding to the cost of producing content.

Content complexity

Pharma is a very demanding industry, where even a single mistake could result in critical financial and reputational losses. Content should be created in accordance with all regulations and standards. However, this is not the only thing that makes pharma content so difficult to produce; it’s also how technical and specific it can be. Just one blog post might be created by the whole team, involving subject-matter experts, marketers, regulatory specialists, and medical writers.

Content fragmentation

Most departments in many pharma companies still face siloes, which harms content production. People responsible for creating and publishing processes must jump through extra hoops to get necessary information and approvals, often resulting in postponed deadlines and escalating costs.

Extended time to market

Due to approval bottlenecks, siloed production processes, and other issues, it’s much harder to deliver content quickly. Two possible solutions are to continue publishing content less frequently than preferred or expedite the content production process by outsourcing, using additional content creation tools, and investing in powerful solutions like AI-based software and automation platforms.

Lack of digitization

Companies that have yet to reach the right level of digital maturity often struggle to move away from manual labor and traditional content formats. This is why it usually takes longer for them to finish content-related projects and optimize content production. As a result, these pharmaceutical companies spend even more time and money delivering content to their audience.

The Need for Compliance: Why It’s Non-Negotiable

In pharma, content marketing efforts are worth nothing if the content doesn’t comply with industry regulations. And it’s not just about being a lawful company; there are many reasons why compliance is so important in the content creation process:

Patient safety. In the pharma world, anything any pharmaceutical company does is carefully monitored by regulatory bodies in case it poses a risk to patients. Just the smallest mishap and one single mistake could cost lives. And it’s not just about medicine and treatments; even content can be harmful. When the content team adheres to the regulations and creates all materials with industry standards in mind, they can be sure that patients will get only safe, valuable, and reliable information.
Data integrity. Compliance ensures that the data organizations work with is accurate. Without data integrity, no one would be sure that the research is valid, the medicine is safe, or that the claims made by pharmaceutical companies are trustworthy. Data integrity issues might result in serious consequences, but such risks are minimized with compliance.
Reputation. According to Trustpilot, 90% of online customers choose not to purchase from a company if its reputation is bad. Most customers decide whether to engage with a brand based on what they hear or read about. Patients are more likely to trust you if you have a good reputation. If you are an organization that has problems with compliance, investors, patients, distributors, and other stakeholders will probably try to avoid working with you.

Striking the balance between compliance and agility in content production is one of the biggest challenges for companies of all sizes. This is why a solution is needed to create content at scale without compromising compliance—and fortunately, one exists, which we’ll explore next.

Introduction to the Digital Content Factory: What is a Digital Content Factory (DCF)?

A digital content factory (DCF) is a system designed to streamline the processes of creating, distributing, and managing content across multiple channels and platforms. The goal of DCF is not to replace the work of the creative team but to enhance it by automating, standardizing, and organizing the whole content production process. Digital content factories facilitate better content promotion, faster business growth, and more data-driven decisions.

Key DCF features

A digital content factory offers a set of unique features that can be customized to each company individually. Some of the key DCF features are:

Automation

Digital content factory helps automate at least half of the tasks related to creating content, if not the entire process. With DCF, companies can easily automate content distributions, personalization, and compliance checks, reducing manual labor and time to market.

Agile content production

DCF decouples content production from creative processes while ultimately enabling the ideas of creative teams through systems that facilitate smooth and effective content production and delivery. Instead of one being responsible for every single step in the content process, the digital content factory fosters cross-functional collaborations across different departments.

Availability of content formats

The digital content factory is a versatile solution that allows for creating all types of content, including blog posts, emails, presentations, landing pages, and even videos or content for augmented or virtual realities. With DCF, you can create high volumes of content while maintaining consistency and compliance.

Modularization

Modular content is much more reusable and cost-effective than traditional content. Modularization is a significant part of the digital content factory, as it allows content to be broken down into smaller parts and repurposed across various channels. For example, in most cases, whenever there is blog content like articles, many companies just publish it and forget about it. However, if you switch to modular content, you can reuse content, ensuring that the written piece of content offers as much value as possible.

