How to Create a Content Map in the Pharmaceutical Industry?

Did you know that 46% of drug launches in the United States between 2012 and 2017 failed due to an inadequate understanding of market and customer needs?

As it turned out, companies didn’t understand the types of patients who would respond well or the types of physicians who would be high versus low prescribers for the new drug or underestimated the difficulty of converting customers from existing therapies.

It was a valuable lesson for everyone in the industry because over 70% of pharma and life sciences leading companies see improving customer trust and satisfaction as one of their top priorities, while 52% are moving toward a personalized customer-centric model where content mapping has an essential role.

What is Content Mapping?

Content mapping is a marketing technique that allows companies to complete their business goals more efficiently by tailoring content to each customer and fulfilling their needs with the help of a content map.

What is Content Map?

A content map is a plan to personalize journeys and create real value for customers by developing relevant content and providing it at the right moment and via the preferred channels based on data-driven insights.

Why Create a Content Map in Pharma?

Content marketing is booming worldwide across dozens of industries and markets, and pharmaceuticals and life sciences are no exceptions.

Why do some content strategies work and some don’t?

Here’s an obvious fact – 80% of marketers and business owners who consider themselves very successful in content marketing had their strategy documented.

Getting back to the question: content strategies work because they’re defined. And what is content mapping? That’s what makes a content strategy distinct and clear.

And that’s not the only reason why you should create a content map in pharma.

Consistent Communication with Each Customer

A content map is a key to a clear understanding of a target audience’s profile: what customers like and dislike, what channels they prefer for content distribution and messaging, and what days of the week and hours are the best for interaction.

With such a clear understanding, pharma companies deliver the best customer experience by eliminating content duplication and spam and enabling fully automated communication.

High-Quality Content and Digital Maturity

Content mapping, by definition, combines multiple content formats and channels. It encourages content marketing specialists to improve standards for content creation and find more powerful ways of content development and storytelling.

The only way for pharma companies to provide full automation and personalization in a communicative environment with a wide variety of content channels and formats is to increase the level of digital maturity. As of 2023, only 44% of pharmaceutical and life sciences leaders are executing on or have completed a digital transformation journey.

Positive Brand Reputation and Higher Profits

An effective content map helps pharmaceutical companies find weaknesses and turn them into strengths. The focus on human-oriented engagement with customers, a better awareness of their priorities on an individual level, advanced content creation practices, and a higher level of digital maturity result in higher conversions and more customers.

How to Build a Content Map for a Pharma Brand

To successfully implement a content mapping strategy, your pharmaceutical company needs a team that includes professionals with expertise in a few areas, such as marketing, sales, and search engine optimization (SEO).

Now let’s go through the main content mapping steps:

1. Reassess Your Target Audience and Create Customer Personas

The headline should have said: Identify your target audience.

But we’re talking about pharma, so you probably have some image of your ideal customers, or at least you thought you had it before the tremendous digital transformations in the industry.

Content mapping is successful only when you create content for your customers as human beings, not as wallets or ordinary figures in analytics. Everyone loves when a business knows about us more than they thought they knew.

And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a visit to a favorite restaurant, a purchase of sneakers on Amazon, or as in the case of a healthcare professional (HCP), an interactive e-detailer they didn’t expect to receive so soon after attending a webinar.

In a survey we mentioned above, 47% of marketers and business owners consider researching their audiences the leading factor in building a successful content marketing strategy.

The first step you need to reassess your target audience is to create buyer personas. Hereafter, we’ll call them customer personas because, unlike customers, buyers don’t usually involve themselves in decision-making.

A customer persona is an avatar that impersonates your typical customer. We recommend you create a few customer personas at once because you’ll need to segment your audience afterward.

Here are the basic characteristics that will help you create your customer personas:

• Background and Experience. Find more about your customers’ demographics, locations, occupations, and lifestyles.
• Needs, Intentions, and Challenges. Determine problems your customers have, figure out what they’re up to, and think about how your business can solve them.
• Interests and Dislikes. Discover whom your customers trust, what they care about the most, and what they don’t like and would like to avoid.
• Technology and Communication. Figure out what devices and platforms your customers use to search for the information they need to detect what messages match their intentions.

