Activating DOLs — Strategy, Integration, and Long‑Term Relationships
Translate insight into action. Show how DOLs fit into omnichannel engagement, amplify scientific content over time, and complement KOLs. Provide guidance on governance, collaboration models, and relationship-building practices that create mutual value and sustained impact.
What role do DOLs play in an omnichannel strategy?
Omnichannel engagement is no longer optional in pharma; it’s the expectation. HCPs encounter content across multiple touchpoints, live congresses, webinars, podcasts, short-form video, professional platforms like LinkedIn, and even closed WhatsApp groups. The challenge for pharma is ensuring consistency, credibility, and resonance across all these channels.
This is where DOLs play a critical role. They can translate scientific content into multiple formats, ensuring that a core message – say, new trial results is echoed in ways that fit each channel. A DOL might provide live commentary on Twitter during a congress session, record a short video summary for LinkedIn, and expand on the same findings in a podcast interview, all reaching different segments of the HCP audience.
DOLs also help pharma overcome the risk of message dilution. While corporate channels can push content, HCPs often prefer hearing from trusted peers. DOLs provide that authentic peer-to-peer voice, which builds trust and drives engagement.
Importantly, DOLs bring speed and agility. In a digital world, the conversation starts as soon as data is released. Traditional KOLs may later endorse findings at an advisory board, but DOLs amplify them within hours, ensuring pharma’s message is part of the first wave of discussion.
In an omnichannel strategy, DOLs are not replacements for traditional KOLs. Instead, they complement them, delivering real-time amplification, broad reach, and authentic voice, while traditional KOLs provide depth, credibility, and stewardship. Together, they ensure influence is both immediate and enduring.
How can pharma leverage DOLs to extend the life and impact of data?
Congress presentations and journal publications have always been anchor points in medical communication. The challenge is that their impact often peaks quickly, a plenary presentation creates buzz for days, a paper is cited for weeks, but then attention fades.
DOLs can dramatically extend this lifecycle. By sharing, contextualising, and reinterpreting data online, they ensure it remains part of the conversation long after the initial release. A single congress abstract can generate weeks of online dialogue if amplified by the right voices.
Pharma can support this by identifying DOLs before data drops, providing them with resources to interpret findings, and ensuring content is easily shareable across platforms. The goal is to “omnify” content, making sure the same message is echoed in multiple formats, on multiple channels, by multiple trusted voices.
Done well, this creates an echo effect, where a single data release continues to shape peer understanding and clinical practice for months, not days.
Should pharma keep traditional KOLs and Digital Opinion Leaders (DOLs) separate, or try to bring them closer together?
A recurring challenge in medical affairs is the generational divide in how influence is exercised. Many of the most established Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs), those with decades of trial leadership, publications, and society roles, come from a generation that often sees social media as non-credible or irrelevant. For them, authority is still built in journals, guidelines, and congress halls.
By contrast, Digital Opinion Leaders (DOLs), often younger or more digitally engaged clinicians exert influence by shaping conversations in real time online. Their credibility comes not from decades of tenure, but from their ability to filter, interpret, and amplify science across digital platforms where the majority of today’s healthcare workforce consumes information.
This raises a strategic question for pharma: do you keep the digital and non-digital worlds separate, or try to bring them closer together? The answer is both, but with purpose.
In some cases, it makes sense to treat them as distinct pillars. Traditional KOLs provide depth, authority, and governance, anchoring scientific credibility. DOLs provide speed, reach, and accessibility, ensuring messages are carried where HCPs are actually listening. Segmentation here avoids forcing traditional experts into channels they do not trust, while still ensuring balanced influence across audiences.
However, there is also value in creating bridges between the two worlds. For example, pairing a senior KOL with a digitally active peer in a webinar or joint commentary can combine gravitas with digital reach. Similarly, helping respected senior figures translate their expertise into digital formats with support, training, or ghost-writing assistance can extend their influence into new spaces without requiring them to become social media natives overnight.
Ultimately, the goal is not to force one model into the other, but to orchestrate complementarity. KOLs and DOLs each bring unique strengths. The most effective pharma strategies acknowledge the differences, leverage each group for what they do best, and – where possible – create opportunities for collaboration that amplify both credibility and reach.
How can pharma build sustainable, long-term relationships with Digital Opinion Leaders (DOLs)?
One of the risks with digital engagement is treating DOLs as transactional, reaching out only when a data drop needs amplification or when a campaign is launched. This can result in shallow, short-lived connections that fail to unlock the true value of digital influence.
To build sustainability, pharma must approach DOLs with the same respect and strategic mindset that has long guided relationships with traditional KOLs. That starts with early and consistent engagement. Rather than waiting for major milestones, companies should involve DOLs in the scientific dialogue year-round, through advisory sessions, co-creation of educational content, or ongoing feedback loops on how data is being received digitally.
Second, pharma must recognise the importance of authenticity. DOLs thrive on credibility with their peers. Heavy-handed or overly promotional interactions risk damaging both the influencer’s reputation and the company’s. Instead, the goal should be to empower DOLs with accurate, timely information, and to let them translate it in their own authentic voice and style.
Third, sustainability requires two-way value exchange. DOLs are not simply a broadcast channel. They can provide pharma with rich insights into how messages are landing, which topics generate the most engagement, and what unmet needs resonate in digital conversations. Treating them as partners – not just amplifiers – creates long-term trust.
Finally, digital engagement should be integrated with traditional KOL strategy. The most enduring influence comes when senior experts, younger digital voices, and institutional accounts work together to reinforce a consistent scientific narrative. Building bridges between these groups creates continuity and resilience, ensuring influence doesn’t depend on a single channel or individual.
In short, sustainable DOL relationships come from respect, authenticity, and integration. By moving beyond ad-hoc interactions and building long-term partnerships, pharma can ensure its digital influence strategy is not just impactful in the short term, but future-proof for years to come.
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