1. Identify relevant DOLs
The first step in including DOLs in your overall marketing plan is to identify those DOLs active in your therapy area.  You'll want to check their follower count and also review their content to ensure that it aligns with your brief. You should also check their content to see if they are already collaborating with any other brands in your therapy area. 

2.  Customise your approach
Bear in mind it's likely that these DOLs will receive many approaches from agencies and other pharmaceutical companies and it's important that your communication is clear and bespoke. 

3.  Define their role
You should be upfront about how you'd like to collaborate with this DOL and the involvement you'd like them to have.  One of the key characteristics of a DOL is that they will have reach with online healthcare audiences, and it's likely that you will want to engage with them to leverage their ability to effectively share relevant information to a wide audience.  This may be quite different to some of the ways you would work with a traditional KOL (such as providing medical guidelines or expert opinion) and may also overlap with the DOL also providing this guidance.

4.  Follow content guidelines
As with any expert, it's important that when they are posting on their platform that there is clear and immediate disclosure where there is a paid partnership.  

If you are working with an influencer and have contracted them to post on their own social media channels, you will be responsible for monitoring comments that appear on these posts for product mentions and adverse events. Many pharmaceutical companies who have worked with influencers in this way, may ask influencers to turn off the comments on these posts to reduce the need for monitoring.

Want to know more?
To learn more about the role of DOLs, KOLs and KEEs in the marketing plan for your therapy area, we'd recommend our mini course on "Working with Social Media Influencers in Pharma.