Compliance

DCF supports regulatory requirements in multiple ways, ensuring adherence to legal, regulatory, and industry standards. Here is how compliance is integrated into a digital content factory:

A DCF is the right solution for companies ready to improve their content marketing and speed up content creation while maintaining adherence to legal and ethical standards. Even though a digital content factory can look different for every company, its capabilities to enhance digital content creation and embed compliance into every stage are undeniable.

How Does DCF Help in Reducing Pharma Content Production Costs?

One of the main purposes of a digital factory is to help cut down costs when it comes to creating and managing content. A digital content factory can help reduce content production costs in several ways, including:

Streamlining content workflows

Companies can reduce manual labor and boost content production by automating key content processes. Moreover, there is no need to create every single piece from scratch; by switching to modular content, companies can save a lot of time and money and scale up and down easily should the need arise.

Centralizing content assets for easy reuse and localization

Digital content factory unifies all content production processes in one system, making it easier to do many things, starting with version control and ending with quick access to any piece of content that was ever created. Instead of having to spend time accessing different materials, it can be easily done.

Leveraging AI and automation for faster approvals and compliance checks

Artificial intelligence is a big part of digital content factories, as it allows for better analysis, content creation, and approvals. Modern AI-driven solutions encompass various processes, such as content generation, plagiarism checks, MLR reviews, content personalization, and even translation and localization. The AI-powered digital content factory has the potential to significantly accelerate content approvals, ultimately reducing time to market.

Reusing and repurposing modular content

A digital content factory enables the creation of modular content that can be reused multiple times without the need to create anything from scratch. This reduces both the time and expenses needed for content production while also ensuring that content brings as much value as possible.

Case Study: Pharma Brand Success Using a DCF

A Belgium-based biotechnology company specializing in developing and commercializing innovative drugs was looking for a solution to standardize its content delivery process. Their goals were the following:

Scale up the content production process;
Reduce time to market;
Cut operational costs.

Another big goal our client had was to gain a competitive advantage in new markets. Why would a customer switch to the services of a new company if they already can rely on local biotechnology companies? This is why the client needed someone to assist them with launching persuasive and engaging content campaigns, capable of convincing healthcare professionals to consider partnering up with them.

The task was quite challenging, but the Viseven team succeeded, helping the client gain more customers and outshine the competition. To do that, we built a content factory that was fully customized to the client’s needs and produced personalized, easy-to-scale content. Our approach heavily relied on modularization, as it alone can reduce content production costs, improve the content marketing strategy, and speed up the delivery of high-quality content right to the target audience.

We utilized different channels and content formats to achieve an effective content production process. This way, the client was able to connect with the content consumers on a much deeper level. Our team provided the client with a comprehensive suite of e-Detailers, banners, landing pages, and emails. So, what was the result of our cooperation? Here is what our client received:

Standardized and robust content production process;
Fewer mistakes thanks to pre-tested templates;
Sped-up time to market;
The number of distribution channels increased from two to five, which allowed the company to reach a wider audience and engage with it better;
A single ecosystem that connects all channels;
High customer satisfaction rate (4.9 out of 5);
Peak volume requests went from 28 to 217 in just one year.

We understand how hard it can be to just switch to digital, how much effort and time it takes. It’s not easy to move every content workflow to a new space while ensuring that every employee is on the same page with the rest of the team. This is why we are ready to assist any business, regardless of its size and digital maturity, by finding solutions to help the company create amazing content, drive organic traffic, and build unique digital customer experiences.

Final Thoughts

Adopting a digital content factory in pharma is an important step toward reducing costs and improving compliance. A DCF might require some time to integrate into usual workflows, but as soon as the company does that, its content-related workflows start to change completely. With the help of DCF, even the smallest business can start producing content at scale thanks to streamlined processes, a better content strategy, simplified localization, modularization, and automation. Without innovation, it’s impossible to move forward, which is why it’s crucial to implement such solutions as a digital content factory.

Are you ready for a change? Explore how a DCF can transform your content operations. Contact us now for a personalized consultation on how a digital content factory can help your business grow.