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3 Benefits of a Content Management Solution for Life Sciences Companies

One thing is certain. As René Affolter, Global Business Development Director at gateB, said while opening our recent webinar, “Old methods of content management don’t work anymore.”

Life sciences organizations are particularly hard hit by this challenge. On top of the headaches old content management methods present — like difficulty measuring ROI or customer engagement — businesses in the life sciences space have to think about regulatory requirements for their content.

In our webinar with our partner, Aprimo, we explored the topic, “More than Regulatory Review: Successful Content Management for the Life Sciences.” We talked about the challenges facing life science content teams — and how they can overcome them with the right content management solution.

Here are three benefits life science organizations can unlock from moving to a centralized, globalized content and work management solution.

#1: Proper control and alignment with regulation

Smaller life science companies often worry about their content’s regulatory compliance. As organizations grow in size, so does that concern. For life science organizations with locations around the world, it’s a huge challenge to manage their content, ensuring it complies and is available should they face an audit.

At least, that’s the case without a centralized solution. But once organizations move to a single content management solution, review processes get streamlined. It becomes easier for the right people to apply the right approvals to the right content. And should the organization get audited, we’ve seen as much as a 91% reduction in response time with a content management solution in place.

As Brett Molotsky, Industry Vice President at Aprimo, said during the webinar, “Content needs to be findable, translatable, and accessible by the right people at the right time in the right location. That’s more than just storage, it’s rights management.” With the right solution, rights management is built in, ensuring the right people can access the materials they need while protecting your overall content strategy and regulatory compliance.

#2: Greater efficiency and insight

Content production should always be tied back to your company’s strategic objectives. But when you can’t see all of your content, let alone track it, monitoring how it performs against your KPIs is impossible. “If you don’t have a full content management platform, it becomes very difficult to get insights and analytics against the usage of that content and its value in the marketplace,” Molotsky explains.

With a centralized solution, however, you don’t just get everything in one place. You also get the ability to see how content is used and how it performs when pushed to specific audiences on specific channels. With a content and work management solution, Molotsky says, “When you go to market in 2021 or 2022, you have a clear connection between the content that’s being produced and the strategies and tactics that are supposed to be the result of that content going into the marketplace.”

#3: Global availability and opportunities for reuse

Life science organizations usually have a broad variety of content. They have promotional content (sales materials, web content, ads, social) as well as non-promotional content such as educational materials, alongside the content in and on their packaging and internal training content for their team.

In other words, life sciences organizations are usually creating a lot of content with each of the content types having different content life cycles and regulatory requirements. Unfortunately, many of them are only using that content once and in one location.

With a content management solution, your company has a way to easily push content through its life cycle, access approved content and adjust it to the local market. Instead of dedicating countless team hours to creating assets for each individual market, you can get more out of the content you already have.

This also eliminates the issue some organizations face in working with agencies. When your content lives in your content and work management solution — rather than in an agency’s hands — you can always find and adapt it whenever the need arises.

Measuring the benefits of a content and work management solution

During the webinar, we asked attendees how they currently manage their content. 36% said they’re still using spreadsheets, 36% said they only use tools for highly regulated contents and just 12.5% said they have a full content and work management solution in place.

But a single, unified approach to the entire content journey helps organizations in tangible ways. As we’ve worked with certain organizations to adopt this broader content management strategy, we’ve seen results like the following:

  • A global leader in the pharmaceutical industry saw a 33% reduction in time-to-market.
  • Another company removed eight marketing technology systems by simplifying and standardizing their content processes.
  • Another organization was able to increase the number of promotional materials they were able to produce by 41%.

“The ability to create predictable, repeatable, auditable processes — and standardize those around the world — provides for localization, expiry review. It allows for content storage, retrieval, and distribution, and increases content velocity,” Molotsky explains.

So how do you get started?

In the webinar, our experts recommended five steps:

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