How to Set Up a Content Creation Programme
Let’s look at some steps to help you create more pharma content, more consistently, via a structured content creation programme.
We’re well aware of the importance of content. It drives the problem-solving process for anyone looking for more information on particular medications, manufacturing capabilities and everything else in between. And although we realise that our organisations require content to communicate with our audiences - to survive in competitive environments like these - we just haven’t become experts at creating this content.
Sure, we can create an email, a social media post and a news piece about a new service offering. But that won’t have the same long term effect as creating a continued flow of consistent, educational and engaging content to serve buyer personas throughout the traditional buyer’s journey.
The solution: Setting up a content creation programme within your organisation.
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HOW TO SET UP A CONTENT CREATION PROGRAMME
In this post, we’ll run through the steps that you, the marketing or commercial manager of a pharmaceutical organisation, could take to set up and run a successful content creation programme.
We’ll assume that you already have a target audience and a content strategy, so we’ll look at how to ensure you are on track with that strategy. Grab a cup of coffee and let’s begin shaping your content creation process.
1. ASSIGN A CONTENT MARKETING LEAD
If you’re reading this article, the content lead in your organisation is likely to be yourself. No problem. The role of the content lead is to oversee all operations of the content marketing strategy, which includes the planning, sourcing, editing, publishing and distribution of the content. Without this lead role, the roadblocks that you will likely face during the process where your intervention is needed will not be overcome. Identify the content lead from the outset to push the day-to-day tasks of the strategy forward. Resilience is key.
2. IDENTIFY THE TYPES OF CONTENT YOU REQUIRE, ALONG WITH TOPICS
We can’t create content without content topics. You’ll likely have a list of potential promotional and non-promotional (solution-based) topics that can form much of your content. This is a great start. I believe that to go one step further is to map the customer journey with your organisation, from stranger to customer, and identify the content and topics required to move that person along the journey. At this point, you will develop some key insights from other representatives within your organisation. Sales, brand, account managers and customer service representatives can all tell you a little bit about the problems that your current clients run into which your content can help. Aim to get the relevant parties in a room for a brainstorming session. Do not leave the room until the whiteboard is completely full of ideas, and then (the content lead can) shape those suggestions into content pieces.
3. CREATE A CONTENT CALENDAR
Before officially beginning to create your content, you will need to lay out the road ahead via a content calendar. All of the individual content pieces that you will aim to create, by when etc. This consists of your day-to-day management of your content creation, editing and distribution. As a planning tool, a content calendar is invaluable as it will provide focus, save time and will create more strategic content for your organisation in the long run. This can be done online or via a simple Excel sheet with the relevant details associated with your internal process.
Content creation is a robust process, and without an actionable calendar to keep track of things you will be doing yourself a disservice. Planning ahead will ensure that all of the individual post elements are organised to stay on schedule so that coordination between departments can happen with limited disruption and delay. You didn’t think we could create pharmaceutical content without cross-department collaboration, did you?
4. IDENTIFY AND BEFRIEND SMES (SUBJECT MATTER EXPERTS)
As pharma marketers, we can’t be expected to write about the highly scientific elements of our products and services. That would do injustice for those products and services and for our colleagues in R&D and product. Pharmaceutical organisations will employ a range of specialists throughout the production process, and it is the knowledge of those SMEs (dependent on the topics you wish to expand on within the content) that we are looking to gain access to and use within our content. Identify who those individuals are and look to engage with them. Your goal is to extract the relevant information in the most efficient manner - remember, they have their own jobs to do, so you’ll have to do this in a smart way. Conduct interviews and recorded sessions with those SMEs and develop a strong working relationship with them - you will need them so much more than they need you.
5. GET YOUR LEGAL TEAM (AND SENIOR LEADERSHIP) ONBOARD
Don’t think it’s as easy as befriending SMEs either. Because we have other executives in other departments that will intervene during the content creation process that will need to review the content before publishing. Content can be delayed by weeks and months during this process of due diligence. But you may be able to speed up the process if you have befriended someone from the legal team that can prioritise the content which you send for approval. (If your content is strategic, and will benefit the organisation, you have a business case for this to go through quickly.) Having a member of the senior leadership team as a sponsor will also help you here as they will have the power and authority to push this content through so that the overall content creation process doesn’t stall.
6. CONSIDER EXTERNAL RESOURCE
As we go through more of these steps within a content creation process, you might start to feel overwhelmed. Marketing Managers in pharma could feel that the pressures of managing event calendars, inbound marketing campaigns, CRM projects or media plans might be too much to take on a content marketing programme. If this is the case, working with an external marketing agency might be appropriate for consideration here. If this option isn’t viable, depending on the content you require, perhaps allowing for guest contributions or curating the content from elsewhere is better suited to your content needs. Help is around the corner - don’t let resources stop you from getting an edge over the competition.
7. SYSTEMATISE THE ENTIRE PROCESS
I also find that if there is a system in place for the production of content - a series of interconnecting processes that can move the content forward via the different stages and departments - you’ll create more effective content, quicker. The content calendar is just the beginning. Quarterly brainstorming meetings, monthly content editing slots and weekly follow-up activities - fixed milestones for all stakeholders, will ensure that the content programme is on course to reach its objectives and produce the completed content. Templates, guidelines and checklists for yourself as well as for those that need to intervene is also a must to ensure completion, not to mention quality.
8. READ YOUR COMPETITORS’ CONTENT
There is no better way to come up with great content ideas than by looking (not stealing) at what your competitors are doing. Just by looking at the content they are promoting on their channels, as well as what is promoted on the website, provides an indication of what those competitors are focusing on - to give you new areas to focus your content. Even borrow their best practices. Look at their keywords, topics, authors etc. and dig out all you can - you’ll be surprised how productive this activity will be. Your own content creation efforts will benefit from this exercise as you will generally be more motivated as the content lead, and you’ll pick up clues to how to refine your own content creation process. TweetDeck allows for the live monitoring of any Twitter account to keep an eye on your competitors’ content.
9. FIND THE OVERLAP: REPURPOSE
Content marketing in pharma is challenging. The content creation process, however, can include the highly productive exercise of getting more out of each piece of content you have created. I think this is really where you can see the results of your content strategy come through, without too much creative effort. A 30-minute webinar will likely have enough content to serve up four new thought leadership articles on your blog, all of which can be shared on your social channels and via email. If you see these thought leadership articles building up, you could take 8 of them - where the topics complement each other - and create a downloadable e-book to promote via LinkedIn or via a specific publisher in the pharma space. Whitepapers are huge investments for any organisation, not only in pharma, so why not review the paper and pinpoint all of the various content pieces you can source from it to use elsewhere? Rest assured, this isn’t a case of old pills in new bottles.
10. GET FEEDBACK
Reviewing performance will feature within any content strategy or marketing plan. Pageviews, time on page and bounce rate etc. But I believe that prompting for feedback is a great way to see how you’re doing, as well as provide an insight into how current content can be edited, and more importantly, how future content is created. Content creation is a process of continued improvement. Feedback CTAs, polls and directly requesting for reviews or one-on-one conversations will all provide indications of what readers like, don’t like, and what they want more of when it comes to your content. This is the best way to refine your content creation process.
KEEP REFINING THE PROCESS
As said in the opening sentence, you will be aware of the importance of content marketing and why you need to create it. But it is a difficult process, there’s no doubt about it. But be resilient. Aim to keep refining the process. Try different approaches with the view of maintaining the processes that deliver you the content you require for your marketing strategy on a consistent basis.
For more on strategic content marketing and writing in the pharmaceutical sectors, and how we can help you, visit our section on content.
