A 4-Step Guide for Boosting Your HCP Engagement Platform’s Discoverability and Impact
Your HCP engagement platform is filled with valuable scientific content. Yet your analytics tell a frustrating story. Visitor numbers are lower than expected, engagement metrics aren’t meeting targets, and your carefully crafted content isn’t reaching its intended audience.
This scenario plays out all too frequently across the pharmaceutical industry. Exceptional educational resources often remain hidden in the vast digital landscape, failing to achieve their intended impact.
It’s clear that superior content alone doesn’t guarantee success. Without the right discoverability tactics, your HCP engagement platform is at risk of becoming a well-intentioned but underutilized digital resource.
Long-term success depends on a strategic, multi-channel approach to discoverability that leverages both digital and traditional channels. Here’s what you need to know to get started.
Understanding the Discoverability Challenge in Medical Communications
There’s a reason so many pharmaceutical companies struggle to attract and maintain consistent HCP engagement on their platforms. The digital landscape is getting more and more crowded with each passing year. As that happens, it’s less and less likely that your content will be discovered organically (i.e. without additional efforts put into boosting its discoverability).
It’s essential to implement targeted, omnichannel strategies that help your HCP Engagement Platform stand out and become a trusted destination for the latest medical information.
Your Discoverability Roadmap: A Multipronged Approach
With the right approach to discoverability, you can transform your HCP engagement platform from a passive repository into an active, sought-out information hub. You’ll need to take a multifaceted approach, one that brings together inbound tactics such as creating content assets optimized for search and proactive outbound tactics such as email and paid advertising.
Use the following roadmap as a guide to ensure your content not only reaches your target audience but keeps them coming back for more.
1. Optimize for Search Success
Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a major role in improving your HCP engagement platform’s visibility. You must pay careful attention to both on-page and off-page SEO elements to maximize your content’s organic reach.
On-Page SEO Elements
Make sure each piece of content on your platform includes:
- High-quality, original content that addresses specific HCP needs
- Appropriate content structure, including clear headers and subheads that incorporate relevant keywords
- Mobile-responsive design that search engines prioritize and that ensures your audience can access content across devices
- Internal linking that creates logical pathways between related content
- Meta descriptions and title tags that accurately describe each page’s content
Off-Page SEO Priorities
At the same time, you should also prioritize:
- Building authoritative backlinks from respected medical and scientific sources
- Creating shareable content that generates interest and discussion beyond your HCP Platform
- Maintaining citations and links pointing back to your site
- Engaging with the broader medical community through guest content contributions
2. Leverage Digital Channels for Enhanced Visibility
Strategic use of email marketing, social media, and third-party platforms is crucial to meeting HCPs where they are and creating meaningful touchpoints that drive engagement.
Email Communications
Email campaigns keep your HCP platform top of mind and offer direct pathways to your platform’s content.
Newsletters and other forms of email outreach are ideal for maintaining a steady pulse of contact with HCPs. As you develop your email strategy, consider segmenting your audience and developing a separate, custom strategy for each key audience or user journey.
Use your email campaigns to highlight new resources, share updates, and even make personalized content recommendations based on previous interactions. Be sure to include clear calls-to-action that drive platform visits — and don’t forget to monitor performance and optimize your approach based on the data.
Social Media
Similar to your email strategy, it is also important to regularly share content and engage with specific HCP audiences across social media platforms such as LinkedIn, X, and others. Doing so helps you meet busy HCPs on their “own turf” and encourages them to engage with your content and navigate to your platform.
There are two main components of a social media strategy:
- Organic Social: Routinely posting content and updates to your own page with links back to your engagement platform is a great way for HCPS to discover your educational resources. Growing your followers by engaging with experts, resharing relevant content, and following influential accounts is key. When HCPs engage with you through likes, comments, and shares it builds trust and credibility.
- Paid Social: Because many platforms limit the reach of organic posts, it can be difficult to truly target HCP segments without a paid social presence. Platforms such as LinkedIn make it possible to share your content with a targeted audience using parameters such as job title, company size, and industry.
Third-Party Platforms
As HCPs continue to choose digital platforms over traditional resources, third-party platforms (TPPs) have continued to play a prominent role. TPPs are digital spaces that exist for specific audiences, like HCPs, where they can access educational content, engage in professional discussions, and stay current with medical developments.
Building content to share within these platforms allows you to reach a wider HCP audience, potentially with people who have not yet discovered you, and creates an opportunity to link them back to your own platform. Beyond that, there are a number of key benefits to making TPPs part of your discoverability strategy:
- Increased credibility by publishing on trusted platforms
- Providing value through platform-specific content
- Facilitating opportunities for deeper engagement and peer-to-peer discussion
Creating specific content for TPPs is critical to extending your reach. With the right third-party platform strategy, you can create an active presence on TPPs while ultimately driving your audience back to your own platform for deeper engagement. For HCPs, key third-party platforms include Figshare, Kudos and Sermo. However, it’s important to select the TPPs that best match your goals. Consider the following:
- Target audience. Every TPP caters to different HCP segments. Make sure the platforms you choose align with the audience you’re trying to reach.
