Viacheslav Vasylenko, Сo-Founder & Chief Operating Officer, Viseven discusses digital content factories and why they are essential for pharma companies today.
Modern pharma brands pursue a higher degree of content personalisation to engage with diverse audiences. This means tighter deadlines, higher workloads, and a greater demand for skilled content creators than ever before. If your team is juggling multiple launches, each requiring mountains of content across channels, and you’re drowning in a sea of regulatory approvals, translation requests, and last-minute changes — it may be time to rethink your content creation process.
What is a Digital Content Factory (DCF)?
A digital content factory (DCF) is a systematic approach to efficiently creating, managing, and distributing digital content at scale. It is a major enabler for the entire content lifecycle, from planning to distribution, treating content creation like a manufacturing process.
DCF simplifies planning, accelerates writing and editing, expedites MLR approvals, and facilitates content adaptation for different markets. It centralises content storage in a digital asset management system (DAM), allowing pharma brands to locate and repurpose pre-approved content easily.
By optimising these processes, DCF improves the speed, efficiency, and effectiveness of creating and distributing content. As a result, you reduce time-to-market and costs, while boosting engagement and conversion rates across omnichannel strategies.
Importance of DCF in the Pharma Industry
DCFs are becoming essential for pharmaceutical companies due to the increasing demand for accessible and engaging content. DCF adds value throughout global pharma marketing operations in three key areas:
- Strategic planning: DCF supports the development of global content strategies and their localisation. This ensures consistent and impactful brand communication worldwide, helping to engage HCPs and build their loyalty. The goal is to maintain a unified message while adapting to local markets.
- Efficient execution: By separating content production from creative processes, DCF enables faster and more efficient content delivery. This includes development, standardisation, and localisation, followed by quick distribution through integrated systems. DCF also allows for content modularisation, which enables more personalised communication and supports omnichannel marketing capabilities.
- Continuous improvement: DCF provides valuable insights through content performance tracking and analysis. This data helps optimise content production, improve campaign management, and enhance customer experience. As a result, companies can increase their net promoter score (NPS) and make better informed go-to-market decisions.
DCF in action: How a pharma brand streamlined global communication and cut costs
To highlight how a digital content factory can transform your content production, let me tell you a real-life story of a pharma company.
One big pharma company struggled with its content production process — content delivery was chaotic and took too long, resulting in a lack of scalability. Moreover, their target customers already trusted the local biotech companies, so the to-be-launched content had to be quite persuasive to make the HCPs change their partners.
To fix the organisation and scale the production of meaningful content, it was decided to implement a DCF. To achieve high-quality results faster, the pharma company involved a DCF provider.
To compete effectively with the local companies, deliver personalised content at scale, and reduce costs, the company utilised a modular content approach and strategic use of eDetailers, emails, landing pages, and banners. DCF provider helped them standardise the content creation process with the help of a centralised system.
The results were outstanding. Errors were eliminated thanks to the adoption of pre-tested templates. The company was able to utilise more channels, scaling from only two to five. Their messaging became more consistent because of the adoption of a content channel ecosystem. All of that resulted in their requests skyrocketing almost eightfold! And not to forget the stakeholders, they reported their satisfaction rate to be 4.9 out of 5.
DCF Formats: Which Should You Choose?
In most cases, digital content factory comes in a few formats. You can either build and maintain it all on your own, or involve specialised software, or even a pharma DCF provider. Pharmaceutical companies can choose from several DCF models, each designed to address specific organisational needs and challenges.
The self-service model involves using content experience platforms to manage content production independently. This approach is ideal for organisations with an existing team that wants to improve efficiency or streamline processes with limited personnel. It can significantly enhance team collaboration and content workflow through centralised systems and automated processes.
The white-glove model involves outsourcing all content production and management processes to a DCF service provider. This approach can be particularly beneficial for companies looking to reduce the expenses associated with maintaining an in-house content creation team. It allows quick access to specialised expertise and frees up internal resources to focus on strategic work such as research and development.
The hybrid model combines in-house capabilities with external support. This approach is well-suited for companies that have a skilled internal team but need to fill specific expertise gaps or require access to specialised technology. It allows companies to maintain control over core processes while leveraging external resources for specific tasks or during peak periods.
How to Start Your Content Factory Journey
To build a successful DCF, you need to streamline all the processes of content creation: planning, development, MLR review, and distribution. Let’s dig into how to get started.
- Define clear KPIs: Establish measurable goals such as time-to-market, content reuse rates, or cost savings. Also, track content performance and gather qualitative feedback on team satisfaction.
- Determine content reuse strategy: Clarify whether you'll focus on reusing different content types, sharing across global regions, or encouraging local-to-local reuse.
- Standardise taxonomy and metadata: Implement consistent naming conventions and tagging systems to improve searchability and drive content reuse. If manual tagging doesn’t seem feasible, you can automate tagging with AI-enabled auto-tagging software.
- Adopt a modular approach: Break content into reusable modules to speed up creation, review, and approval processes.
- Utilise content librarians: Assign dedicated professionals to manage content quality assurance, metadata, usage rights, and ongoing content management.
By implementing these strategies, pharma companies can create a scalable, efficient content production system that meets the evolving needs of healthcare professionals and supports effective communication.