The Benefit of Modular Content for Life Sciences

With a continued shift to digital, healthcare and life sciences professionals face the challenge of delivering tailored experiences that are locally relevant and delivered through a variety of different channels, while also ensuring compliance and messaging consistency for global markets.

So how can life sciences organizations meet these increasing demands and scale content efforts, especially among remote and distributed teams?

The answer: modular content.

Many life sciences companies continue to use a time consuming and redundant approach to content creation, creating end-to-end channel- or regional-specific materials that each require medical, legal, and regulatory (MLR) reviews—even if they contain the same assets and messaging.

That is a lot of content to create from scratch, and it also means long review cycles.

Whatever you call it: modular content, content atomization, microcontent—the concept is the same and addresses the biggest content marketing challenges of today: resources, speed to market, and consistency.

What is modular content?

Modular content is the process of creating, managing, and distributing content in its smallest, reusable form to streamline the content creation process and speed up the time-to-market across brands, channels, regions, and customer segments.

With a modular content approach, companies can create compliant content faster and at scale by:

• creating and approving core assets and reusing that content across channels and regions, saving critical time and resources among creative teams.
• reducing rounds of reviews and approvals, significantly cutting the time it takes to bring new products or content to market.
• ensuring global brand consistency and allowing for the flexibility to create more relevant promotional assets in localized markets.

Modular content allows for more dynamic content operations and means that you must have a content-centric approach instead of letting regulatory reviews drive your process.

But a modular content strategy can’t be used on its own. Many marketing Saas companies promote a modular approach, but having the right foundation is the key to success. If your company doesn’t have a centralized repository and an effective way to govern all assets, a modular strategy simply won’t work.

Investing in a digital asset management (DAM) system is the centerpiece to a modular content strategy, allowing teams to easily store and organize all approved company content in one centralized location, from images and videos to templates to claims and safety guidelines.

Many brand managers and content owners in the life sciences industry work within a huge tech stack, with similar tools causing overlap and inefficiencies. Instead of using siloed asset repositories and content libraries across different departments and locations, a DAM creates a single source of truth for all teams that not only helps to facilitate content management and reuse, but also reduces the amount of content that needs to go through the review process and the time it takes to do so.

Creating global governance of all content modules also decreases the risk of policy and regulatory violations, and as a crucial factor in life sciences, it also gives companies the all-important ability to find, track, and pull content modules quickly, if needed, with detailed audit trails.

Changing your content operations strategy certainly does not happen overnight. With a centralized repository of your company’s content, a modular approach to your content strategy, and an approval system to manage compliance, life sciences companies can create an efficient and cost-effective way to deliver engaging, relevant content quickly in whatever channels their customers are in.

To learn more, watch this webinar on the intersection of modular content and compliance.