Category: Agency Resource

The second article in a series of three on harnessing a data-driven digital strategy, this piece from Nick Woolnough looks at how opportunism in content marketing can be just as powerful – if not more so – than the considered outputs of the traditional ‘brainstorming’ or planning sessions that are the mainstay of content strategy.

Based on a talk that Nick – Head of Marketing Operations at StrategiQ – gave at the Pharma Multichannel Marketing Meetup in December 2018, this series looks at the concepts and approaches applied in mainstream marketing that can be adapted and moulded to fit the pharma sector.

“It’s not all creativity clubs, workshops & brainstorming”

There’s a bit of a misconception that many hands can make light work when it comes to content ideation (the process of conjuring up and refining content ideas). The thought of gathering people from different areas of the business together in a boardroom with a whiteboard and a marker pen to brainstorm feels collaborative and diverse, but it still doesn’t directly address the main purpose of content marketing as a principle.

To be useful and therefore successful, content needs to directly address the needs of the target audience and have a means for getting in front of that audience.

A room full of experienced people in their field will likely come up with some great ideas, but they will be ideas restricted to their wingspan of knowledge. Is it still current? Is the competition too great? This is research and ideally data that will have to be backfilled to validate the ideas. When you start with data, the opinions of the six people in the boardroom become less important, their time can be saved and the actual needs of the target audience can be addressed with relevant content. Effective content needs to plug a gap, not add to the white noise around a subject area.

Find it, fill it

While not alone in any respect, the pharma industry can be guilty of publishing content to the web that fails to give consideration to what search engines – and their users – want and need. To be useful, digital content needs to ultimately be the answer to a question. While the way in which we frame our search queries to Google has changed as the intuitiveness of its algorithms continues to evolve, they are still ‘queries’. Ask Jeeves may not be the search engine of choice these days but the common principles still remain in that we request information and a search engine returns the most relevant results.

You don’t have to be an SEO ‘Guru’ or ‘Ninja’ to find opportunities to generate search engine traffic, in fact a member of our team at StrategiQ wrote a detailed blog on how you can use tools to hunt down opportunities. A few key points though:

Find a niche within a niche

If your businesses niche is pharmaceutical device manufacturing, don’t saturate your website with thematically similar content on device manufacture. Dig into the detail and expand on the detail – the people you want to talk to online are likely to already understand what you do and be craving more depth. Cover a particular component of a device in depth or a patent – whatever it is, sense check it against the search results for relevant terms to see whether it has been done to death by competitors. If it has, then make sure your content is more detailed and better structured. If it hasn’t, great!

Hunt down the PDFs

The pharma industry is chock full of whitepapers and other pieces of content that have been consigned to PDFs. Google doesn’t ignore PDFs in the way that some may suggest, however it will naturally prioritise content on webpages as they are easier to crawl and index and provide a continuation of the user experience, rather than an isolated document. Have a look at detailed search queries that you may want to target (such as the below example) and find opportunities to publish content that others have covered in a PDF – in these search verticals you’ll have a higher chance of success.

Don’t wait

This one can be tricky in pharma, but if you can launch some content earlier than the competition, regardless of whether you have access to all the information you need, you can secure prominent Google rankings. The timeliness of content is key – there is no harm in pushing something out as a placeholder and then evolving it over time – Google loves content that has been refreshed and updated.

Think about your end game

What role do you want content to play not just in your marketing strategy, but also your business strategy? Content and social media marketing can be perceived as being light years away from the coalface of a business; directly generating revenue or converting customers. In some respects that is true, but both are great tools for nurture, particularly in B2B sectors.

Consider what you want people to find you business for or associate your business with. It’s important to accept that these people won’t always be your potential customers or end users, but are relevant enough that they may share your content or your brand message to others that might be. By broadening your target audience for content beyond your typical target audience for acquisition, you may well find that the overall impact on your brand is far stronger.

The next article in this three-part series will explore the user experience principles that can be adopted by keeping an eye on the silent majority of website visitors. Sign up for the twentyeightb newsletter to keep yourself abreast of all our latest content.

Preparing to kick off an edetailing project? With the level of regulation and often strict brand guidelines within the pharma industry, the smooth progress of a project can often hinge on how much critical information has been sourced and detailed up front. Wherever possible, you should ask your client for their Technical and Operational Guidelines for CLM content creation and deployment.

