As pharma marketing teams shift their focus towards delivering omnichannel content and tapping into the potential of emerging technologies like generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI), the question is no longer about quantity, but quality.
Enter Gaurav Sanganee, Founder and Managing Director of Closing Delta. With a deep well of experience in pharma content strategy, Sanganee has seen firsthand what makes content truly effective. In this interview, Sanganee reveals what content resonates with HCPs, the metrics that really matter, and how Gen AI tools can elevate pharma marketing—provided they’re used the right way.
All views expressed are his own.
Could you tell us about your background in content excellence?
GS: I started my career in the sales team at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), helping to develop content for the field teams. Then, I joined an agency called Roundhouse Health Ad (later taken over by Adventist) that pitched for one of the drugs that GSK was promoting. I used that experience to return to the client side as the Digital Head of Oncology for Novartis, where I worked with content factories and learned about content at a much more global and regional level. I also built one of the first clinical paper applications on an iPad in Pharma there.
I was then a content manager at Boehringer Ingelheim across commercial and medical, and from there, I moved into a commercial excellence function, supporting things like digital asset management and Veeva Approved Email rollouts, as well as building websites and hub sites, working again across the go-to-market and country teams.
From what you’ve seen, what content and channels do HCPs like the most?
GS: Healthcare Professionals (HCPs) prefer content that comes from the source. So, for example, they prefer clinical papers that come directly from the publishers, as opposed to an abbreviated version coming through a pharma company. It’s also important that the content has a responsive design, so HCPs can access it on tablets and mobile devices, as well as on desktop.
Another area that I've seen a big growth in is post-Congress activity—things like on-demand content for people who couldn't attend certain events in public. Especially since Covid, Congress has become one of the biggest investments pharma companies make throughout the year, so it’s important to get as much leverage of the content out of that—also because it’s where cutting edge science is shared.
If you understand HCPs on a human level, you realise their pain points are around overburdening.
I think video content is also growing in popularity, and it’s being pushed by algorithms from TikTok and LinkedIn. You can use video to help your HCPs make better decisions, for example. If you understand HCPs on a human level, you realise their pain points are specifically around overburdening.
There are lots of topics which aren't just product-related that pharma companies can support.
Can you create other things that help your HCPs? Content on managing workloads, perhaps, or dealing with mental stress within the healthcare system. There are lots of topics which aren't just product related that pharma companies can support.
Do you have any success stories of content or strategies that particularly resonated with HCPs?
GS: The strategies I’ve seen work really well are sequential. They’re not one-off pieces of content, but well thought out journeys that involve multiple touch points and tactics.
The strategies that work really well are sequential. They're not a one-off piece of content—they’re well thought out journeys.
During Covid, there was a real upsurge in webinars. The reason was pretty obvious—people couldn't get to physical locations, and they weren't allowed to mingle. But what I saw with one pharma company was that after about the 11th or 12th webinar, they started to lose their audience. They had nothing new to say.
It wasn't about the volume of webinars they did. 196 people turned up the first webinar—only four turned up to a later one. It wasn't necessarily that they didn't have the key opinion leaders, or that they were using the wrong technology. People were just reaching a level of fatigue with all of these webinars. You started getting these ‘Zoom eyes’ because it was just one meeting to the next for a lot of people. Why? They were just relying on one tactic.
It’s about quality over quantity. It’s best to keep really valuable content in a very short campaign. And to diversify this, do some work in terms of pre-event and post-event activities too. This yields the best results.
How do you measure the success of your content?
GS: Historically, marketing teams have measured vanity metrics— things like open rates and click rates. That's simple when it's on email. Where it gets harder is measuring engagement. How long did someone spend actually consuming the information? Are you seeing the journey between pages? Are you able to then turn around and say: “Page one, seven, and eight were interacted with, but six, five and four—nothing.”
When marketing teams get more forensic on engagement data, they can start making some really clever content decisions.
There's a real discussion to be had around the right metrics and the right KPIs. But we all get hung up on the initial metrics, which are just showing you engagement. When marketing teams get more forensic on engagement data, they can start making some really clever content decisions.
For example, I used to work with brand teams and we built a detail aid on pain analgesics. We were competing with the market leader at that time. A 17-page detail aid had gone onto a third party's website, with almost zero engagement. We cut that content down to three pages and we boosted the engagement by around 90%.
We put real thought into [our detail aid]. It was short—it went straight to the point… so we also cut down the cost of development.
Suddenly, HCPs weren't spending their time going through 17 pages on pain, which they knew most things about because huge amounts of new data hadn't been released. Our detail aid was short—it went straight to the point. But we put real thought into those three pages, whereas the other stuff in there before felt a bit like fodder. We also cut down the cost of development, because we don't have to develop the other pages.
Where do you think pharma marketing teams have been going wrong when it comes to building that trust?
