Content marketing at AbbVie

Content marketing is rapidly taking centre stage, standing out from the crowd formed by other types of advertising and marketing. However, building a content operation from scratch is a daunting endeavour. A lot of groundwork needs to happen before achieving value, relevance and consistency. And while content is an important pillar in this building journey, culture and process are equally essential pillars. Content is what internal and external audiences see and hopefully engage with; culture is what is necessary to address internally, across the organisation, to ensure adoption of content efforts; and process is what keeps a team on track and in full alignment with the company’s business priorities, enabling ongoing insight generation to ensure relevance. Driving profitable customer action is understandably a broad statement that needs to be tailored according to each industry’s particularities. The highly regulated nature of biopharmaceuticals and the global reach of multinational companies like AbbVie heavily determine the ultimate goal of AbbVie’s content operation: increasing the company’s valuation and reputation. As one navigates through the challenges of building a solid, sustainable and strategic content operation, the order of the aforementioned three pillars (culture, process and content) matters, and, surprisingly enough, content does not come first.