Marketing is one of the most important departments in your sales organisation. They promote and sell your product and services to customers, build and maintain brand awareness, and drive customer engagement.
That includes:
Creating and implementing campaigns and promotions to attract new and existing customers and drive sales
Gathering and analysing information about customers, competitors, and market trends to better understand the market and develop more effective marketing strategies.
Creating and maintaining your brand image and reputation
Designing and distributing ad campaigns, email campaigns, social media posts, catalogues, leaflets, posters, store displays, and other marketing content.
Planning and organising events, such as product launches, online or in-store promotions, and other customer-facing activities
Working closely with the sales, product, and customer service teams to ensure that all marketing efforts are aligned with overall business goals.
That's a lot of work and a huge responsibility, and finding ways to reduce their overload, streamline processes, increase efficiency, and lower costs is crucial.
Let's now explore how a PIM solution can help your marketing teams with that. It can:
Drive customer engagement and sales
Track trends and monitor competition
Enable Product Experience Management
Improve internal communications and efficiencies
Maintain brand consistency
1. Drive customer engagement and sales
This includes high-quality titles, short and long product descriptions, descriptions for social media, SEO metadata, image galleries, videos, downloadable files, filtering attributes, tags, and more.
Creating different product description variants will also allow them to test which works best.
A PIM platform will also help them tackle one of the biggest challenges in omnichannel marketing: managing product information across multiple channels. As PIM eliminates manual data entry, it reduces the risk of errors and ensures that customers receive accurate, consistent, and up-to-date information about the products they are interested in, no matter what channel they are using.
Finally, PIM automates the process of publishing product information to marketing channels and can be easily integrated with other platforms, such as ecommerce, marketing automation, CRM, and analytics tools, to provide a comprehensive view of product performance across channels.
2. Track trends and monitor competition
Knowing your company's position in the market and against the competition is crucial. Ongoing competitor and market analysis, which helps you understand your competitors' pricing, proposition, categorisation, and trends, is a part of it.
Integrating your scraping tool with a PIM platform will allow you to identify the differences, update yours manually or through AI, and immediately publish your updates to your sales and marketing channels.
3. Enable Product Experience Management
Effective Product Experience Management is quickly becoming the future point of difference. It optimises customers' end-to-end experiences with a product, from initial research to post-sales support. Understanding what customers expect from your products is a core element of it. A PIM platform can help you to gather customer feedback in several ways:
Product reviews. They are a valuable source of feedback, and a PIM platform can collect them directly or through integration with your ecommerce and mobile platform or from 3rd party review websites.
Customer surveys. You can use a PIM to send out surveys to gather feedback on specific products or categories to improve their engagement and sales conversion rates.
Brand-mentions monitoring. You can use a PIM to monitor mentions, ratings and reviews of your products published in shopping feeds and social media platforms to improve them and respond to feedback or concerns.
Understanding products and attributes’ popularity. In specific scenarios, a PIM can also collect information about the popularity of individual products and attributes used in navigation and filtering to inform how they are displayed and ordered in your ecommerce platform and your product development and improvement.
By incorporating these feedback mechanisms, you can gather valuable insights into customer needs and preferences, improve engagement and experience, and drive growth.
4. Improve internal communications and efficiency.
Turning raw data from an ERP into attractive and engaging products that sell requires a lot of effort and coordination. Marketing teams often coordinate the many internal teams, external suppliers and brand and marketing agencies involved in the process.
Integrating PIM with collaboration tools such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Basecamp, and others will make communication about specific products or categories much more efficient.
A PIM platform also allows creating automated workflows mimicking your product lifecycle, further simplifying your collaboration and approvals.
Finally, integrating PIM with all the marketplaces, marketing channels, and publishing tools will allow your marketing teams to manage product information centrally, eliminate errors and massively reduce work and rework.
5. Maintain brand consistency
Maintaining brand identity and values across the business and market requires consistently upholding and applying the same standards to all images, content and digital assets.
Some PIM platforms also provide Digital Asset Management (DAM) capabilities, but as these typically fall short of a dedicated DAM platform, it is better to integrate the two and leave each to its strengths.
Regardless of where the assets are stored, a PIM platform will ensure it is correctly associated with the corresponding products and published efficiently and on time.
Summary
Your marketing department needs a PIM platform. It will help to provide accurate and consistent product information to all channels, enhance customer experience, engagement and sales, and increase ROI.
We can help to make it happen. Get in touch.