The journey of developing and launching your new treatment is a long one. When you get to the launch, it is the crystallization of years of effort. Regulatory approval is secured, pivotal data is published, and a surge of communications follows: congress presentations, publication plans, stakeholder briefings. Much effort and investment goes into creating the content that supports communications, throughout the trial – from pre-clinical fact sheets to phase II posters and phase III articles – but particularly at launch, where big bucks get spent on videos, interactive graphics, data visualizations, and many other kinds of digital medical education content.
An entire industry has grown up around creating carefully targeted content with the highest production values. But too often this sophisticated, expensive material has a burst of visibility and usage at launch, and then sits under-leveraged in a little-known repository.
too often, sophisticated, expensive content sits under-leveraged in a little-known repository
The mechanisms that drive awareness in the early weeks begin to falter. Search visibility declines; content becomes siloed, orphaned. But the *need* for the content remains.
Missed opportunities
This is a common gap in strategic medical communications strategies. It represents missed opportunities to support evidence-based decisions across markets, stakeholder groups, and timeframes. It potentially even allows misinformation or outdated understanding to persist, because insights are buried in inaccessible formats or under-discoverable repositories. Ultimately this gap means getting less ROI for your content spend than you should or could be getting.
What to do? The key is to think about your medical communications in a more joined-up, iterative way. Think about the pathway for each piece, not only in terms of how you join it up with other pieces, but also in terms of its own lifespan and how it can be repurposed and reused over time.
From one-and-done to over-and-over
Many assets are designed for a moment in time, often tied to a specific audience or channel – a slide deck for an internal MSL briefing, a congress abstract, a gated microsite for HCPs. These are typically siloed and dispersed, with little in the way of lasting discoverability or interoperability. Once the immediate application of the asset has passed, its visibility begins to decline. But it doesn't need to. The content still has plenty of uses. For example, post-approval, the same data that supported regulatory submission now serves to inform clinical decisions, formulary discussions, and guideline development.
treat dissemination as an adaptive, continuous process
The imperative, then, is not necessarily to keep creating new content, but to maintain, repurpose and connect the content we already have – to treat dissemination not as a one-time event but as an adaptive, continuous process.
Designing for discovery
Adopting a continuous approach doesn't mean scrapping everything and having to start all over again. It just means rounding out our thinking of what each piece of content can do for us. For example, a plain language summary isn't only a tool for patient engagement. It is a very effective way of driving organic discovery. Even healthcare professionals use general search tools (i.e. Google) to look for information, and when they do, they tend to search not for technical terms but for plain language queries. Yes, when writing for or speaking to clinical colleagues they might talk about “angiotensin II receptor blockers for resistant hypertension”. But when they’re standing in clinic with five minutes to spare and a phone in their hand, they’re far more likely to Google it as “best treatment for high blood pressure that won’t cause a cough”. So Google prioritises search results that incorporate plain language terms.
Google prioritises search results that incorporates plain language terms.
Continuity also depends on coherence. Fragmented content loses meaning when isolated from its context. By curating story-driven pathways – giving people a clear "next step" link to take them from visual to summary to publication, for example – we're not only helping guide individuals' education, we're also signalling context and connections to discovery tools – whether that is Google, or AI, or other systems trying to understand the evidence base.
Rethinking value
There is also, of course, a deeper question beneath this: how do we measure the value of medical communications? Traditional metrics (citations) are limited in scope. In the long tail, we should be asking who is finding the content, how, and to what end. Are previously hard-to-reach stakeholders engaging with material months after publication? Are summaries being shared across borders or translated into clinical impact?
Answering these questions demands more than basic analytics; it requires a framework that captures the dynamics of attention, understanding, and influence over time. It means recognizing that the success of dissemination is not simply in how content performs at launch, but in how it lives, adapts, and continues to inform.
A more sustainable future for #medcomms
The pharmaceutical industry rightly invests heavily in the generation of high-quality evidence. But the return on that investment depends increasingly on our ability to surface, contextualize, and communicate that evidence throughout the lifecycle of a therapy.
Long-tail strategies – grounded in discoverability, continuity, and contextual relevance – offer a more sustainable model for medical communication. They align with the realities of modern healthcare decision-making, which is seldom immediate, linear, or uniform. They also acknowledge a truth too often overlooked: that the life of clinical data does not end at launch. With the right infrastructure and intent, it can – and should – do much more.
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- Learn more about how we drive discoverability of medical publications, clinical information, and medical education content at info.growkudos.com/pharma
