How Blue Earth Diagnostics Expands Its Reach with Compliant Social Content
In less-regulated industries, social media has long been essential to digital marketing strategies. In life sciences, however, social media success requires not only garnering views, clicks, and mindshare, but doing so while maintaining compliance with rigorous medical, legal, and regulatory (MLR) requirements.
When the Blue Earth Diagnostics marketing team decided social media was key to expanding its U.S. presence and overall reach, it knew there would be multiple hurdles to overcome.
Building a strategy from scratch
Founded in the UK in 2014, Blue Earth Diagnostics, a subsidiary of Bracco Imaging S.p.A., is a recognized leader in the development and commercialization of novel PET radiopharmaceuticals to inform clinical management and guide care for cancer patients in areas of unmet medical need.
Despite opening its U.S. headquarters in 2016, the company had not yet established a strong local marketing presence. “It became increasingly important for us to focus on reaching a broader U.S. audience,” says Maura Harrigan, senior marketing director at Blue Earth. “The most expedient and effective way to do this was through social media.”
Starting from scratch to build and execute a social media strategy meant overcoming two major challenges: limited time and resources to dedicate to social, and the need to create a compliant process for posting and sharing content.
Lining up a sponsor and forming a team
Given her prior social media experience, the then-VP of marketing was appointed executive sponsor to champion the effort. The company then formed a social media team to guide and implement the strategy.
“For any life sciences company considering a social media presence, bringing team members from compliance, legal, medical affairs, and corporate communications into the process as early as possible is a critical success factor,” says Harrigan. “Having a cross-functional team ensured everyone understood what was happening and was aligned around a thoroughly vetted process.”
Finding external partners to complement the team
As a small company with fewer than 200 employees, Blue Earth turned to third-party partners for expert advice, technology, and ongoing services to help them launch, operate, and optimize their social media strategy. Hale Advisors provides Blue Earth with digital marketing expertise and guidance. Mint Collective helps Blue Earth address pharmacovigilance and other concerns through monitoring and moderation, using a response protocol and pre-approved messages. Both partners are focused exclusively on the life sciences and healthcare industries, respectively.
Blue Earth’s technology partners include Veeva and MarketBeam, a Veeva partner. Blue Earth uses Vault PromoMats for digital asset management (DAM) and accelerated MLR content review and approval. MarketBeam’s social amplification platform offers native integration with Vault PromoMats, enabling Blue Earth to streamline the publication of compliant social media posts.
Together with its partners, Blue Earth developed a standard operating procedure (SOP) for its social media work. “Our SOP is the go-to foundation of what can and can’t be done, what employees should and shouldn’t do,” says Jacqueline Wong, associate director of marketing, at Blue Earth.
Streamlining the content review and approval process
“We need great content to drive a following and build a Blue Earth community in the U.S.,” says Wong. “That starts with a great content plan.” Blue Earth first established key content pillars, including corporate and human resources news, disease state content, third-party information, and product news. The content is further subdivided into types including planned, semi-planned, and unplanned. Blue Earth piloted its social media launch by starting with planned, non-controversial posts on LinkedIn.
In preparation for posting content that needs formal review and approval, the social media team reviewed the process with the MLR team. “The integrated workflow in MarketBeam and Vault PromoMats streamlines the review and approval process,” says Wong. “With this platform, we could show the MLR team that nothing had to change in their workflow except that the process was even faster than before.”
Launching its first social media channel
Nine months into its social media journey, Blue Earth issued its first post on LinkedIn. “We started with a single platform to get the basics in place,” says Wong. “This has allowed us to optimize our social media approach over time.”
Post-launch, the Blue Earth social media team includes its compliance officer, its corporate communications officer, Harrigan and Wong from the marketing team, and an external partner. The team previews all posts before they go live on the LinkedIn page. Should there be an issue where the company needs to withdraw a post, any team member can do so.
With the successful launch on LinkedIn, Blue Earth is planning to expand its presence to other social media platforms such as Twitter as it continues growing mindshare in the U.S. Its partners will help it do so efficiently and with confidence.
Find out how your organization can build the right content foundation for long-term growth with these 4 tips for emerging pharma companies.