In the traditional pharmaceutical business model, it seems like all the efforts were put into addressing the physicians needs to boost sales. However, the scenario has changed drastically in the past few years and the focus is more inclined towards customers alongside physicians and payers.
Current business model driven by advanced technology is giving patients an opportunity to have a say and become more and more involved in their healthcare issues. This is especially true when it comes to millennials, who are not very satisfied with the information provided by their healthcare experts. Hence, people are leveraging the power of wearables to measure and track their fitness and vital signs like blood pressure and heart rate.
On these premises, it’s not difficult to agree with the growing importance of online presence and building credibility to boost sale. Having said that CMS provides medical practitioners space to share the know-how of new and upcoming medical devices. As a result, information sharing is becoming a critical part of the marketing strategy. So let’s dive straight into the basics of CMS, what does it manage and why does it matter for your industry.
What is CMS?
A CMS is a software application that is used to create and manage digital content. Using this, medical device makers can handle a vast amount of product information that is required to bring to market. It can be also used to present medical device information to a diverse set of stakeholders as a means of increasing quality management and regulatory compliance while reducing risk.
While selecting a CMS for pharmaceutical products, you need to look at different aspects such as ease and speed of setting up a user friendly website, performance optimization, security, what can be done if there are unexpected changes, volume variations, demands for major workflow changes, and other problems specific to the medical device industry.
Regulatory compliance, website performance, personalization, and SEO are the other key components you need to look at. Here are the 5 reasons why a business needs to invest in a web CMS:
- Facilitates frequent content updates on the web properties
- Aids in effective content management & collaboration
- Ensures device & platform compatibility for the web properties
- Effortless customization options at your fingertips
- Web experience management
What does CMS manage?
In the medical device industry, consistency is the key to brand awareness. Undoubtedly, due to the rising competition and concerns, the approval of new drugs and medical devices has been marginally declined by the US FDA. To overcome these factors, pharmaceutical companies are investing in their brands. After all, increasing brand awareness is an important strategy to boost a company’s competitiveness.
An easy to use medical device CMS lets your content developers and marketers engage with a prospect, maintain the consistency throughout different collaterals such as blogs, news, product pages, corporate content, industry analysis, announcements, testimonial, and others.
In the medical devices industry, such components could be company information, product information, training materials, investors information, news, press release et cetera.
Here making an informed open source CMS choice is of utmost importance as it enables technical as well as non-technical personnel to have full control over the website including editing and organization of the website.
Drupal is one such open source CMS that follows a modular, building block approach, allowing unlimited customization. It also allows organizations to build flexible solutions that fit their unique business needs, resulting in a tailored solution specific to their requirement.
Why does it matter?
Indeed, pharmaceutical companies don’t make changes too often in a website. But what if it is company’s information, manufacturing address, representative’s name, regulatory changes or adding new information. Such changes happen as and when required. Therefore, it is pertinent to understand what a good CMS is.
The benefits of a CMS is manifold and leveraging it rightly can be one of the major wins. In a medical device company, there are different stakeholders and they have their own perspective.
Stakeholders involved in the CMS decision
Content Authors - Typically, content developers and consumers are likely to have a different user experience. A medical CMS offers different functionalities to different stakeholders. For authors, it has drag and drops editing, granular content editing, in-place editing, grouping content, sitemap generation, and layout management.
Marketers - For marketers, maintaining a marketing strategy and website goes hand in hand. An effective pharmaceutical website and marketing strategy is always relevant and should be up-to-date. In order to streamline to strategy, marketers make changes too often as per the requirements.
An easy to CMS offers a wealth of undiscovered value far beyond just allowing them to create, distribute and monitor content across the business. The best healthcare CMS is the one that seamlessly integrates with your existing marketing technology stack and overall marketing automation plan.
Business - Evaluating whether your medical device CMS’s feature meets functional and nonfunctional needs is just one thing. Being a decision-makers/business owner you also need to assess the ROI whilst making the decision. Therefore, it's equally important to know how your CMS makes a good business sense. Here are the few questions you should ask yourself before making a decision:
- Does your business require a flexible website
- Do you need to share some common contents on specific or all pages of your website
- Do you need to build connections and stay connected with your customers
- Does your business require your website to be mobile-first
- Do you need to establish and maintain a heavily trafficked site
By identifying these and other issues, you can use your business plan to create a roadmap for a more accurate content strategy.
Developers and IT - When it comes to developing a medical device/healthcare website, it covers a wide area of disciplines. More importantly, you need to look at it from the perspective of development and comparison. Have a look at some of the skills your in-house Drupal developers should have.
Having an in-house team has its own benefit, however, hiring an external support team to have several advantages. A specialized vendor can provide talented individuals, access to technical expertise and scalability, which means the flexibility to scale up and scale down as and when required.
Community - While selecting an open source, it's crucial to look into the community that builds and maintains your medical device CMS of choice. Are they maintaining software quality? Is the CMS viable? Here is our take on why should we contribute back to the community. Also, read why Drupal is a market leader.
What do you get
You can build your brand. Your customers are likely to be loyal, so your employees. You can build a credibility in the market and win the trust of your new customers.
If you want our Drupal team to take a look at your website and provide you with personalized insights. Get in touch.