Here are 15 key points you need to know and documents like these should cover:

1. Client/Brand CLM iPad style guide

2. Content design standards

3. Mandatory supporting content

4. Media design, formats and guidelines

5. Presentation design structure

6. Key message slide structure with clickstream objects

7. Html content development approach for slides

8. Text/fonts

9. Functionality and navigation standards

10. Metadata and content utilisation data tracking

11. Naming conventions and standards for files, metadata, and content utilisation tracking

12. Packaging, documentation & deployment

13. Loading content for testing

14. Content files transfer process for content publishing

15. iPad and iOS version specifications

Not everything listed above is absolutely critical to the success of an e-detail or CLM project, but having the right documentation will make everyone’s life that much more simple and help ensure projects are delivered efficiently and on time. Not every client will be able to provide you with a technical and operational guidelines document and many will not have considered all of the points listed, but the more you can gather and extract from your client the better the project will run.

We have been building eDetails for agencies and pharma brand teams for many years and are certified in all the major CLM/CRM platforms, so if you need help getting hold of this sort of information or want to understand more about its importance and how it can impact on the success of a project then please get in touch, we would be happy to help.

If you’re involved in the handover of a project from design to development, you may also find our CLM project handover checklist useful – give it a try!

So you’re a Brand Manager or Creative Director and in the middle of a meeting someone has mentioned ‘GDPR Compliance’. You may know by now that it’s nothing to do with Gross Domestic Product, but is the General Data Protection Regulation something you should be seriously concerned about?

A lot of people might say that “it’s an IT issue” and move on, however the reality is that while the IT guys may have had worried looks on their faces for a while, the GDPR is far more business focussed than the previous Data Protection Act. Which itself was often misunderstood as being primarily IT focussed.

Process, documentation and no silver bullets

In reality, most of the GDPR is centred on processes and documentation. There is no magic IT silver bullet which will make a company compliant. The GDPR comes into force in May 2018 so there is now only a short window of time in which to prepare.

There is currently a significant amount of confusion and scaremongering surrounding GDPR, with consultancy firms bandying around statements such as “non-compliance can result in a fine of either €20 million or 4% of turnover, whichever is higher”. Even a large agency would likely suffer significant financial problems following from a €20 million fine, while 4% of turnover is enough to make any CEO sit up and take notice. However, the UK’s supervisory authority, the Information Commissioner’s Office, has declared that it does not intend to use the maximum extent of its powers and initially is aiming to guide rather than coerce.

The same consultancy firms who are spreading the word around the scale of fines will, coincidentally, happily send a team in to produce a large quantity of paperwork to assist you in your compliance processes. In fact, many large corporates will have had teams in place for some time, looking at processes and creating documentation to try and ensure compliance with the GDPR.

Is there any guarantee of compliance?

The one thing that seems to be overlooked is that at this point there is no way to guarantee compliance. There’s no certificate, no audit process and no guarantee that what is in place is compliant. Further, from my discussions with former colleagues and customers, many of the current projects are being run as a head-office central IT team operation and the interaction with the wider business is slim to non-existent.

A lot of the guidance from the ICO is still in a state of flux as the ‘Article 29 Working Party’ continues to elaborate on the meaning behind much of the core legislation and how it applies in the real world. There are also, naturally, no existing cases of firms which have failed to comply – since the GDPR does not come into force until May 2018.

However, this doesn’t mean that if things go wrong, fingers won’t be pointed. So, what can you do and what should you know to be informed?

1. There’s no need to panic. As mentioned, the ICO has suggested that the highest fines are unlikely to be levied and any initial non-compliance is more likely to result in advice than prosecution.
2. Check what corporate programme is already in place. Everything may already be in hand. If you are reading this, however, that implies there has not yet been any (or sufficient) awareness training. In which case it would be worth asking what is being done and ensuring your enquiry has been recorded – for your own peace of mind if nothing else.
3. Consider the information you hold in your team or department. The new GDPR definition of ‘personal data’ is somewhat broader than the previous one. If any questions remain then it is worth obtaining some advice. For example there has been discussion in infosec circles around how in Germany, IP addresses are being considered as personal data. The guidance given so far around the definition of personal data means that while the obvious examples (names and addresses) fall inside, so would something such as a list of job titles and salaries. Since there is generally only one CEO or Head of Department it is possible to identify the person via ‘association’ or ‘aggregation’. If you hold the personal data then it’s worth examining whether you really need it. If you do, then consider how to protect it as the GDPR places a requirement on the data controller to ensure “the existence of appropriate safeguards, which may include encryption or pseudonymization” (Article 6(4)(e)).
4. Examine your current projects. Then attempt to determine whether they will be affected by the GDPR. This is especially important if you have any responsibility for marketing. For example, there is a window of opportunity between now and May to get your contacts database in order without running into the new GDPR ‘consent’ legislative issues. It will be harder to obtain consent for distributing marketing materials after May under the full compliance regime. Taking the time now to clean your mailing lists and contact people regarding their approval to receive communications will pay dividends in the second half of the year when you will able to continue your marketing campaigns unimpeded by compliance issues.
5. Review your interfaces to other projects, programmes and departments. If you are capturing, transferring or receiving data then you may need to check how it is being used elsewhere. Protection of data is far tougher now so if you have captured the details of a HCP in order to invite them to a specific event, you can’t then pass that on to the central marketing team for sending out any other type of marketing. Equally, if you are receiving data from somewhere else in the company you should be certain that you can use it for the purpose you intend – a mass email to people who only gave their details for use in a clinical trial has more serious consequences now than in the past.
6. Use the GDPR as an opportunity. It’s a chance to obtain funding from on high to clean your contact database, to renew your leads and prospects and to put in place a much more streamlined approach to integrating CRM, CLM and Event Management. Gathering consent compliant with GDPR is not a challenge for modern systems and done in the right way, such as from within your DSA during a call, does not have to be intrusive. Nor does the greater granularity of consent need to be a problem; being able to identify those HCPs who are keen to attend events compared with those who would prefer only minimal contact can help you to segment and focus your efforts in the most beneficial way. Building your DSAs to make maximum use of the power available will enable you to collect the necessary consents and data to not only comply but also to improve your marketing campaigns.

