What Can Content Strategy Do for You? When it comes to marketing, pharmaceutical brands have a daunting challenge: how to get your brand messages to disparate target audiences that include multiple segments such as healthcare providers, payers, pharmacists, patients, and caregivers. Each audience needs a personalized message, framed in a way that makes sense for them. On top of that, each audience consumes your brand’s content in multiple ways: through television and print, online, and through mobile channels… Expert: Martha Walz, Content Strategist, Ogilvy CommonHealth, part of Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide. Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide is committed to creativity and effectiveness in healthcare communications, everywhere. With 60 offices across 33 countries, the group provides marketing services including brand identity and development, clinical trial recruitment, digital/interactive services, direct-to-consumer, direct-to-patient, global integration, managed care marketing, market research and analytics, media planning and buying, medical advertising and promotion, medical education, public affairs and relations, relationship marketing, and strategic consulting. The network also offers scientific communications and publications services through a wholly owned separate legal entity. For more information, visit ogilvycommonhealth.com. When it comes to marketing, pharmaceutical brands have a daunting challenge: how to get your brand messages to disparate target audiences that include multiple segments such as healthcare providers, payers, pharmacists, patients, and caregivers. Each audience needs a personalized message, framed in a way that makes sense for them. On top of that, each audience consumes your brand’s content in multiple ways: through television and print, online, and through mobile channels such as tablets and smartphones. In this fragmented landscape, it is essential to understand what each audience needs to know and how to deliver it in a compelling way, and to deliver it when and where each audience needs it. How can this monumental task be accomplished? Enter content strategy. Content Planning and ­Governance Content strategy, in its simplest terms, is planning for the creation and governance of useful, usable content. It’s not just what you will publish and where, but why and for whom. It’s deciding what you will include in your content, but also what you are going to leave out. It is a roadmap for planning, creating, publishing, and optimizing your content for maximum ROI. Content is what matters most to your audience, so it needs to matter to you as well. Find Your Users, Wherever They Are Users consume your brand’s content and messaging in ways that make sense for them. What a patient needs on a mobile device, for example, is completely different from what a physician needs on a laptop. As such, you need to create and seed content in the channels in which your target audiences will discover them. Planning for the creation of content for each of these scenarios is at the heart of content strategy. Achieve Your Business Goals Content strategy helps you figure out how your content will help you achieve your business goals. It is a way of aligning your brand’s key performance indicators (KPIs), your audience needs, and your content and its optimization — combining to produce content that actually drives your audience to take a desired action. By planning out your brand’s content for each audience, you won’t waste resources on content that no one wants. By focusing on each audience’s needs, you create content that each audience finds useful and actionable. Content should be designed to be adaptable across platforms, creating efficiencies in asset development and amortization. Any content that doesn’t support a business goal is a distraction and a cost, and with careful planning, you can eliminate cost overages on content that does not meet your audience needs or your business goals. Create Better Content, Not More Content Content strategy allows you to create, improve, and maintain content over time through an actionable, achievable plan. Figuring out the needs of each audience and creating content tailored to them will give you confidence that the proper message is being conveyed to the proper audience. Additionally, having a content strategy in place will allow for more consistency in overall brand messaging between campaigns and audiences, improving the consistency of communications, since all messaging will come from a central content stream. Stay Ahead of Your Competition Making content strategy a part of your process will help you produce higher-quality content. Higher-quality content improves audience engagement in all channels, improves audience satisfaction, and engenders more trust in your brand, keeping you ahead of your competitors. By focusing on your disparate audiences’ needs, you will create content that drives actions, boosting your bottom line. Content strategy allows you to ­create, improve, and maintain ­content over time through an ­actionable, ­achievable plan. ­Figuring out the needs of each ­audience and creating content ­tailored to them will give you ­confidence that the proper ­message is being conveyed to the proper ­audience.

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