How to Scale Personalized Content for HCPs

When it comes to developing content for healthcare professionals (HCPs), the first step is to put yourself in their shoes and ask a few questions. Whom do you want to engage with, what are their needs, and which content or services can add value and simplify their lives? This is the starting point for creating and scaling differentiated customer experiences for HCPs. Here’s how I think about personalization through data and a modular content approach, along with tips for optimizing your global-to-local strategy.

Content personalization, based on data

When defining personalized content, I prefer to keep it simple. Personalization means delivering the right message in the right channel at the right time, based on customers’ interests and needs.

A foundation for personalized content is data, and it’s essential to have the right data to understand the customer, such as location, specialty, and preferred channel. Data privacy regulations, such as GDPR in the European Union or other data protection laws around the world, can be a challenge when looking at data you can collect from your targets.

Your technology integrations, or lack thereof, may also pose additional challenges. If you have data from several software solutions, you will need to reconcile the data to derive insights and make meaningful decisions.

As you look at collecting and integrating the key data points to deliver relevant content, you will want to ensure you can easily access and measure that data. At the same time, you can help your customers understand the purpose of collecting data and shift mindsets by educating customers about why data collection is essential. By combining education with quality content, your customers will recognize the value, and they will, in most cases, provide even more data.

An integrated platform for modular content

To help us build personalized content faster, we rely on a modular content approach—that is, we leverage pre-approved components or modules that we assemble following brand, medical, legal, and regulatory (MLR) rules – displayed using bulletproof channel specific templates. Of course, it’s also necessary to consider the overall context and the customer journey.

There are several critical factors when it comes to modular content success. The most crucial consideration is to ensure integration of technical platforms because they need to talk to each other. I’m not saying that you must buy everything from the same vendor, but it certainly helps. Integration is crucial because it allows you to easily combine personalized pieces of information, use pre-approved materials, and follow brand rules. Having integrated platforms will help you efficiently maintain up-to-date, timely content that you can quickly publish and disseminate to your various channels.

Optimizing your global-to-local strategy and processes

As you develop integrated modular content strategies, getting buy-in from top management is crucial because the change is significant. You need visibility, engagement, sponsors, and a well-built governance model that includes global and local business stakeholders, including medical, regulatory, IT, and procurement amongst others.

I recommend piloting projects in smaller markets, which are agile and accept change readily. If you begin with a key market or brand, you may experience pushback and find it more challenging to implement because their significant responsibilities make them more risk-averse.

Accelerating content development

With all the foundational elements in place to build personalized content, you can focus on accelerating content development. Start by evaluating what works and doesn’t, including content, channels, and initiatives. Then remove anything that brings in limited value. From there, look at what slows you down. For example, if it’s content creation, you might want to work with specialized agencies or start building an in-house content creation capability. Agencies can be critical for helping you to get to the next level with modular content.

Another thing you can do to speed up content development to make sure you’ve set up your claims and reference library properly, which will help you reduce legal and regulatory risk, execute quickly, and protect your brand.

One final tip: Look at the content your customers love and want before developing new content. This approach will allow you to focus your efforts on delivering more value.

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The elements presented here are the views and opinions of Quentin Muller, and do not necessarily represent those of Sanofi.