GS: I think the biggest challenge for pharma marketing teams is their internal stakeholders versus their external stakeholders. From an internal stakeholder viewpoint, they have a brand plan where they need to hit certain targets. However, they're limited by budget. They have to then cut the pie in a way which allows them to deliver against a multitude of objectives. This usually dilutes certain efforts, because you're not always going to get what you want on a limited budget.
Pharma companies need to change the narrative to be more about their customers than themselves.
As an industry, our communication is also still very brand centric. Pharma companies need to change the narrative to be more about their customers than themselves. Netflix, for example, cares about what you consume. They care about the genres that you like; the length of the movies that you want to watch; the characters that you like. Nobody comes around saying: “Hey, this is Netflix. Netflix is great. Did you know Netflix's rating went up? Because who cares?
If pharma marketers focus on what the customer wants, their work will suddenly start delivering ROI.
If pharma marketers focus on what the customer wants, their work will suddenly start delivering ROI. We just fade into a big vanilla storm otherwise. Brand features don't matter as much as the benefit to the HCP—their clinical practice and their patient population.
How do you define personalised content?
JT: I had an interesting conversation with someone at a pretty big company. They said the problem with personalisation is that you’re targeting HCPs and physicians. You're in your office, and your computer is open. You don’t know who’s looking. Could a patient see? Could a nurse see? Could the wrong person see it? That was one of the concerns about personalisation. I think it went too far. For me, content personalisation is about channel preference. I don't want to see an email on my phone. I’d rather get a text message that can link out to the website.
Are there any tools you find particularly useful for content creation?
GS:
Figma is great for designing content and moving it into a development environment. A lot of rapid prototyping and UX pieces can be made with it. I also use a technology called
Veed to do my videos because it can superimpose subtitles on my videos. It can also add in emojis, background tracks, slides, and so on. There are others like
Opus clips too, which let you take a YouTube video, splice it up into ten different sections and drop that into the YouTube shorts format. This is all very easy for Pharma to do.
Then there are the generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) tools coming out which are really powerful. Gen AI really helps with ideation and blue sky thinking. You have to learn the skill of prompt engineering, but then you can start really going into your imagination and building out some incredible things. There’s so much going on. The human brain cannot compute how much AI is out there—it's so much more than
ChatGPT. And they all do a certain job.
People need to be able to use the technology at a decent level to get the return on it. Otherwise, they’ll sit there trying to work it out instead of building content
However, people need to be able to use the technology at a decent level to get the return on it. Otherwise, they’ll sit there trying to work it out instead of building content. You have to start thinking a little bigger than the technology. It's not the tool, it's the way you're using it.
Lots of pharma companies will get AI wrong because their data isn’t in the right shape to feed the models
Lots of pharma companies will get AI wrong because their data isn’t in the right shape to feed the models. If your data isn’t structured then laying over AI won't make any sense. It's like putting nitrous oxide in a car which doesn't have wheels—it's not going to go far.
If your videos aren’t working, it’s probably because they’re rubbish. It sounds harsh, but it's probably true. They’ll see AI working for another pharma company. Why? It's not the format, it's not the technology—it's the content.
AI can help you proliferate content, but is it valuable? Is it insightful? Does it do the job? By increasing the amount of content, you increase the MLR workload. There's only X amount of MLR approvals that you can get through with what resources you have in house. So you have to get smarter on things like content and image tagging.
This is what Pharma really needs to understand. What tech stack are you going to put your hat on? What works well with your existing infrastructure and how can you use that to build better content—more efficiently—that meets the needs of your customers in a more personalised way?
Choosing the right tech stack, not just for now, but also for the future, is important. The AI space race is on!
Choosing the right tech stack, not just for now, but also for the future, is important. The AI space race is on!
How can pharma marketing teams use Gen AI to better localise their content?
GS: Historically, in pharma, whenever we released images—in detail aids, for example—we had a selection of images that weren’t massively representative of the population that we were trying to target. Certainly not in a hyper-personalised way. We may have had an elderly white gentleman with glasses and a lab coat as the traditional look, for instance.
But with Gen AI, there's nothing stopping you having an Afro-Caribbean or Indian woman in a white coat, and so on. Suddenly, you can get multiple iterations of what your target population is looking like. And that goes for patient material as well. We're probably sick and tired of seeing really happy people on the front of medicinal ads, running through a field or whatever it is. We can change that too with Gen AI.
You can even talk to people in their own language. Japan has a strong pharma industry. But Japanese has always needed some level of translation. Now you can get technology to help you to do that, and get it maybe get 97% of it right. I was really impressed with ChatGPT's accent feature too. It can do like 50 different accents of the same language, which is crazy!
The challenge is not to become vanilla, in a sea of sameness. If everyone's using the same hooks, the same templates, the same format, the same keys, and so on, it becomes uniform.
I think you will see that most images and videos are AI generated in the future. The challenge is not to become vanilla, in a sea of sameness. If everyone's using the same hooks, the same templates, the same format, the same keys, and so on, it becomes uniform. Nothing stands out, and it becomes monotonous. There’s the danger that pharma content becomes too vanilla too quickly with AI. We need to keep the creativity going.
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