ModCon: How to Make Content for Heavily Regulated Industries
ModCon: How to Make Content for Heavily Regulated Industries
An introduction to Modular Content (ModCon) and when to use it
Customers want to see—or more accurately ‘forget everything but’—content that is relevant to them and at that time.
The demand for personalized, engaging, and timely content across multiple channels is higher than ever.
Creating actually personalized, from scratch content is already hard—as discussed in a previous post.
Putting together timely content in a highly regulated field is darn near impossible.
So what if you could satisfy legal and still offer timely content?
Then you’re looking for Modular Content (ModCon)—a content approach that turns content into re-stackable building blocks.
For this post, I got to interview Morgan Blackwell, a ModCon implementation expert in Omnicom’s Precision Marketing Group.
Let's explore what modular content is and when you’d want to use it.
What is Modular Content?
Modular content uses smaller, reusable components that can then be assembled into various formats and templates.
Morgan explains:
"ModCon is like breaking down content into components or I think of as little Lego pieces that can then be put into a template to create assets"
This method allows for efficient content creation and management.
Each piece of content is approved by the business before being used in different contexts—but the final customer-facing product isn’t assembled until it’s needed.
Benefits of Modular Content
1. Speed to Market
Modular content significantly reduces the time it takes to get content to market.
"Speed to market is one of the biggest drivers for why people choose to go the ModCon route"
-Morgan
Once components are approved, they can be quickly assembled into various formats—skipping a repetitive approval processes for each variant.
This agility is crucial when timely content can make a significant difference in engagement and conversions.
For example, imagine a new tax bill is passed as a law. A financial company with ModCon can quickly create relevant podcasts, email newsletters, and in-person flyers without having them all wait on legal review separately.
This fast time to market can keep customers informed without reducing your consistent brand image or fighting legal battles.
Morgan highlights this benefit:
[ModCon] reduces your overall like time to get things to market. Once you do that initial review process, you're not having to redo it for every bit of content that you're producing
2. Cross-Channel Consistency
One of the primary advantages of modular content is the brand consistency across multiple channels.
Whether you're creating an email, a blog post, or a graphic, the same approved components can be used, maintaining a cohesive brand message.
By approving individual components rather than entire assets, companies can produce a higher volume of content without compromising on compliance.
This cross-channel consistency works especially well for conglomerates where a single review group must review content across many different brands.
Per Morgan:
"[Imagine a Client] has 100 different brands that are all under the parent brand. But [each brand] has their own complete look and feel. ModCon allows those brands to have their own personalized content.
Despite what many marketers seem to think, legal review isn’t there to make a brand’s personality disappear—they’re there to protect the company.
When they have all of a brand’s assets to review at once, legal can help offer wording that would keep the brand image.
When they have to skip back and forth between various brand personalities, they don’t get the same opportunity and default to blander copy.
3. Personalization at Scale
Personalization is key to engaging modern audiences.
[ModCon] gives more flexibility to marketing teams to create personalized content and to create variations of content
Modular content allows marketers to create personalized experiences by assembling different components tailored to specific audience segments.
This flexibility lets teams create relevant content that resonates without starting from scratch each time.
Generally, the key principles of ModCon are similar to 'Dynamic Content Optimization’ [DCO].
ModCon is used to refer to pre-approved units that can be assembled.
DCO is usually unsupervised.
Use Cases of Modular Content in MarTech
1. Pharmaceutical Industry
ModCon is especially useful in the pharma industry.
Every piece of content must undergo thorough review—no matter how small—because of the stringent regulatory environment.
The reason we have done it so much in pharma is because of all the regulatory constraints in the format. So like every single tiny bit of content has to be approved by their medical and legal review"
By breaking down content into smaller components that are pre-approved, pharma companies can ensure compliance while speeding up the content creation process.
2. Financial Services
Financial services, like the pharmaceutical industry, are heavily regulated
Modular content can help these organizations stay on the right side of the law and customers.
For instance, a bank could pre-approve components such as disclaimers, images, and text snippets. This way, when they want to send out an email update, the only part that needs to be written and reviewed is the core text.
3. Healthcare
Healthcare providers can also benefit from modular content by creating informative and compliant materials that cater to different patient needs.
Similar to pharma (above), healthcare organizations can produce educational content, patient information leaflets, and marketing materials that adhere to regulatory standards all from the same core ideas.
This approach ensures compliance and lets healthcare providers deliver timely and relevant information to their patients.
Challenges and Considerations
While ModCon offers many benefits, it’s not a free lunch.
Like any MarTech implementation, ModCon requires buy in and planning.
Implementing a modular content strategy requires a significant initial investment in technical resource time and technical tooling.
Creating the components, establishing a taxonomy structure, and setting up a DAM system are essential steps that can be resource-intensive.
As Morgan points out some important considerations for implementing ModCon:
[Implementation] is not just creating the content. It's also creating the taxonomy structure.
How are you tagging things? How is it being organized? Where does it go?
Additionally, ensuring that all components are properly tagged and organized1 within the DAM is crucial for efficient retrieval and reuse.
Conclusion
ModCon represents a useful approach for marketing teams looking to accelerate time to market without compromising brand consistency or legal backing.
As you’ve seen, organizations can create personalized and compliant marketing materials by breaking down content into reusable components that still resonate with their target audiences.
While the initial setup may be challenging, the long-term benefits of modular content make it a worthwhile investment.
I recommend it for any highly-regulated marketing organization looking to stay ahead of consumer interest (and on the right side of the law).
Yes, using AI for tagging and content generation can help streamline this process, but it also requires robust infrastructure and an integration method