The Internet is where much of today’s storytelling takes place, making it critical that website content meets an audience’s expectations. This is particularly delicate in pharma. This whitepaper authored by Justin Freid and Matt Howell of CMI/Compas looks at the expectations and challenges of content marketing in our industry and discusses how to achieve meaningful, compelling and impactful content.

1. Page 1
People have been storytelling since the
beginning of time, and intrinsically humans have
a propensity to share information. Once upon a
time these discussions might’ve taken place
around a fire in a cave, but today many of these
discussions occur across the internet. This is a
place where the conversation can grow
exponentially, and these stories are shared
across multi-functional platforms with the
potential to reach millions in seconds. The
ultimate goal of content marketing is to connect
your customers with the information they find
most compelling. Due to many of the legal
restrictions pharmaceutical companies face, they
often struggle creating content that achieves the
desired effect.
If you’re developing a website for a drug that
treats diabetes, and the content on your site
speaks about the disease state, causes, and
symptoms, this content is not going to be found
compelling by someone who has had diabetes
for 10 years, nor by a healthcare professional
who treats the disease, because they will be
looking for higher-level information. On top of
developing content that has a limited connection
to your target audience, you now have a
webpage that has similar information to
hundreds of millions of pages on the internet.
Overview
Content Marketing for the
Pharmaceutical Industry: “By Changing
Nothing, Nothing Changes”
May 2014
Due to many of the legal
restrictions pharmaceutical
companies face, they often
struggle creating content that
achieves the desired effect.
This approach makes it that much harder for
your target audience to find you, connect with
you, and for your voice to be heard. This
approach is why pharmaceutical companies
should consider alternative ways to sharing
content with their audiences, as well as more
innovative ways to create and distribute their
content.
WHITEPAPER
Is My Content Solving Your Problem?
“All good books are alike in that they are truer
than if they had really happened and after you
are finished reading one you will feel that all
that happened to you and afterwards it all
belongs to you: the good and the bad, the
ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people
and the places and how the weather was.”
~Ernest Hemingway~

2. Page 2
The quote by Hemingway articulates the
purpose your content is supposed to serve. You
want your audience to feel as though you
legitimately understand them. Is your content
developed from the viewpoint that you
understand what they care about, what they
talk about, and what their issues are? This type
of fluidity between brand and audience is not
easily attained, and the first step to
understanding your audience is do extensive
research into their behavior.
Begin by listening. Before you speak to your
targeted audience, you should first listen, and
you can do this by measuring audience
sentiment online. What do they share, what do
they not, how much time do they spend when
exposed to our content? Once you’ve done
some research, begin to segment your data.
The segmentation of the data and user activity
will help to create personas, just as is done in
other marketing strategies. Creating personas is
essential as the platforms and ways in which
you’d market your content to a 24 year old
woman with a 10-year history of diabetes
should differ from how you’d market that same
content to a 55 year old man newly diagnosed
with the disease, and to the healthcare
professionals that treat it.
Once an idea of what matters to your audience
has been established, begin to engender ways
to connect them to one another. Most people
are not seeking generic disease state
information, and your goal should be to create
a community where people can come to discuss
their issues, support each other, etc.
This approach ensures that you are connecting
with people on how they are dealing with their
diseases, issues, or treatment techniques. It is
important to let the afflicted dictate the
conversation, if you try and facilitate to them
what matters they will not be as interested.
Content Marketing is not solely about product
advertising. It is marketing, public relations, and
communication with your audience all rolled into
one. It’s about promoting the ideals of your
brand as well as the products. Starting to
organize people allows brands to help shape how
they’re perceived by their desired audience.
Whenever a consumer feels as though a brand
“gets them” they have a greater propensity to
become a brand loyalist. By creating an
environment where your audience can connect
with each other on issues they care about,
you’ve set the table for continuous engagements
with them over time. These types of
engagements are invaluable, and should always
be tailored to their interests. They should not be
campaign oriented, but ever evolving based upon
your audience’s needs.
Do you currently have content people want to
share that drives customer actions? Auditing
your content is essential to understand what
assets you have, and to make your strategy more
visionary. Digitally speaking, your content is your
basis for making money, and it is the single
greatest asset you have to leverage.
Establish a Community

