In Agile Fashion: Pharma Sets New Trends in Content Production

Each season sets new trends in every business industry, and pharma is no exception. Some trends are born to die faster than someone starts copying them. Others have longer longevity – from a couple of seasons to a couple of years. Similar to fashion, pharma has a rapidly changing, ever-evolving, and ever-revolving nature. Feedback from our partners helped us figure out what makes one creative agency a classic out of pharma world, a regular supplier who’s like a couturier carefully tailoring pharma’s needs, while others remain a one-season (project) thing. Read on to unveil the ultimate trend that will shortly be storming pharma runways.

Why do creative agencies need to enter the new stage of content development path?

It is now established that omnichannel is a classic that will last in the pharma and the demand is likely only to increase. The omnichannel wave brought along trends on flexibility, operability, and utilization. To maintain an omnichannel model, pharma expects from creative agencies new modes of work and readiness to adjust to any new business trends.

The new order has conventionally divided all creative agencies into 2 types – those that are ready for digital transformation and agencies that continue to work under an old design, without offering any innovations.

Pharma has to deal with complex workflows – that’s why it is so important to streamline the process. To be an “haute couture” agency means help pharma companies with their content challenges, offer a technological advantage, and deliver content frequently, flexibly, and extensively. In other words, offer something beyond the content like special speed and quality of delivery. Agencies’ top priority now is to bring content requests, briefing, feedback, proofing, review, and approvals into one workflow and conversation feed to provide an agile content process on different steps.

What does it take for a creative agency to become a top-notch pharma content provider? Experience has shown how important is to introduce innovations in the content development process. To respond to the demands of this business model, and become the pharma’ permanent contractor, creative agencies must be agile enough and deliver more types of content in a shorter timeframe. That’s why agility has become an ultimate trend for creative agencies to follow. A global study of 161 different companies around the world has divided them into different groups based on their relative stability and speed scores: slow and unstable – trapped; slow and stable – bureaucratic; fast, pure and simple— start-up; and those that combined speed with stability – agile. The study has shown that agile companies enjoyed a far greater premium: the odds that one of them would rank in the top quartile for organizational health were 70 percent.

Three working models that set the tone for agility

Agility doesn’t happen overnight. However, agencies that incrementally improve their content practices end up becoming more agile. Agencies that are sought to adopt technologies that ensure agile workflow for detailing, landing pages, and emails – orchestrate the whole process better, and leverage their teams more effectively. Tunable and sensitive technologies provide flexible creation, collaboration, management, publishing, and promotion of digital content for their pharma clients.
The Viseven team has vast experience in working with hundreds of brands from all over the world. It helped us identify three working models that set the tone for agility.

Agile teams

Consistent processes within your team of content creators ensure quick reacting, thereby minimizing the risk of internal disruption to supply. Companies with content authoring solution in place support better communication and content workflows across the organization, which makes them more agile. As a result, they create more collaborative space for their teams and client to work together on each step of the content lifecycle.

Agile assets

Each piece of content needs to go through a lot before it’s finally ready to publish. When a content item is created from scratch, this essentially means the manager and agency have to compile all the materials required, and then review and approve the ready content item detail by detail. Every single part of this process takes some time and effort. That’s why your assets are supposed to be flexible.

Modular content is the epitome of flexibility with its deep content editing and a library of approved digital assets to be reused. This is the solution to supply content in the amounts required – while maintaining quality.  Modular approach introduces new ways to create content for eDetailing presentations, email templates, and landing pages and ensure that each component is customizable and 100% responsive. Explore more than 10,000 possible formats that provide flexibility in the content creation process with a Flexible Framework.

Agile processes

If the content supply chain is not rethought or changed, your marketing plan is not meant to be. Companies with agile content supply chains can recognize and respond to potential risks promptly and equally fast seize growth opportunities. The right technological solution helps them build the publishing process correctly, establish the relationship and interaction of elements at every stage, which leads to better content reuse.

The solution to embrace agility

Content creation is a complex area where many components come together and intertwine. It is both the precise and painstaking work of creative minds – at a fundamental level and a technological base, which ensures that interactive content can be created from scratch, localized, and approved in a few clicks. However, in trailblazing creative agencies, the right digital content creation platform is like a needle and thread – sewing together their content creation efforts.

As a rule, creative agencies choose a solution that supports their centralized and thoughtfully planned strategy to manage digital assets. The flexible content authoring solution helps respond, pivot, and market faster and better than the competition.

One of our content partners, boutique communication agency DrCom has shared with us the feedback on how they tackle today’s challenges associated with pharma content development. DrCom specializes in helping pharma companies with their content challenges. To do this, they bring their clients and stakeholders into their agile content process on different steps. They believe that there is a solution to produce content for pharma clients in sufficient amount and variety – and at sufficient speed.

They embrace agility with the content authoring platform with in-build integrations and collaborative workflows. They integrated eWizard platform into their projects as the solution for omnichannel orchestration of their global campaigns.

Bruno Senouci, Managing Director at DrCom describes how the use of eWizard platform affected their content development processes.

“When pitching new content production projects, DrCom includes eWizard as an essential tool. DrCom has seen how large projects can go off the rails without strong content workflows and sees eWizard as the best tool to manage risk — and save clients’ money. The eWizard platform, combined with the Cobalt framework, is a truly powerful combo, allowing us to fulfill all our needs from idea/initiation to the omnichannel orchestration of global campaigns.”

DrCom’s induction packs outline the workflow each piece of content must pass through from briefing to publishing. They mirror this in eWizard with the agile content workflow.

“Workflow in eWizard is a really good way for helping the client understand the whole process that one piece of content needs to go through before it’s ready to publish”. DrCom appreciates how easy it is to change workflows midway through a project when staff changes or new requirements emerge.

Final thought

Time dictates the need for creative agencies to bring more products to the market, faster than ever. With a growing number of channels and systems, improving your distribution of content is essential for driving new business. eWizard improves your digital asset flow from creation and approval to consistent delivering of content across channels. The platform encourages parallel workflows and productive collaboration among cross-functional teams (Editor, Designers, Developers). Editors can post updates and fresh content without needing to hand it off to developers. This unified content platform allows editors to organize content and design assets for use and reuse across channels, expanding their reach, and improving brand consistency.

Trends come and go, unlike flexible digital solutions that are always in fashion. That’s why digital agencies are busy rethinking their strategies, defining their creativity, and looking for new solutions to problems and challenges. Contact us to open up even more possibilities to add flexibility to your pharma content creation processes.