Why is DAM the pharmaceutical industry's best friend?

The pharmaceutical industry's marketing challenges and needs are very specific, and for good reason - it's one of the most regulated sectors out there. Marketing content must comply with market rules and the various authorities that govern publications in this industry. We refer in particular to the rules of the FDA in the U.S., the ANSM in France and the BfArM in Germany, to name but a few. For brands in this industry, the issue of “Brand Safety” is critical. This article presents the main benefits of DAM for the pharmaceutical industry, particularly in terms of compliance with regulations, consistency, and protecting your brand image.

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How can you support the production of content and marketing visuals and organize the work of teams spread around the world? 

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How can you simplify sharing and make sure its use is secure? How can we streamline the asset approval process? How can you ensure technical and regulatory compliance of all the content created? And inevitably, how can you ensure optimal distribution? 

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Frequently equipped with slow, poorly optimized and not very user-friendly tools, marketers often struggle to effectively organize the communication and marketing strategy for their products. These difficulties can quickly translate into a loss of competitiveness on the market, and ultimately a drop in sales.

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Find out how Wedia's DAM solution addresses the challenges and marketing needs of the pharmaceutical industry. Learn more about DAM for the pharmaceutical industry.

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DAM for the pharmaceutical industry answer your needs in terms of regulation

This is one of the most highly regulated sectors; the pharmaceutical industry must communicate according to very precise rules from one country to another. Depending on the country and the medicinal product, the line between promotion and information must be strictly respected. With a very clear consequence; each marketing or communication asset is subject to a rigorous approval cycle.

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DAM is therefore eagerly awaited in this domain. Content segmentation with fine-grained management of authorizations, customized workflows based on multiple rules (nature of products, regulations, content typology and media), affiliation of content to master documents that contain validated scientific information, the use of electronic signatures to authenticate stakeholders, etc. Everything must be done to guarantee content integrity and traceability of revisions.

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This is an additional complexity that must be reconciled with a large volume of content, as documentation is available in many different forms. Distributed marketing, the DAM's playground, requires both empowering employees (through the provision of templates), but also defining precisely what they can and cannot modify within a document.

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“Brand safety" is a major concern for this sector of activity. For example, video content shared on third-party platforms should not be displayed alongside other non-compliant content. Here again, DAM is a welcome addition to secure diffusion right up to the video player. 

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Giving users personalized access

Pharmaceutical companies will often store confidential or sensitive information, which must be kept in a secure location. An added complexity is also the rights given to people who can view certain pieces of information but not others. 

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A DAM system as such provides a highly-secure location for files and makes it easier to create personalized user profiles so each user has specific access to certain elements. In this way, you can decide if users can edit or merely read certain assets. This protects the nature of the information stored on the DAM platform and also makes it easier to share the right level of information across your organization without any concerns. 

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This also applies to working with agencies or other service providers. As you may be sharing sensitive content, you want to manage how they access it and what they see. Access to your secured DAM software can be controlled by you, meaning you know what they can view and edit. This makes collaboration easier with different parties, allowing you to have full control over your assets. 

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Defined workflows

Working in this highly regulated industry, means having to go through sometimes long approval processes. When the process requires the input of multiple stakeholders, it can sometimes be hard to follow who has seen and validated what. 

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With defined workflows, this isn't an issue. Users are assigned the part of the project they need to see or approve and can be alerted when they have missed a deadline or need to send additional information. 

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This way of working enhances collaboration, especially with global companies that bring multiple teams, across different locations together. 

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DAM as the Single Source of Truth in your company

For these companies, DAM therefore provides the key function of a "Single Source of Truth“. This means that the DAM makes references to the assets that the teams can work with confidently: images, videos, marketing documents with finely tuned modification rights to facilitate localization without distorting the brand. 

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You are then assured that all your teams are working with the most recent versions of your digital assets and that the consistency of your group's communication will be maintained. 

The use of artificial intelligence makes it easy to generate content variations, in particular to test their impact on the different stages of the purchasing process, from an email to a product page. Integrated into the information system, the enterprise DAM also becomes the "media referent" for the various PIMs and CMSs that coexist in large organizations.

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More than in any other sector, the key role of DAM's "Single Source of Truth" makes sense here, as the integrity of each piece of content must be ensured. DAM is essential to ensure rigorous content lifecycle management, but also agile to help control time-to-market.

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Measuring success

In order to understand the success of the content that is being distributed by pharmaceutical companies, particularly if there is a commercial element, you must be able to track various KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Understanding interactions across various markets and territories is going to provide crucial information about the interactions with your assets and whether they are optimized or not.

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Having a dashboard of metrics is going to help your teams understand in detail their campaigns and set new objectives and roadmaps based off this information. These dashboards are intuitively integrated into the DAM system, meaning storing, distributing, creating and measuring assets all happen in the same place. 

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Manage asset with metatagging

Pharmaceutical companies require the ability to carefully and correctly tag their assets in a very precise way in order to ensure that the references for each product are correctly assigned. 

By having a precise naming procedure, it in turn, makes it much easier to find assets which must be updated or removed from various platforms. With a DAM platform, metatagging is seamless and pharmaceutical companies can rest assured that each asset is labelled correctly. This also avoids creating duplicates and makes it easier than ever for users to quickly find the right asset they are looking for. 

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An enormous productivity gain with DAM for the pharmaceutical industry

On this scale, there's no way we're going to let everyone wander around for hours looking for a visual. Content categorization and search functions should allow quick access to product packshots, campaign visuals, etc. 

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Thanks to advanced search functionalities (full text, faceted, Artificial Intelligence...), your teams will be able to find the content they need very quickly. The considerable time saving generated by the use of the Wedia DAM allows teams to gain in productivity and thus allocate more time to different tasks. 

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Productivity is also guaranteed by integrating DAM with existing PIM (Product Information Management) solutions as well as with brand or retailer e-commerce sites. In addition, DAM allows you to categorize and search for your content according to your company's operating and organizational rules. 

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Wedia, a SaaS software publisher, offers cloud-based, content-centric marketing software that helps large companies unleash the full potential of their media and deliver the best possible experience across all channels.

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DAM in the pharmaceutical industry supports marketing teams by helping them overcome the challenges they face. Wedia supports global brands in enhancing their marketing content from creation to distribution, with the primary objectives of increasing awareness and ultimately boosting sales.