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The pharmaceutical industry should strongly
consider a shift in their thinking, and begin to
think/ promote their content as if they are
publishers. Create an editorial calendar for a full
year. Have your content, comments, and other
language already submitted to MLR so you can
be more nimble, but also realize that audience
behavior may change, and that if this occurs so
should your already approved content pieces.
Disease education, for example, can become
much more innovative when incorporating the
insights, needs and wants of your core
audience. Big emotions come from simplicity in
the way people digest and relate to your
content, and evoking these big emotions is the
best way to promote the changes you desire in
audience behavior.
How exactly does one create
compelling stories which
compliment audience needs that
are also memorable, personal,
shareable and impactful?
Moving Mountains
How exactly does one create compelling stories
which compliment audience needs that are also
memorable, personal, shareable and impactful?
It’s not an easy process, but it is achievable.
Developing a great content marketing strategy
takes careful planning and a long-range set of
goals. Truly connecting with your audience to
the point where they organically take the
actions you desire can feel like moving
mountains. You won’t achieve success
overnight, and you will have to try and fail to
perfect your craft as with anything. Ultimately
the most important aspect of content marketing
besides the actual content itself is to have your
key stakeholders support your vision and buy in.
Content marketing cannot be a commitment
through a quarter, or through the end of the
year. It should never end, because you will
never adopt the belief that your audience stops
needing your brand.
Very few pharmaceutical brands are
comfortable expressing themselves creatively.
Content Marketing and Search
Optimization Efforts
Search engine optimization and content
marketing used to be viewed as separate
marketing tactics. They are increasingly
becoming one in the same, as great content
marketing is the best way to optimize your web
property. A multitude of factors contribute to
increasing a site’s rank within search engines,
but the most effective is by acquiring links to
your content. Each link to your content/ website
serves as a vote of confidence for your web
property over a particular subject matter.

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The more links you have the better, and who
links to your content is also of great importance.
Whether you are being endorsed by a
trustworthy online source or a low security,
spammy website play a role in determining the
impact of said links. Link building is not only the
most effective way to optimize your site, but
also the most difficult. This is why content
marketing plays such a vital role to your
optimization efforts.
Creating content your target audience wants to
link to or share is quite difficult if done so
without incentives. But if you have to
incentivize your targeted audience then they
aren’t truly connected to your brand. In the
pharmaceutical industry, the acquiring of links is
difficult due to FDA restrictions and
conservative legal teams, but a large part of this
also has to do with the amount of content
online about disease states and treatment
options. If you were trying to get your targeted
audience to share/link to your sites content on
“diabetes treatments,” you would have
131,000,000 other pages online to compete
with. To be one of the best with that much
competition, especially when your content is
similar, is nearly impossible. This is what makes
content marketing and the innovation of how
it’s constructed vitally important to the
pharmaceutical Industry. Content innovation is
the key to getting your audience to share/link to
your content. Sharing will drive volume, and
that volume is the single greatest way to rank
highly within a search engine.
The type of content that pharmaceutical
companies create has to change if the goal is to
get people to share. Instead of creating a
generic webpage about Parkinson’s titled
“Symptoms of Parkinson’s,” create pages with
titles that generate more interest.
The more links you have the
better, and who links to
your content is also of great
importance.
Health Literacy is Difficult Without
Visual Literacy
To an individual with Parkinson’s, content titled
“How to travel with Parkinson’s” or “10 things
people with Parkinson’s need to know” would
be much more appealing. And to a healthcare
professional that treats Parkinson’s, content
with a title such as, “Treatment Techniques
every HCP Should Know” would have a higher
propensity to be shared. You generate interest
from your target audience by making them feel
as though your content is unique; something
they haven’t seen before. And when they arrive
at your content make sure that their hunch is
validated; you want to make them glad they
came.

5. Page 5
Matthew Howell
Senior Search Analyst
Communications Media, Inc.
Justin Freid
Vice President, Search Engine Marketing & Emerging Media
Communications Media, Inc.
Analysts:
Changing the way you portray your content, as
well as how you create it, is essential to
marketing your content effectively. Health
literacy is extremely difficult without visual
literacy. In order to make your content the most
appealing (and shareable) pharmaceutical
brands need to invest more in video, a best
practice that is worth the investment. It is an
excellent way to connect with people, and has
the greatest propensity to be shared. Adopting
video into your content marketing strategy can
also be an excellent stepping stone into other
innovative media. Consider turning your
whitepapers into info graphics; contemplate
whether utilizing augmenting reality can better
market your content.
You should be adopting routine brainstorming
sessions, and beta testing your content across
multiple platforms. You’ve achieved success
when your target audience believes that your
content makes them smarter, is aligned with
their best interests, is convenient, and easy to
access. When your audience believes this,
they’ll be excited about sharing the wealth of
knowledge you’ve bestowed upon them with
others. When this effect is achieved not only
have you opened a door you never knew
existed, but you’ve moved a mountain.