6 Content Effectiveness Considerations for Life Science Companies

The life science industry spends billions of dollars on drug promotion, medical device training, sales recruitment and onboarding, and the development of patient and advocate communities.  And to support all of those efforts, a great deal of time and money is invested into content development.

Content is a wise investment, I don’t disagree.  However, I do have to question whether companies truly evaluate the effectiveness of their content investment.  And if budget cuts are required, can these companies identify which content resources, creators, and channels should be eliminated?

Below are 6 considerations for measuring content effectiveness.

1. Look beyond standard conversion metrics. Identifying which pieces convert into eDetail opportunities or prescription conversions is important, but don’t underestimate evaluating what content is revisited, the duration of content engagement, and the origin of the engagement.  Also evaluate under-performing content.  Is the message off-point?  Are you publishing the content on a channel not frequented by the target audience?
2. Audit and map your content.  Identify both personal and non-personal content.  Map the content to the intended audience both by high level personas like patients, caregivers, HCPs, and payers as well as interest like disease, specialty, and decile level.  Matrix the content type against the persona, interest, as well as the stage.  Is the content meant for pre-awareness, awareness, trial, adoption, or advocacy stages?
3. Measure and score your content contributors. Because you're investing large portions of your budget into content creation, understand what the engagement against individual contributors looks like.  Do you have agencies that consistently deliver high performing content?  Additionally, don’t overextend content contributors like Key Opinion Leaders and Patient Opinion Leaders.  When a company manages many brands and many content initiatives, it’s very easy to lose track of content assignments. It’s imperative that content strategy and resource allocation is managed through a single Center of Excellence.  Without that single CoE, you risk the abuse of your greatest content assets. This CoE can also align with the compliance organization to ensure content meets requirements.
4. Incorporate metrics into your content marketing strategy.  Identify the business objectives for each.  Define both internal benchmarks and external benchmarks.  Business objectives, metrics, available data, and data sources should drive this benchmarking.
5. Calculate the ROI of your content marketing.  We recommend the following formulas for this calculation.
   • Investment
     • § (hours per month for creating content x hourly pay) + overhead rate (%) + other out-of-pocket costs (software, design, etc…) = investment
     • § Example: (20 hours x $40/hour) + 30% overhead + $500/month other costs = $1,540
   • Return
     • § Leads per month x lead conversion rate (%) x average life customer value ($) x average profit margin = Return
     • § Example 20 x 20% x $2,000 x 25% = $2,000
   • ROI
     • § ($2,000 - $1,540) / $1,540 = 30%
6. Don’t go it alone.  I speak from experience.  I used to manage content effectiveness through a very cumbersome Excel spreadsheet.  With the help of several team members and several days a month, we would manually execute the tactics listed above.  There are now tools that allow you to audit, map, and score your content.  You can measure content effectiveness, assign content projects, and control content project overload.  These tools allow you to plan, produce, publish, promote, and prove your content strategy success.

Content will continue to be a wise investment for your company as long as you can demonstrate the value of that investment.

Do you know the value of your content?