- Engagement Features. What ways can HCPs engage with your publications on the platform? Are the discussion forums? Does the platform support video embeds?
- Integration with your own HCP Engagement Platform. Most importantly, how easy is it to link back to your own platform? Remember that the ultimate goal with TPPs is for HCPs to discover your content and want to learn more about your company.
Finally, the content you create for TPPs should satisfy a few key criteria. In addition to complying with all industry regulations and driving visitors to your own HCP Engagement Platform, content for TPPs should:
- Create educational value for HCPs through insights, data, or strategic perspectives
- Demonstrate an understanding of what’s most important to the HCPs you’re trying to reach
- Always make use of clear calls to action (CTAs) to encourage HCPs to engage with your own engagement platform
Paid Search Keywords
Organic reach forms the foundation of your platform’s visibility, but strategic paid keyword promotion on search engines like Google complements these efforts by significantly accelerating discovery and engagement by specific HCP segments.
Search engines offer precise targeting capabilities for medical keywords that matter most to your audience. By identifying keywords that closely align with your therapeutic areas and educational content, you can ensure your platform appears prominently when HCPs search for relevant clinical information. This approach is particularly valuable when launching new content or seeking to establish leadership in emerging therapeutic areas.
3. Devise a Content Strategy for Sustained Engagement
An effective content strategy lays the foundation for maintaining HCP engagement on your platform. Your goal is to create valuable, timely content that resonates with your audiences needs, with a special focus on the content formats busy HCPs prefer.
A well-rounded HCP engagement platform content strategy should include the following components.
Fresh, Relevant Content
Regular content updates keep HCPs returning to your platform. Keep your content on-strategy and on-track with an editorial calendar that is aligned with your big-picture goals as well as medical conferences and key events.
As much as possible, find ways to develop content that attracts ongoing engagement. For instance, you might develop a content series that encourages repeat visits or update existing content as new data and insights emerge. While you will likely build an annual editorial calendar, be sure to leave enough flexibility to respond to emerging topics and trends in your therapeutic areas.
Publication Extenders
While long-form publications are still considered the primary source for scientific research, the truth is busy healthcare professionals need easily digestible content, too. Publication extenders allow you break your long-form, cornerstone content into multiple engaging, short-form digital assets which can be hosted on your HCP engagement platform.
Your publication extenders can take a variety of formats. For instance, you might:
- Create infographics highlighting key study findings
- Develop animations and interactive data visualization tools that let HCPs dig deeper
- Produce video summaries and expert discussions tied to a publication
- Start a podcast that lets you dive deeper into topics HCPs care about
No matter what format your publication extenders take, it’s important to remember that your content should influence the medium. In other words, an infographic may work well for one publication, but not lend itself to another. You likely already have a robust, far-stretching publication cadence. So, rather than ideating what publication extender you’ll need after publications go live, consider planning your publication extenders in advance. That’s key for a number of reasons:
- A more strategic approach: Planning out your publication extenders in advance allows you to consider your longterm strategic goals as well as formats that require longer lead times to produce.
- Smoother content production: Knowing what publication extenders you need in advance set expectations about what needs to be produced and when. You won’t have to scramble to get things done later and you can produce more content at one time.
- Better internal alignment: When you know what publication extenders you need ahead of time, you’ll have more time to involve your broader medical affairs team and other departments. This helps everyone align on greater company objectives and fosters synergy between departments.
- Higher efficiency and lower costs: A clearly defined plan for publication extender formats (infographics, videos, podcasts) tells you exactly what you need to develop throughout the year. This visibility allows you and an agency partner to develop reusable modules that can be repurposed time and again.
4. Maximize Traditional Channels
Congresses, conferences, and other physical events also provide valuable opportunities for platform promotion. Event staff can engage attendees through hands-on platform demonstrations during one-on-one interactions, highlighting the valuable educational content visitors can expect to find. Further, adding QR codes or short URLs on publication and digital booth assets enables effective follow-up engagement.
Your Medical Science Liaison (MSL) team serves as platform ambassadors in the field. Through training on platform features and benefits, along with quick-reference guides for common questions, MSLs can effectively communicate platform value to HCPs. Furthermore, insights collected by MSLs ensure HCP needs inform iterative platform development.
Tying it All Together: an Integrated Campaign Approach to Discoverability
All of the tactics you use to increase discoverability should ladder up to an integrated awareness campaign, one that coordinates across multiple channels to create a cohesive experience.
At the same time, you’ll want to thoughtfully adapt your content to leverage the strengths of each channel. For instance, social media posts might feature short video snippets while email newsletters could include more detailed clinical summaries.
Cross-channel performance metrics can help you identify which approaches resonate most effectively with different HCP segments, enabling continuous refinement of your discoverability strategy.By orchestrating these elements through an integrated campaign approach, pharmaceutical companies can create multiple pathways to platform discovery while reinforcing key messages across channels. This coordinated effort will establish your platform as a trusted, go-to resource for HCP education and engagement in your therapeutic areas.