The Secret to Personalized Content in the Digital Age

The life sciences industry’s shift toward digital engagement is boosting the number of healthcare professional (HCP) and sales rep interactions across a variety of channels. From remote meetings and virtual events to email and social media, this growing engagement mix is generating 60% more content across the board.¹ While this allows HCPs to reach a world of information at their fingertips, it also adds pressure on brands to stand out and create relevant content, faster.

How can companies quickly adapt to HCPs’ evolving needs while delivering effective and compliant content across digital and in-person channels? Based on our experience at Kyowa Kirin, here’s what we’ve found to be key in creating personalized content for a new era of digital marketing.

Leverage data and insights to deliver more impactful content
With a variety of new channels available to engage HCPs, companies need to recognize which are most effective for delivering content and what messages resonate best with their audiences.

Building a commercial strategy based on real-world data is critical to creating more personalized, and impactful, content. Platforms that help convert key customer data into actionable insights can give teams a comprehensive view of their HCP targets and help them develop the right content plan to fit different needs.

Yet the data referenced shouldn’t be confined to HCPs’ therapeutic areas, general demographics, or organization profiles. Marketing teams need to create robust behavioral segmentations to understand HCPs’ different personalities, what drives them, and what’s important to them. This will fuel accuracy and consistency into crafting the right message, at the right time through each stage of the customer journey.

My advice for organizations of all sizes is to think small and act big–look at the granular information at your disposal and use it to tailor your content across a diverse set of audiences and interactions.

Stay on top of content performance for greater customer engagement
To drive more successful customer experiences, teams need to set clear goals and measure success early on. This helps them assess where they need to make changes and adapt strategies as they go.

Start by analyzing three key metrics: message preference, channel preference, and the timing of outreach. This is essential as HCPs’ preferences vary at different stages of their content journey. Then, with the help of content tagging, teams can get additional feedback on what visuals, messages, or emails are more effective than others. Tracking this information ensures reps avoid saturating one engagement method and instead use it to improve future content plans.

Once there is a baseline of what good looks like, tie these metrics to business objectives to demonstrate real content value. Are reps generating more prescriptions as a result of this content? Or are they driving down the cost per engagement? Asking these types of questions is vital to reflect on progress months after launching and see how an organization is moving the needle.

Why modular content is key for the future
To act quickly on HCPs’ changing preferences and growing demand for more content, companies need to invest in agile operating models that help them adapt content on the fly, maintain compliance, and stay cost-prohibitive.

Modular content helps by creating pre-approved content blocks, or ‘modules,’ that marketers can quickly and easily recombine into a variety of polished assets. Each module is automatically linked to an approved reference and claim, speeding the medical, legal, and regulatory (MLR) review process and ensuring teams remain flexible in a highly regulated environment.

This streamlines the reuse of key messages across new and existing channels to create relevant content faster, and as compliantly as possible. It also makes the content creation process more creative and cost-effective, as marketers can optimize content reuse across channels and regions while playing with different formats for greater content impact.

Lay the foundation for more meaningful, hybrid engagement
As HCPs’ needs continue to evolve with digital, having the right processes in place to consistently create and distribute relevant and compliant content will ensure reps engage more meaningfully across virtual and in-person interactions.

Start small by leveraging insights to deliver more personalized content and set clear metrics upfront to quickly assess how content is performing. Use modular content to adapt engagement to each customer’s unique journey and unlock new content ideas within existing assets without risking compliance.

These steps lay the groundwork for companies large and small to magnify business value across the digital marketing mix and sustain successful content creation in the hybrid world.

For more content insights from Jay McMeekan of Kyowa Kirin, read highlights from the session “Kyowa Kirin U.S.: Personalized Marketing at Speed & Scale”.

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^{1. Veeva Pulse Data, October 2020}