The faster digitalization goes worldwide, the more pharma companies find out about new tools and approaches for digital self-promotion. Digitalization brought new challenges to any industry related to online activities and social influence. Pharma and the specialties of pharma’s marketing appeared to be under influence as well. Modern days marketers are as good as quickly they adapt and overcome today’s challenges. The most successful of them create strategies to foresee the challenges of tomorrow. This is the reason why the omnichannel approach becomes a powerful methodology in the arms of a farsighted marketer. Omnichannel allows to both cover the whole customer’s perspective on the internet, reaching out to him wherever it is comfortable for them across channels, and provide them with an engaging experience, being flexible with content and message delivery from channel to channel.
Being able to build a solid and at the same time flexible content production management for omnichannel purposes sounds like a never-ending nightmare full of additional costs and creative hell. Well, it is a truly unique experience, but definitely not a nightmare, and the ‘additional costs and creative hell’ part is quite overrated.
The name of this idea is the modular approach, and it works perfectly when it comes to covering omnichannel issues.
It may sound obvious or boring, but standardization is key. The main idea of effective resource usage is to standardize everything you can and personalize the rest to create unique and consistent modular content. The perfect thesis for omnichannel interaction will contain the same key message you promote in every channel with a small difference in delivery as different digital channels may require a certain attitude. In a few words, you can adapt it, but the core always stays the same, as you have a pre-approved solution.
Modular content approach with omnichannel strategies: why they fit each other
What does modular content mean in Life Sciences?
Modular content itself is a combination of an image and text, organized relative to the content needs describing the required information in so-called blocks. These blocks can be combined depending on channel and purpose requirements, so they can be adapted to prints, landing pages, social media, and others. The best part of it all is that these blocks are reusable, interchangeable, and customizable.
In a nutshell, modular content is the complex solution that helps to significantly reduce time and costs for content production, adaptation, and time-to-market. Let’s figure out how exactly this approach influences the commercial part of digital marketing.
Why is it great for commercial purposes?
How to decrease Time-to-market (TTM)?
The first of the most uncomfortable issues that happen during content production is time planning. Missed deadlines are not only about additional costs for content rework or else, but also more about being on time with your product, ideas, or messages before someone else do the same instead of you. Fast TTM directly affects your sales metrics, as being first with something valuable in a market means winning the competition. Often, missing deadlines happen because of misunderstandings while collecting requirements and sharing them with your content agency or marketing team. Each separate detail of your plan has a chance to be lost, forgotten, or misunderstood which leads to more time spent on explanation or reference search.
At this point, the modular content becomes a savior as standardization and unified branding design leave no space for incorrect interpretation but gives a lot of opportunities to go through past activities and find something to reuse or redesign. Thanks to the unification, there’s no need to look out for a branding design code or create content from scratch — go on with pre-approved modular content, interpreting it to suit your needs. Simple as that, the modular approach significantly improves your ability to self-representation and engagement.
How to calculate cost efficiency?
How much money have you spent on content creation agencies? Most often, agencies charge you for every separate asset that needs to be coded, localized, or reworked. The cancellation fee may cost up to 10% of the initial production cost. Along with standard content production issues like an unclear technical task, missed deadlines, or changed priorities, the price for being relevant to your audience in life sciences may cause a heart attack as the lack of standardization only creates more questions.
From a modular perspective, there’s a way to significantly reduce the number of spendings as the modular content is highly reusable when it comes to gathering materials and coding automation. Metadata tagging allows searching for a needed piece of delivery faster and easier than usual research on the content subject. Again, thanks to unified branding and design assets, the change of missed time frames are reduced along with the possible cancellations. It’s easier to foresee upcoming spending and know how to balance your budget right when you know exactly what your end content should look like. he changes management
How to measure content effectiveness?
The main purpose of any content is to attract HCPs and call them to action in perspective. Without a clearly defined approach, the creation of supporting materials for any pharma company’s strategy becomes a mess and it doesn’t perceive as a whole concept. Of course, we know that a personalized customer experience approach always raises the number of KPIs, but personalization becomes a struggle to guess whether you need to concentrate on a new design or focus on the message delivery or else.
The modules give you consistency in content management system and customer journey. A clearly defined initial thesis plus a unified design code make a perfect foothold to personalize it further, whether we are talking about a channel or HCP audience personalization. Modular content works perfectly for both cases, as it helps to collect the whole library of templates filled with unique meta tags for quick search. It becomes easier to navigate through sales representatives and local teams; as a result, sales reps become more satisfied as clearly defined modules allow them to precisely address the key messages in pharma industry.
Reasons to try the modular content strategy
- Ecosystem. Implementing modular content into your daily marketing routine means building a whole development structure that changes many production aspects. Once you design and create your core modular templates, you are open to a huge number of opportunities. For example, being able to collect and analyze content interaction data and adapt content pieces accordingly significantly increases content re-use rate and reduces development costs. Along with that, content creation teams spent less time on gathering materials and creating concepts, as well as the risk of small mistakes, and MLR decline possibility is significantly reduced due to established and preapproved modules. The pharma sales representatives would be happy to work with clearly defined messages, personalized for particular needs without extra effort.
- Communication quality and agility. Modern HCPs are used to going through most of the pharma sales funnel without the direct involvement of representatives. It’s your top priority to make this way as comfortable, unobtrusive and engaging as possible, so your sales department will be able to catch that lead, continue communication and turn the lead into a customer. When it comes to such complex marketing approaches, as omnichannel in pharma marketing, the modular content reveals its potential as a tool for creating standardized messages that serve to close all possible conceptual gaps between customer and expert.
- Resource spending reduction. The best fact about the commercial benefits of the modular approach is the reduction of spending, as the modular content is based on template re-use and personalization technology. Stable production chains guarantee clear technical requirements, availability of required assets, and specific direction vector for development processes. The speed of modular content creation and content reuse increases in a few times. As there’s no need to regularly invent new ways of reaching out to customers’ points of interest, so the cost for development for all channels is based on what we already have and what can we do to adapt it for a certain case.
- MLR review. As your content strategy is based on modular content, there’s nothing to worry about MLR review and approval. Usually, it becomes such a pain to create, deploy and approve the piece of content for the medical legal regulatory review process as you rarely know what can be rejected and how much it would cost you to fix it. An unstandardized content development process usually only delays the process as your content creators must redo the whole work from scratch. However, the standardized modular content, built on previous feedback and highlighted for MLR representatives, significantly help to speed up the approval verdict. If the modules are approved once, content reuse becomes the everyday solution for marketing teams.
Since all pharma companies dream about delivering their ideas to customers, the innovation of the digital era serves to translate these dreams into reality with a help of technologies and creativity. The more ways you find to deliver your messages, the more ways there are to raise engagement and make it more conceptual, and viral across channels. From the commercial point of view, modular content is the perfect marketing tool to optimize your production and delivery processes, increasing reply and interaction rates. It may sound a bit complicated for starters, however we provide full support during this journey with our educational materials and effective change management.
Start implementing the module approach now. Don’t know where to start – ask our experts. We are here to help and guide.