If you feel you would benefit from a more formal session on the potential impact of GDPR, why not take a look at our review of IT Governance’s GDPR accreditation? We’ll be providing further resources on the impact of GDPR, alongside the latest from Veeva and CLM development so sign up for our newsletter to make sure you don’t miss our updates.

With the deadline for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) looming, Peter Boyall, Head of Operations at twentyeightb, decided to take the plunge and sign up for an online training course from IT Governance, here is his review.

There is still a degree of uncertainty around what ‘GDPR compliance’ actually means, but it is fast becoming too late to wait for the Article 29 working party to rule or for a course to be officially certified by the EU data protection board or the UK information commissioner’s office.

Having looked around and found that my preferred British Computer Society provider had no current course available, I looked to the IT Governance company which offered a depth of courses and a specialism in information security. This gave me the confidence that their course would cover the key points. In addition, they offered an exam which was certified externally by GASQ, providing some assurance that the exam itself was not simply a box-ticking exercise.

The course I selected was the certified foundation, intended to provide a background and grounding but not to push the envelope. With a background in data security already, I felt that a ‘GDPR top-up’ was sufficient.

The course

• The information was reasonably paced, with a set of notes to go along with it that helped immensely. I was able to make a precis in advance then listen to the video and fill in gaps rather than try to type notes while listening.
• It seemed to cover the main points and included self-tests as well as an FAQ.
• Lawyers being needed was referred back to several times – avoiding the trap of it being purely IT-focused.
• It was also made clear that there are no official certifications issued at that point.

Areas for improvement

• There was just the one presenter so limited points of view and I did have to take a few breaks.
• The subject matter has understandably dated very quickly with interpretation of GDPR legislation changing all the time.
• Some cyber security practitioners take a dim view of the implication that the IT Governance qualification is in some way officially approved by the government. It is made clear in the course itself that no official qualifications yet exist, but it is important to stress that there is no intention to pass off the certificate as the answer to everything.
• Accompanying book is very out of date and doesn’t tie in particularly well.

The exam

Ouch! The instructions were somewhat contradictory – one set said to use Firefox, another to use a secure browser app. To run the app you have to turn off all but one screen. Once you start the ‘secure browser’ it takes over the screen so you can’t read the PDF of instructions (or get your username/PIN code). You have to fumble your way to the exam and the ‘face detected’ icon kept flickering (albeit that may have been down to my laptop).

The actual questions in the exam were very different to the self-tests, although I saw this as being a good thing as it meant the exam wasn’t too easy. There was quite a lot of brainwork involved and it definitely wasn’t just a case of answering questions by rote in the manner of, say, PRINCE2 Foundation exams.

In conclusion

All in all, I’d say that in order to get your hands on the certificate you do need to have a pretty good grasp of the GDPR, as the only way to pass the exam is to both know and understand the material in order to be able to extrapolate answers to the questions.

There is a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt at present surrounding ‘GDPR compliance’. It’s easy to be fooled into thinking it is just an ‘IT exercise’, that it is necessary to pay large amounts of money to a management consultancy or that an impressive collection of paper certificates are required to ‘demonstrate compliance’. In reality it is quite possible that companies are already compliant and a quick confirmation check is all that is needed. The above course has given me the confidence that we don’t need to spend tens of thousands of pounds on external consultancy or tools in order to discharge our duties regarding the data we handle. Gaining peace of mind that you have adequate data protection policies in place is in some respects the ideal scenario when enrolling for a qualification. While you won’t be able to just tick a box and say “we’re compliant now”, you will be far clearer on any steps you may need to take to stay ahead of the forthcoming legislation.