BioMarin on How to Scale Customer-Centric Content for Omnichannel

Aug 02, 2024 | Tom Zito

For BioMarin, moving to an omnichannel marketing approach was a way to achieve customer-centricity. That meant integrating channels and scaling content while staying true to our customers and brand.

With these principles in mind, my team and I began analyzing content quality and flow across areas of marketing. We audited assets, documented workflows, took stock of current and projected resources (people and technology), and revisited our KPIs — all while keeping the focus on customers.

It was not a total redeployment of our content management system, yet the changes were significant enough that the team stepped back to map out three large components: processes, governance, and metrics. Here’s my best advice for others undertaking a similar initiative.

1. Pay attention to processes, and don’t fix what isn’t broken

Any global pharma marketer would agree: certain practices, policies, or processes that work in one region might not work elsewhere. Standardization, to an extent, is a great goal that saves on resources, but it can be tricky. So, we were mindful of including stakeholders from regions and markets that would be affected by process changes.

Incorporating regional users’ perspectives helped the team avoid eliminating useful content processes just for the sake of standardization. We also corrected hurdles in process management and streamlined sub-optimal system configurations that had impeded medical, legal, and regulatory (MLR) reviews, approvals, content distribution, and reuse.

2. Be inclusive in technology governance

This team knew from the start that it was our responsibility as process and system owners to be prescriptive about governance for all impacted end users.

We sought out people — many of them internal contacts we hadn’t worked with before — and built relationships. Partnerships, old and new, aided in assigning project leadership roles and presented an opportunity to empower people to make decisions that historically had been made at a higher level. That shift in thinking led to better resource utilization for the entire marketing content scaling initiative.

3. Measure to improve

Facing a near-total reconfiguration of our content management solution was daunting, but presented us with a chance to re-engineer how we’d measure success within our content model. I’d advise other biopharma marketing teams not to be alarmed if the KPIs aren’t straightforward at first.

Our team got the ball rolling by choosing metrics that tie directly to our goal of scaling content. From the start, we wanted to see content reuse and review metrics data, both within and across regions. We started small with data collection and reporting, with the short-term goal of presenting unambiguous progress updates to leaders.

4. Create a content foundation that is ready for DAM

As we solidify our content foundation, our next step will be to deploy digital asset management (DAM) technology in Veeva PromoMats to create a single source of truth for content in omnichannel.

We anticipate that DAM will help us to:

• Improve our ability to reuse and adapt effective content
• Be strategic about the content we maintain in the platform
• Identify core content versus derivative content
• Lessen the burden on end users, including agencies

The entire initiative of analyzing content quality and flow in preparation for omnichannel has been a great opportunity for us to involve people internally to advance our focus on creating personalized customer content.

Hear more practical tips from Tom Zito on how to scale content for omnichannel.

These comments are the views and opinions of Tom Zito and do not necessarily represent those of BioMarin.