How can you get all this information about your target audience? Use these methods:

• Google Analytics. It’s the best software to get the most specific view of your customers on your website, including age, gender, location, interests, behavior, and beyond.
• Social Media Analytics. Platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn offer analytics systems to track users’ basic activities.
• CRM Platforms. If you have multiple databases of existing customers, a customer relationship management platform (CRM) will help you sort all the data out and leverage it for creating your customer personas.
• Interviewing. You can ask your current customers, prospects, and referrals for direct feedback. Due to a different perspective on your company, products, and services, each of these target audiences can provide unique and valuable information on the needed characteristics of your customer persona.

2. Create a Content Marketing Funnel for Your Customer Personas

Now that you created your customer personas, you need to figure out how many steps it takes for them to make the final decision about your offer and what content you need on each customer journey phase.

A content marketing funnel is a model that helps pharma companies to leverage content across all the touchpoints of a customer journey, from meeting a brand to the point of turning into a brand fan, by understanding which type of content and at which stage they need to use to convert customers.

The content marketing funnel model comprises three stages:

1. The top of the funnel (TOFU): A customer has a challenge.
2. The middle of the funnel (MOFU): A customer is searching for a solution to solve the challenge.
3. The bottom of the funnel (BOFU): A customer is searching for a solution provider.

What content can fulfill the needs of your target audience, and at which stage?

To complete your goals and increase the number of customers who appreciate your brand, you should brainstorm and ask specific questions.

In the top of the funnel or the awareness stage, you should ask yourself: How can I create demand for my products and services with content, and what types of content should I use for that?

The solution at this lifecycle stage is to spread your online presence with appealing content through as many channels as possible without affecting the quality of your content. In other words:

1. Google what techniques can drive more organic traffic to your website through search engines and social media.
2. Focus on creating content for the channels your customer personas prefer the most.
3. Analyze main marketing trends and discover effective content development practices on these channels.
4. Create content for these channels as frequently as possible.

There are two essential things to focus on. First, hire as many content creators as possible. Second, don’t let the chase for quantity influence quality.

In the middle of the funnel or the interest stage, your goal is to get more customers interested in your brand. The question that can help you reach your goal is:

What types of content can encourage my customers to spark a genuine curiosity in my brand?

The solution is to solve the problems of the customers who noticed your brand by demonstrating unique benefits and original approaches to distinguish you from your competitors.

However, remember that, at this lifecycle stage, you should show customers only a slight view of the possibilities that can get with your company. It’s like demonstrating an awesome trailer to make viewers eager to wait and watch the entire movie.

Here are types of the content that can get customers interested in your brand:

• “How-to” content and other tutorials.
• Social media posts and comments.
• Reviews.
• Introductory webinars.
• Short videos.
• eBooks.
• eDetailers.
• Checklists.
• Infographics.
• White papers.
• Reports and surveys.

At the bottom of the funnel or the action stage, customers are ready to make the final decision.

Your goal is to make customers make that decision. To reach the goal, ask yourself: What type of content can encourage potential customers to convert and remain loyal?

You should show your target audience the big picture – unveil explicitly all the details about the solutions that can solve the problems of your target audience.

You can use pretty much the same content formats as at the interest stage, but you should focus on depth and comprehensiveness:

• Testimonials.
• Case studies.
• Live demos.
• Webinars on specific topics.
• Newsletters.
• Longer videos.

3. Conduct a Keyword Research to Find Content Ideas

People use Google and other search engines to enter specific keywords and keyword phrases and find everything they need, including information about your company and niche. 

Before creating a content map, your team should fill all the content gaps your company might have by conducting in-depth keyword research.

Keyword research is a practice that allows companies to discover search inquiries that are most popular among your target audience and find the content ideas that would be most relevant for current and future customers.

Your research strategy should consist of three stages. 

The first stage of the strategy is the existing content analysis. 

If your company isn’t new to the market, we assure you that you’ll find content waiting for improvements, updates, and fixing. It can be articles on your blog, information on your website pages, and beyond. 

The existing content analysis isn’t only about modernizing the content you have and refreshing it with new keywords. It will help your team know what topics and keywords you are missing.

The second stage of the strategy is the new content analysis.

It’s about researching the topics and keywords your company hasn’t used for its promotion yet. You ought to start your analysis by searching for general topics that evoke associations for your customers about your business.

For example, we at Viseven can use such topics as martech services, omnichannel marketing, pharmaceutical marketing, and beyond. Your team should do the same and collect up to ten general subjects about your business. It would be more than enough.

