February 15, 2021
Healthcare companies invest a lot in the outwardly facing aspects of digital content, e.g., the messaging and the look of their brands. However, many healthcare companies could get more value out of their outward facing content as well as raise the level of trust in the market towards their content (1), if they would focus more on the internal, organizational aspects of it. So, if you want to aim for digital content excellence, aim also for becoming a dynamic content organization. Based on our experience, six practices can bring you closer to this vision.
The value of optimization
Before we introduce the six practices, it is important to introduce their common, underlying assumption: success with digital content, and thus success with your business, comes primarily by means of optimization processes.
Why does the digital paradigm operate with this assumption, you might ask? There are several reasons.
First, there is a recognition of the complex relationship between digital content and human beings, the users. It’s not easy to know why people do what they do. It’s not easy to know what people experience. Optimization involves establishing feedback loops between your site and your user. Optimization processes enable testing of hypotheses about user behavior, so we hope to get closer to the most accurate interpretation of it. These insights from user data drive our decisions about content and other aspects of user experience.
Second, there is acknowledgement of the labour intensity and costs of both digital development and content development. Optimization therefore helps us scope our work and utilize resources with greater efficiency.
If your organization primarily values – explicitly or implicitly - the building of digital properties over the optimization of them, it will challenge your efforts with the six practices. Don’t let this put you off. But do let it inform how you communicate in your organization about your ambitions for a dynamic content organization in the time of Covid-19, where the need for digital transformation processes has become amplified.
Figure 1: The 6 practices of a dynamic content organization
Practice 1: Digital content governance
Why digital content governance?
A content strategy focuses on the delivery of the right content to the right audience at the right time. This sounds easy, but in fact it is often very difficult as there can be many parts at play.
Add to this picture the inherent aspects of healthcare content - such as the need to convey complicated medical information with a high degree of precision, aligned to national or international regulations, need for updates due to new research-based knowledge, launch of new products or changes to guidelines – and it becomes clear why there needs to be strong governance of digital content.
Governance processes focus on the quality assessment of your content, and thus how you intend to improve the delivery of your content strategy.
Failing to effectively improve digital content, and thus user engagement with the content, often happens because there is weak digital content governance in the organization.
Governance: Monitor your digital content operations
Digital content governance entails having a standard operating procedure regarding digital content operations. It explains the goals for the content, who is responsible for what content, and how and when the quality of the content is reviewed. Guiding principles for content as well as more concrete Content and Design Guidelines are important tools for assessing your content as is your analytics dashboard. Also relevant are procedures for review of content by multiple stakeholders as well as conventions for storing, naming and retiring digital assets. Another aspect of governance is to maintain a digital marketing calendar that describes recurring and one-off content activities for a given year.
A governance model: a steering and communication tool
Document these workflows and organizational chart as your digital content governance model or SOP. See your model as a living document that will aid your communication, not just within your team but also with stakeholders outside your team.
Practice 2: Analytics
An analytics setup is the engine that provides data from which your governing body will draw insights to assess quality and take decisions about content. A bespoke analytics setup for your digital platforms will be crucial for you to effectively collect user data, test content, and ultimately succeed with your content strategy. Many pharmaceutical companies use analytics on their sites, but they are yet to establish an organizational practice that continuously uses analytics to gain meaningful insights.
Have a well-structured KPI framework
Another common issue is a misalignment in a digital KPI framework. If there is a mistake in the logic of the KPI framework, the flaw often gets technically implemented. When this happens, a problem with thinking also becomes an implementation problem. Getting clear and aligned about how you define the success of a site (and its content!) and with which metrics you measure your progress and test hypotheses, is alpha and omega. Not just related to your content, but for user experience, too.
There are a lot of analytics setups out there that create noise rather than action-oriented meaningfor marketing teams. Which do you have?
Practice 3: Content hubs
Adopting a digital mindset has been a challenge for many pharma and other healthcare companies, who traditionally focused on printed materials for HCPS and patients. Many, however, are turning to the use of content hubs.
The term “content hub” is both a digital property, but it is also a way to describe a digital content production team. Both types help companies streamline content production for a multi-channel, digitized world. Finding the right content hub platform for your strategy is important, as is training your team to use it.
In regard to content hubs as content production teams, these can either be in-sourced or outsourced. Either way it is important that the content team is hired and trained to deliver the content vision. Nowadays this means understanding medical content and digital – not only knowing how to create digital medical content, but how the content is integral to the creation of digital experiences. Digital experiences are by nature multidisciplinary, so make sure that your content hub organization has multidisciplinary skills and knowledge in disciplines like user experience, digital design, content, analytics, technology and project management. Continue to cultivate these competences since the digital domain changes rapidly.
Practice 4: User journeys and Content models
User experience and content go hand-in-hand
To effectively level up your digital and print content in a connected, multi-channel world, your content organization can benefit from incorporating a practice of using user journeys and content models. User journey mapping is a tool that will help you understand what content to place where. Not just its location, but also the forming of its messages. User journey mapping has not been a passing fad. It is a serious practice within the domain of user experience, and it informs fundamental content decisions.
Get more value from your content - Repurpose it!
To further improve your content operations efficiency in a multi-channel world, we recommend the practice of content models. Content models are blueprints for content which are independent of format. They are what will enable you to quickly repurpose and reformat content at user journey touchpoints in the ever-growing number of channels and types of user interfaces. Don’t make your own content? Then make sure your content hub team or content vendors utilize content models.
Practice 5: Content curation criteria
Alongside the publication of required legal and regulatory approval codes on your content, we recommend the use and publication of content curation criteria. These criteria provide more transparency about the conditions upon which your content was created or curated by you. These could include information about who owns the content or from where the content originates. Greater transparency regarding content is one factor that can contribute positively to the “trust equation” in the relationship between healthcare brands and content consumers.
The content curation criteria are closely related to content models and should be included in your site design and thus in your CMS. In this way they can be made visible to the content consumers in your channels.
Practice 6: Leadership and Change Management
The sixth practice of a dynamic content organization is to recognize that creating one is an iterative process and often a transformative undertaking that demands leadership and change management. Don’t be shy about getting tools, assistance and support for developing your content organization.
Appreciate the complexity
As you can see, the six practices of a dynamic content organization are interrelated and inseparable. Each practice offers a lens for viewing the others. The practices also involve interchanging between high level perspectives and granular ones. They require structuring your work, but also having an experimental and experiential sensibility. They have implications that can span across organizational silos. They embody the multidisciplinary nature of digital. See the complexity of these practices not just as a challenge, but also as a reward.
A place to start
One recommendation based on best practice is to start by mapping status quo. What does your content organization do now? Answer the question in order to establish a baseline. Prioritize an audit of your Analytics setup--- your KPI framework and its technical implementation. Get a good understanding of the reasoning processes involved with your particular KPI framework.
Which of the six practices are you most interested in? Where do your team’s strengths and weakness lie? These factors can influence how you develop your dynamic content organization. Your priorities will depend on your unique situation. Wherever you start, start by getting very clear about what you are doing and what your goals are, and then iterate from there. That will give you the solid foundation upon which to develop your content organization from status quo to content virtuoso!
Curious to hear more about our approach to content?
Please contact Line Huusom, Account Director: line.huusom@valtech.com +45 25 28 69 58
(1): 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer. Trust in Healthcare: Global. 2019
