As suppliers of medicine to healthcare professionals (HCPs) and the wider public, pharmaceutical companies must meet stringent codes of conduct in the UK and abroad. 

These regulatory requirements do more than set standards for product safety – they also dictate what pharmaceutical marketing can and cannot include. However, compliance isn’t the only hurdle companies in this industry have to face. 

Maintaining brand consistency across a growing number of channels. Scaling content to meet the expectations of global audiences. Standing out to top candidates in a competitive market. These are all essential duties any promotional team must accomplish.

To help you keep on top of these challenges as a pharma marketing leader, Digital Asset Management (DAM) tools can help you and your team work smarter, not harder. 

But what exactly is DAM software, and how can it support your corporate branding, distributed marketing and employer branding efforts? In this article, we’ll explore these questions in more detail and explain why DAM platforms are a critical investment for modern pharmaceutical marketing teams.

What is Digital Asset Management?

Digital Asset Management is the practice of properly managing your digital assets, so teams in your organization can easily find, share and retrieve the content you’ve invested time and money creating. 

This is key to keeping your marketing efforts structured and your operations efficient, but managing this responsibility manually can be a huge burden for your teams. 

Digital Asset Management software acts as a centralized repository where you can store and organize your entire library of sales presentations, digital files, videos, artwork and more in one accessible location.

This single source of truth for your pharmaceutical brand simplifies the process of coordinating content, maintaining brand consistency and meeting compliance. 

Want to learn more about Digital Asset Management and the helpful features these platforms provide? Check out our comprehensive guide on DAM.

6 reasons why DAM tools are an essential investment

Now you know what DAM platforms are, let’s explore why they should be a core part of your marketing toolkit.

1. Streamlines compliance-critical processes

From hefty legal fines that squander distributed marketing resources, to reputational damage that undermines both customer and candidate trust – the cost of non-compliant pharmaceutical campaigns can be substantial. 

The marketing materials your pharma company shares must meet strict regulatory compliance to ensure your corporate brand, distributed promotions and talent acquisition efforts are effective and appropriate.

This means more than creating content with the right disclaimers, warning labels and side effects. It’s essential that finished assets are delivered to the right audience at the right time.

But with potentially hundreds of pieces of content to coordinate between dozens of regional marketing teams and a growing roster of platforms, it can be easy for mistakes to emerge.

This is why a dedicated DAM for marketing is an essential solution for professionals across the pharmaceutical sector.

Rather than requiring your people to spend hours trawling through messy servers to find the promotional materials that fall in line with the latest advertising standards, DAMs’ centralized repository makes locating compliant, up-to-date materials easy.

High-quality DAM solutions also come equipped with version control. This helpful feature ensures you and your teams can only access the newest version of a file, further reducing the potential for compliance-breaking mistakes to rear their head. 

In addition, some regions require brands to regulate their own pharmaceutical marketing. As part of this process, regulatory bodies may occasionally request to see copies of your content.

In these situations, DAM can also prove a valuable tool. By making every digital file instantly accessible and appropriately tagged, you and your teams never have to let these ad-hoc duties slow down your marketing operations.

2. Boosts pharmaceutical marketing efficiency

From recruitment assets that attract top talent and distributed marketing campaigns that make sales worldwide, to corporate branding initiatives that communicate trust and consistency, pharmaceutical brands today are expected to deliver a huge amount of marketing content.

With no signs of this trend slowing down, getting the most out of your limited marketing resources is becoming more important for teams around the world.

However, as pharma compliance tightens, improving the efficiency of your operations shouldn’t mean cutting corners or doing less marketing. Instead, it’s about streamlining processes, improving productivity and reducing costly bottlenecks.

A powerful Digital Asset Management platform is essential in your bid to unlock true marketing efficiency.

A DAM’s centralized library drastically reduces the number of hoops your people have to jump through to find the marketing collateral they need. This can save your internal team countless hours in the long run – time they can spend on work that really matters.

If you coordinate promotional material with teams in multiple regions, you’ll also know first-hand how much time and energy it takes to organize this huge volume of content. That’s on top of the hours spent scouring email chains and setting up file sharing links to ensure marketers abroad have access to the materials they need.

This isn’t just a huge distraction for your people. Relying on systems like email clients and messaging platforms to manually coordinate asset delivery can bottleneck the launch of campaigns and open the door to efficiency-sapping errors.

Thankfully, most well-equipped DAM software feature brand portals. These customizable hubs can be structured to include key information about a particular campaign, or serve up localized materials on a silver platter.

This can drastically minimize the likelihood that mistakes creep in when collaborating with your people and reduce the number of steps involved in getting campaigns out the door. This added capacity lets your personnel focus on reaching candidates, making sales or strengthening your overarching brand.

3. Lays the foundation for complete brand consistency

When healthcare professionals (HCPs), customers and candidates feel they can no longer trust you, they won’t hesitate to look elsewhere for products or jobs.

