Get your KOL-driven content engine up and running

Biopharma and medtech companies don’t skimp on smarts. But any organization that covers a variety of therapeutic areas will eventually find itself in need of specialized experts.

Key opinion leaders (KOLs) can unlock opportunities for life sciences companies by offering industry-specific expertise and influence that can shape and support commercial strategies, including the process of content creation. In the modern healthcare landscape, organizations that rely on KOLs for insight generation and outreach amplification alone are underutilizing some of their greatest assets.

Working with KOLs as content collaborators—rather than as featured guests or brand mouthpieces—helps to ensure your content strategy is well-informed, authentic, and authoritative.

To get the most out of KOL collaboration, you’ll need an efficient content strategy that maximizes the real-world impact of every insight. In this blog, we’ll show you how to leverage KOL expertise and omnichannel tactics to create a self-improving “content engine” that continuously captures insights and transforms them into high-value engagement opportunities—all while enriching the relationships between your organization and key industry experts.

Identify the right KOLs

Any engine needs a source of fuel to run, and content engines run on expert insights. The “right” KOLs for this type of content strategy are those who can reliably provide that fuel.

Influence, reach, relevance, and level of engagement in their therapeutic area are all factors to weigh as you identify and compare KOLs. To quantify these factors, you’ll need to look at a variety of indicators:

• Scientific publications in reputable journals can help you measure influence and relevance—the more citations and the bigger the publications, the better.
• Clinical trial involvement provides a nuanced view of a KOL’s interests and expertise, as well as their influence.
• Conference presentations at relevant industry events can indicate an expert’s reputation within their field.
• Grant funding received from leading institutions and organizations demonstrates authority, credibility, and potential influence with key industry players.
• Diagnosis, procedure, and prescription claims volumes can reveal real-world experience and influence while highlighting specific areas of therapeutic expertise.
• Social media and traditional media presence can help you identify KOLs who are also digital opinion leaders (DOLs) and have a broader reach within their field.

While many of these indicators are publicly available, gathering and cross referencing enough data to properly compare KOLs can take many hours of research and analysis. Most organizations will benefit from access to pre-aggregated scientific and medical databases. Definitive Healthcare’s Monocl Expert Suite platform, for example, makes it easy to compare publication history, clinical trial participation, grant funding, and industry affiliations for more than 15 million clinical experts.

As you begin to compile a list of prospective KOLs to power your content engine, remember: relying on a single fuel source is a recipe for failure. Instead, take a portfolio approach, aiming to build relationships with a blend of scientific experts, clinical practitioners, digital opinion leaders, and system-level influencers.

Capture insights everywhere

It’s unfortunately easy to undervalue opinion leader interactions. Rather than going into KOL interactions focused on a singular asset, endorsement, or educational opportunity, keep an open mind—and open notebook—to capture insights as they arise naturally.

Whether you’re sitting in on an advisory board, monitoring social media activity, watching a conference presentation, or engaging with a KOL one-on-one, capture and tag every relevant insight within a centralized, structured system. This could be your CRM, an internal database, or even a well-organized spreadsheet.

Every insight you capture represents a new entry in your content backlog. Be sure to make note of the specific language being used by KOLs; this should inform the tone of relevant content going forward. Pay special attention to high-value content seeds such as:

• Emerging clinical questions
• Unmet needs within the industry or therapeutic area
• Points of contention or uncertainty
• Exciting new technology or modalities
• On-the-ground perspectives and preferences

Transform insights into modular content

Getting your content engine up and running might require your team to re-tune the way they think about content generation. It’s less about pinning down the right type of content to produce a certain result, and more about finding as many ways as possible to activate an insight.

As you begin to capture KOL perspectives and build a content backlog, start thinking about multiple ways to leverage each insight. For instance, a clinical leader’s guidance around your therapy or medical device could provide the foundation for a webinar discussion, a short-form video for social media, a POV article authored by the KOL, and a one-pager for inclusion in an email nurture series.

More KOLs in your portfolio means more insights, and more insights means more content opportunities. You don’t necessarily need to transform each insight into each proposed piece of content (as always, timing, workload, and strategic goals will shape your priorities), but having a wide variety of options at your disposal will help you scale asset production without burning out your team, your KOLs, and your audience.

The content engine really comes alive once you have several types of assets created across multiple KOLs and insights. A well-designed asset can serve as a plug-and-play template for future content, be quickly repurposed for other content formats, and act as a showpiece to engage additional KOLs—helping to accelerate the entire identify-capture-create cycle.

Collaborate for more authentic messaging

Your marketing team works hard crafting messaging to maximize audience engagement, and they’re probably pretty proud of it (ask me how I know). But a KOL-driven content strategy often works best when the content sounds and feels like the KOLs’ thinking. And that means actually letting the KOLs drive.

Giving your KOLs opportunities to create or co-author content contributes to the symbiotic nature of your relationship. You get more authentic, authoritative, and relevant content, and the opinion leader gets new outlets to share their expertise and opinion and build a stronger portfolio.

Lean especially hard on KOLs for POV articles, short-form reactions to new data or developments, plain-language interviews, discussion panel appearances, or any other type of content they’re passionate about. That’s where their unique voice will shine through.

KOLs who don’t show particular interest in (or aptitude for) writing can still be valuable voices and co-authors—your team may just need to work a bit harder to transform their perspectives into content. As mentioned above, you should focus on conveying KOL insights with the language they use. For this kind of collaborative content, your brand voice is best left on the back burner.

Take an omnichannel approach to distribution

As your content engine starts to chug along, you’ll quickly build a collection of KOL-driven content. Your strategy for distributing this content should be far-reaching enough to leverage a wide variety of assets, but carefully targeted enough to create a seamless engagement experience for the healthcare professionals and consumers you’re trying to reach.

An omnichannel distribution strategy aims to connect your audience to your brand through every channel they use, using the most relevant and impactful content for each channel and customer. This requires understanding the various personas within your audience, the channel and content preferences for each persona, and the KOLs best suited to engage them.

A younger rising star or DOL, for example, might be a strong choice for social media and short-form content, while an academic KOL might be better for long-form educational content or webinar participation. An opinion leader with operational or leadership experience could make a great candidate for a case study or sales testimonial.

Omnichannel strategy is a deep topic—it really warrants a blog of its own. If you want an even deeper look, check out our e-book for life sciences organizations or watch the replay of our omnichannel webinar.

Measure, iterate, and win

You’ve identified the right KOLs, captured insights, transformed them into collaborative content, and started distribution. Here’s where the content engine becomes self-improving.

Start tracking as many data points around content performance as possible, paying special attention to the highest and lowest engagement/activation rates with regards to:

• KOL type
• Content format
• Topic/therapy area
• Sales team usage
• Channel

This performance data should then feed back into the engine, helping steer decisions around future KOL selection, content themes and asset types, messaging, timing, and more.

The more time you invest in your content engine, the more data it will return, giving you a holistic understanding of your content performance and the broader influence of your KOL strategy.

Kick-start your KOL strategy

A smart KOL strategy starts with a data-driven understanding of your therapeutic area and the leading experts within it. Definitive Healthcare can help you kick-start the process with the Monocl Expert Suite.

Whether you’re looking for unique insights into millions of medical and scientific experts, valuable KOL engagement opportunities at industry conferences, or medical claims data to drive your outreach efforts, Definitive Healthcare has you covered.

Sign up for a demo today to see how we can help you find and engage KOLs around the world.