Working with digital opinion leaders (DOLs) in pharma: A quick-start guide

Key takeaways

• DOLs can provide insights into a healthcare professional (HCP) community's preferred content topics, formats, and information needs
• By partnering with DOLs to co-create and co-promote content, pharma companies can take advantage of their pre-existing audience and credibility
• HCP partners can be split into key opinion leaders (KOLs), DOLs, and ‘Rising Stars’

What are DOLs?

Working with digital opinion leaders, or DOLs, is one of the most talked about strategies in healthcare communications right now. By providing expertise-led, personal, unbiased content online, these digital-native HCPs have amassed audiences of fellow medical professionals that respect, trust, and engage with the opinions they share.

For pharmaceutical companies, working with DOLs has a double benefit. Firstly, they can act as a mouthpiece for a particular HCP community, providing insights into the preferred content topics, formats, and perspectives shared by professionals working within a disease area.

Secondly, they provide access to a ready-made community of engaged HCPs, happy to lend an ear to the campaigns and projects that the DOL contributes to.

DOLs, KOLs, and Rising Stars: What's the difference?

Great question! Before we get into the meat of how to engage them in healthcare communications, it's important we understand the difference between the three key types of HCP opinion leaders.

KOLs: Key opinion leaders are traditional medical or scientific experts within a particular field or disease area. They might be well known for publishing influential papers, presenting at conferences, or simply holding positions of influence in key medical and professional institutions. Often they've grown their reputation through ‘traditional’, or non-digital-first channels.

DOLs: Digital opinion leaders are HCPs that hold influence over other medical professionals in the digital space. Like the non-medical ‘influencer’, some of the most prominent ways in which DOLs might have gained a following include social media, blogging, or appearing on podcasts. They have an engaged following who have actively subscribed (in one way or another) to receive updates on their views and opinions.

Rising Stars: Rising Stars is a term we use at AMP27 to describe a particular type of KOLs and DOLs. These HCPs might not hold a great deal of sway in influencing high-level medical decisions right now, but they're likely to in the near future. These could be HCPs working in key, but more junior, positions within medical institutions, co-authors on influential papers, or medical influencers with small, but growing, follower bases.

Working with opinion leaders in pharma

In the digital healthcare communications space, we're all excited about the role DOLs can play in supercharging pharmaceutical content.

By bringing DOLs into your content planning and ideation from the start of your project, you can ensure that every piece of content you produce is valuable to your audience, and likely to drive high engagement.

By co-creating content with DOLs, you lend your resources the authority and trust associated with a well-respected HCP.

Finally, by co-promoting your content with DOLs, you can share that content with existing audiences to showcase your message to an engaged user group.

What's not to love? For most pharmaceutical companies, the problem isn't with the why, but with the how. How exactly can a pharma team work with DOLs to produce and disseminate valuable content efficiently, compliantly, and credibly?

Don't worry, we've got you covered. Read our quick-start guide below for five key points to consider before engaging DOLs in online communications activities.

Our quick-start guide to working with DOLs in healthcare

Before contracting DOLs for your healthcare communications project, make sure you've covered these five key considerations.

1. Start with the end in mind: What are the goals of your project? Are you trying to increase the number of patients identified and diagnosed with a specific condition? Are you looking to change attitudes and beliefs towards a disease's treatment approach? Or are you trying to influence a specific treatment choice? Identifying the aims you're looking to address will influence your channel selection and your choice of external experts. Make sure you're clear on this from the start, to avoid wasting resources working with DOLs who aren't right for you.
2. Define a shared mission and goals: For a successful working partnership, always identify the ‘sweet spot’ of a shared mission, where your objectives as a pharma company meet the DOL's goals, and your target audience's needs. Early definition and alignment on this mission is critical to getting the most out of your external experts, and building an engagement programme that will drive long-term success.
3. Tailor your search criteria: Once you've identified your aims, and compiled a list of influential HCPs whose own goals align to these, you then need to ensure you've got the right balance of DOLs, KOLs, and Rising Stars for your project. Using best practice criteria for identifying, ranking, and profiling the most appropriate external experts is key to getting this balance right. Our strategy team at AMP27 are experts in DOL identification and profiling. Don't be afraid to drop us a line if you'd like to find out more!
4. Deliver value for all involved: At AMP27, we believe the key to successful, and preferably long-term, engagement with external experts is about value exchange. For many ‘traditional KOLs’, helping them understand how they can make compliant, best practice use of digital and online channels to increase their reach is a real pull. For established DOLs and Rising Stars, it might be about providing opportunities to build credibility through the delivery of great content alongside established opinion leaders.
5. Amplifying expert opinion online: To compliantly and credibly engage and activate external experts online, you need a partner with diverse digital experience, understanding of the latest technologies, and expertise in compliant healthcare content delivery online. This will give you maximum standout across paid, owned, and earned media and channels.

To successfully work with DOLs on a long-term basis, we need to move away from a transactional approach to collaboration and move towards one of mutual benefit and value exchange.

By working with pharma, DOLs are empowered to spread the word on topics they're passionate about, and increase the reach of their personal brand. By working with DOLs, pharma companies are able to share their message online through a trusted spokesperson. To successfully deliver expert advocacy programmes that cut through the online content clutter, we have to think differently about how we engage and activate external experts online.

If you'd like to learn more about the AMP27 External Expert Exchange programme, feel free to contact me at samcollins@amp27.com.