Achieving complete brand consistency should be high on your list of priorities to protect your bottom line, optimize your talent acquisition efforts and safeguard the reputation you’ve invested so much time and energy building. 

But as a brand that operates in dozens of regions, promotes countless products and employs hundreds of people, you know that aligning every sales presentation, letterhead, logo and asset – both internally and externally – is easier said than done.

With an endless stream of global campaigns to deliver, recruitment efforts to support and an international identity to nurture, your team probably doesn’t have time to check every asset going out against the latest brand guidelines. 

Thankfully, the right DAM software can help you deliver truly unified marketing. Not only can these solutions give your teams instant access to your latest on-brand marketing assets, but when integrated with a dedicated brand portal, they can house everything that defines your brand identity in one accessible location.

From style guides and mission statements to templates and more – these customizable hubs can serve as a single source of truth for anybody in your organization, allowing them to truly understand what makes your company unique and reflect these values in every asset you produce and share.

4. Helps deliver rebrands with greater efficiency

Refreshing your pharmaceutical company’s identity is an incredibly lengthy and costly undertaking. 

Done well, a successful rebrand can grow your business and pave the way to good fortune. But if poorly executed, you risk alienating customers, confusing candidates, hurting sales and damaging your all-important corporate image.   

In an industry that witnesses more rebrands than most, any solution that can lay the foundation for positive outcomes and save your marketing department precious resources can’t be ignored.

Dedicated DAM systems play a crucial role in simplifying the coordination of these materials. Firstly, by having a central repository where every new asset is stored, you make it much harder for outdated collateral to re-emerge during the all-important rollout. This can minimize confusion among professionals and prospective customers, and lay a solid foundation for your new brand to grow. 

On top of this, access control allows you to lock old branding away after a refresh or make certain items accessible only to certain regional teams. This ensures only your refreshed identity is promoted across your marketing channels, so you can achieve complete brand consistency without complication.

When you combine the many benefits of a DAM with on-brand content creation tools, you’ll have everything needed to ensure your next rebrand rollout sticks the landing.

5. Overcomes asset overload

Whether your marketing efforts focus on professionals looking to buy medicine or top candidates searching for new opportunities – you know that modern audiences expect more content from brands than ever before. 

While delivering this amount of marketing collateral is tough, effectively managing these materials is a challenge that only gets harder as your content libraries grow.

With hundreds if not thousands of sales presentations, recruitment adverts, brand videos and more to manage, keeping this mountain of collateral usable for your team is an overwhelming task for even the most orderly departments.

To ensure every marketing material you share is compliant and can reach your target audiences as quickly as possible, Digital Asset Management systems are an essential investment for today’s pharma marketers. 

DAM platforms feature smart upload functions that make it possible to upload digital files in bulk. As a result, your creatives don’t have to waste time getting the content they create into company repositories.

On top of that, smart tagging features and powerful search tools reduce the effort and complexity associated with finding files internally, even if you have teams located abroad. 

When you combine these features with a customizable brand hub, getting localized recruitment and market materials into the hands of your overseas colleagues becomes much more straightforward.

6. Fosters international collaboration

Finally, if your pharmaceutical brand operates in multiple territories, chances are you have teams in those regions to localize and distribute your core marketing materials.

This is a fundamental part of building trust with recruits, HCPs and other types of customers in different countries. But for your efforts to truly succeed, effective collaboration is essential.

When internal communication is unclear, it doesn’t take much to imagine how this could result in marketing materials that breach regional laws. Or how poor collaboration could lead to off-brand recruitment assets going live across the wrong channels.

To help your teams bridge this divide and foster the spirit of collaboration internally, DAM software can be a game-changing tool:

• Brand portals act as a single source of truth for your brand, allowing you to get everyone across your organization on the same page when it comes to marketing
• Having a centralized repository of assets breaks down the barriers attached to sharing materials, streamlining the process of collaboration 
• Access restrictions allow leaders to control what materials can be retrieved, giving everybody complete confidence in what they share
• Version control presents teams anywhere with the latest version of an asset, making it easy to work on projects between divisions 

It doesn’t matter if you cooperate with other departments on recruitment materials, distributed marketing content or corporate branding assets; in our view, DAM software is fundamental to great collaboration across pharmaceutical marketing teams.

Digital Asset Management: A foundational tool for today’s pharma marketers

Resonating with customers worldwide. Appealing to 21st-century talent. Building a reputable corporate brand. With strict pharmaceutical advertising standards and an ever-changing world of marketing to navigate, achieving success in the pharmaceutical industry is no easy feat.

To help you navigate this complex web of marketing challenges, DAM software is quickly becoming a core part of many pharmaceutical brand’s toolkits.

With the ability to streamline compliance-critical processes, maintain brand consistency worldwide, unlock pharma marketing efficiency and more – we hope this article has helped you understand what Digital Asset Management is, and why this form of brand management software is fundamental to achieving your goals both now and in the future.