Digital Asset Management Helps Pfizer Accelerate Content Delivery

The rapid pace of innovation challenges pharma companies to deliver commercial content and maintain compliance, but it still typically takes 21 days for content approval. A comprehensive digital asset management (DAM) system for medical, legal, and regulatory (MLR) review can accelerate content approvals. The group I lead, which is focused on healthcare professional (HCP) and patient marketing enablement, has slashed the time needed for content approval from 38 days to seven.

We’ve learned a few things that can help you reimagine your content creation, review, and approval processes. I’ll share some ideas for improving the end-to-end content journey, harnessing the power of data across the content supply chain, and creating a seamless omnichannel experience for patients and HCPs.

Improving the end-to-end content journey

My group oversees services that enable content creation, approval, dissemination, and our data ecosystem—everything associated with managing and capturing information and helping steward HCP profile and interaction data.

Recently, medical content has been added to our group as well, so we’re thinking about how to stand up and disseminate content to our customers, agnostic of the domain.

Here are a few things we’ve learned about accelerating content development:

1. Identify the most significant points of a failure to drive efficiency. Many content creators will tell you it takes way too long to create content. For example, our teams found it was time-consuming to interact with different systems when creating content, so we identified opportunities to drive automation and connectivity with different systems.
2. Simplify and streamline review and approval processes. We obtained a tiered review process based on large or small changes that require different types of reviewers. For example, there may not be anything new to approve for a small change that’s reflected in the global policy.
3. Take advantage of global to local. “Global to local” has been part of our lexicon for a few years, and it bears repeating. We want people to use globally created content locally because they don’t need to develop new, bespoke content for something that already exists in a global repository.

Accelerate from multichannel to omnichannel

As an industry, there are opportunities to elevate our content game. We’re used to connecting and communicating with customers using many different channels, but we need to meet their expectations for more connection and personalized interactions. That’s why it’s essential to create a seamless omnichannel experience for patients and HCPs.

Many organizations are shifting from multichannel to omnichannel. You may face the challenge of stitching together different channels, or you may start from scratch to ensure compatibility across channels. Either approach represents a significant transformation to consider.

The first step is to lay out the current processes, tools, and technologies for content creation and interaction with physicians or patients. Second, I suggest you look at the critical areas causing the most inefficiencies. Start with areas with the biggest gaps to prioritize efforts. Then you can create a plan for each of those areas as you consider the long-term implications. For example, if you think that your website is the channel with the most upside, it behooves you to think about getting those channels closer to your content repositories, so the process becomes more seamless.

Our organization learned that one of the more significant gaps was metadata, so we are prioritizing steps to close it. Here are some considerations for you to consider if you’d like to become what I refer to as “an omnichannel marketer of the future.”

1. Define taxonomies. Which content pieces do you want to capture metadata on? From there, determine the taxonomies of the fields that you want to capture. Next, stand up the process and get it integrated into the content.
2. Prioritize content and interactions. This helps understand how people interact with content in each channel without boiling the ocean. If a portal or video is core, tagging clicks on a website or drop-off rates on a video could be key.
3. Reporting. The last mile is reporting. How will you harness data to render insights, make decisions, and take action that wraps into your overall content management strategy?

Read the Q&A with Anuj Maheshwari to learn more about accelerating content delivery.

The elements presented here are the views and opinions of Anuj Maheshwari and do not necessarily represent those of Pfizer.