What is Modular Content and Why Do Pharma Marketers Need it Now?

Modular content has become a standard practice for various brand marketers who depend on digital content strategies. As the digital marketing landscape continues to evolve, the demand for effective, omnichannel content has increased.

Regardless of industry, brands need not only more content but content that is optimized and personalized to ensure alignment with consumers’ preferences and needs. While the use of modular content has increased within the pharma industry, there’s still a larger pool of pharma marketers who have yet to fully understand the benefits and integrate modular content within their marketing strategy.

Doing more in the digital space

Modular content, or ‘atomic design’ is the process of creating smaller blocks of content to be assembled in pre-defined templates. These content blocks, or modules, might encompass elements such as headlines, body copy, images, calls-to-action, legal copy, and logos. The content can then be used across multiple channel and tactic types instead of creating new designs and layouts for individual assets.

The traditional creative and production approach has typically been siloed; content is created and delivered, but not always shared across the brands or markets. With a modular content ecosystem, creative concepts are used to produce modules, which are then attached to business rules covering style and regulatory requirements. Using standardized templates to combine these modules means additional content takes hours to create rather than weeks.

This can also help drive the adoption of global assets when combined with content localization. Modules can be translated into multiple languages, or once a rapidly produced asset has been completed.

A modular content ecosystem

The need to escape pharma’s traditional approach to marketing content is mirroring recent digital trends. Greater emphasis is now on repurposing existing assets, using the ‘shoot-once-use-many-times’ approach. Pharma marketers are continuously challenged to optimise and deliver content globally. This exposes the need for a higher volume of assets that will rapidly get through regulatory and can quickly be used successfully and efficiently to create a higher volume of quality marketing materials that speak in a consistent brand voice.

One of the ways to meet these challenges is to have pre-approved materials and elements lined up. In this way, it alleviates the need for jumping through regulatory hoops for the same content, which can bring the process to a screeching halt.

Stakeholders along the content delivery journey need to make it a priority to gain efficiencies where possible. The regulatory teams, who have a very high-touch, high-risk role in the process – and a very necessary one – must be innovative in their approach as well as mindful of reducing the time during what has typically been the slowest part of the workflow.

A templated approach required by modular content shouldn’t stifle innovation. Content developers should be flexible in their approach to allow the modular content workflow to do what it’s meant to create large volumes of content in a more formulaic way, while still creating amazing assets, presented in a templated fashion.

Set against this need to think creatively about creativity, there are many different degrees and elements of efficiencies that can be realized if successful modular content is a priority.

Change management: the key to modular success

Being successful with pharma modular content will not come without some adjustments; more than just traditional marketing approaches need to be changed.

The most crucial piece of moving toward this type of content ecosystem for pharma marketers is change management. Every single touchpoint along the way of content creation and production is going to experience some level of change.

Amid these adjustments, it will be vital to ensure that marketing, commercial, and regulatory teams all work closely together. It’s all about collaboration. Success hinges on being transparent and having pharma internal teams work together to speed up processes. It’s got to be a top-down-driven change management effort within the organisation. All invested teams must work together - marketing teams, commercial teams, and regulatory teams. Internal and external silos need to be broken down to ensure optimisation of this key element of the pharma marketing ecosystem.

Contact Tag - We have experience in creating pharma modular content to increase speed-to-market and drive launch and regulatory excellence to effectively communicate with pharma partners’ HCP and patients. Our pharma and language experts within our Marketing Centers of Excellence can create customized modular content for your unique pharma requirements.

Note: a version of this article was previously published by pharmaphorum.