Once you have relevant topics, you should find keywords that describe them. Say we at Viseven take omnichannel marketing as a topic. The perfect keywords for it are personalized experience, communication automation, and so on.

How to find the keywords related to your topics? Here are a few main methods:

1. Use Google Search Console or the Keyword Planner tool.
2. Use any keyword idea tools within popular SEO platforms.
3. Type possible keyword ideas in Google autocomplete.
4. View related searches at the bottom of a Google results page.

You may end up chasing tens and even hundreds of relevant keywords. Which keywords are the best? To find the best keywords for your business, consider the following:

1. Search Volume. The metric shows the number of people who used a keyword during a particular period.
2. Competition. The metric defines the level of keyword reputation. In other words, it tells you how popular a keyword is among other websites.
3. Google SERP Features. SERP stands for a search engine results page. Subject to a keyword, a SERP can include featured snippets, knowledge panels, video carousels, and image packs.

The third stage of the strategy is the competitor’s analysis.

Competitors are a tremendous source for finding unique keyword ideas and creating content maps. After analyzing your competitors one by one using the same keyword tools you used to analyze your company, you’ll get a much broader perspective on your future actions.

Whatever results you receive from this analysis, keep in mind that you shouldn’t plagiarize your competitors. Instead, you ought to adapt their actions to the experience of your company by reading between the lines and disclosing their intentions about content planning.

4. Create Personalized Customer Journeys

Now that you know how to segment your customers, identify gaps in your content funnel, and create the right content for your brand, you can determine different conversion paths for different customer personas and map content.

Mapping content to the customer journey requires an advanced technological environment powered by software that can provide such opportunities as:

1. Data management. It will help your team collect and analyze your customer journey data in a single place.
2. Content creation. It will help your team optimize the content creation process by planning and delivering content for different audience segments and different geographies in a single place.
3. Automation. It will help your team automate all the steps and processes within each customer journey and target customers at the right moment and via the preferred channels.

Here’s how we streamline the content mapping process at Viseven.

How We Do Content Mapping at Viseven

Depending on goals, needs, and the level of digital maturity, we use different products, services, and solutions to help companies in pharma and life sciences create personalized content experiences for their customers across their journeys.

Digital Content Factory

Facing difficulties creating an optimized content map and producing content for your pharma brand at a large scale? Digital Content Factory can provide your company with full-scale content mapping services.

With over thirteen years of experience developing pharma content in multiple formats and for different purposes, we offer:

• Content Production. We can map existing content for you and produce high-quality at scale as long as your company needs.
• Content Analytics. We provide customized dashboards and advanced reporting for your team to monitor the performance of your content and understand the effectiveness of your content map.
• Full Flexibility. We react to any changes rapidly and without losing our efficiency.
• 24/7 Customer Support. A dedicated team of specialists is here to help with any possible inquiry at any moment needed.

In the long run, Viseven Digital Content Factory can save almost 60% of the costs allocated to content production.

Omnichannel Marketing

Have enough resources to create appealing content but have enough knowledge to create your own content map?

Our team can help your company create a content map and tailor content within one of the data-driven omnichannel marketing solutions:

• Technical infrastructure. We can create an end-to-end ecosystem that combines all channels to personalize communication across the entire customer lifecycle.
• Engagement strategy. We can analyze your customers’ behavior and create a unique plan for personalized omnichannel communication based on the existing strategy of your brand.
• Campaign execution. We can prepare and launch complex personalized campaigns inside a marketing automation platform.

eWizard and Modular Content

Powered by Viseven, eWizard is a content experience platform that provides all functionality necessary to implement your content mapping strategy:

• Campaign and content planning. Work together in one space and plan content, customer journeys, and campaigns using dashboard and calendar.
• Modular content. Reuse existing content by dividing it into modules and optimize the content production process with pre-designed templates.
• Translation automation. Optimize the translation process and reduce content production cost.
• MLR process optimization. Accelerate the process of medical, legal, and regulatory review by reducing the turnaround time.
• Publishing & delivery automation. Integrate with the most popular software to automate workflow and execution.

In summary, content mapping is a powerful tool for companies in the pharmaceutical industry, enabling them to deliver valuable information to their customers while navigating the complex regulatory landscape. With careful planning and execution, content mapping can help companies to build stronger relationships with their buyer persona and achieve better results.