Importance of Product Information Management (PIM) for Your B2B Marketplace Strategy
Today, B2B manufacturers and merchants optimize their product information and deliver excellent product experiences wherever a customer shops or interacts with their brands.
To improve the customer’s experience with the business/brand, quality control channels are essential. For this, product information (PIM) becomes crucial. PIM offers a one-stop solution for B2B manufacturers and merchants to effectively manage data. The data consists of everything that is required to sell and market the products through various distribution channels including catalogs, websites, mobile applications, etc.
What is Product Information Management (PIM)?
A product information management system is a data-fueled solution. It is a process-driven application that offers its users to store, collect, and manage complex product content or information. It acts as a central platform and uses PIM tools to manage, streamline and govern accurate product information. With the tools, users can enrich and distribute the product content to the marketing, multiple sales, and eCommerce channels.
Without good product commercialization, even the best products fail to succeed in the market. PIM offers accurate and relevant product content and information into all of the appropriate sales channels and eventually into the hands of customers.
Do you want to get a detailed understanding of PIM, don’t miss to read What is PIM? – An Ultimate Guide for Product Information Management.
Why is PIM important for B2B eCommerce?
A huge and expensive hassle of B2B sellers is transferring the data from their print catalogs into electronic. Product Information Management is essential for B2B eCommerce no matter whether you are a wholesaler, manufacturer, or distributor.
A brand image affects buying strategies. It determines whether a buyer will choose your products or that of your competitors. It defines the quality and composite of your products. Also, a good brand image shows your company is very easy to work with.
Hence, building a master catalog is crucial for building your brand image. It represents all of your products and the flexibility of work. In the digital world, the availability of accurate product information helps buyers to understand the product well. The companies can use this information to compare distributors and suppliers.
So, your business should use an excellent solution for gathering product data. PIM solutions offer centralized information and aid B2B sellers by building a suitable structure for the product data. Data from various sources are collected in one single application. You can easily edit, govern, enrich and maintain the data in one place.
Through PIM tools, you can make faster processes. This makes your brand easy to work with clients. By offering engaging product experiences, other companies will exclusively want to work with you. With PIM your customers can enjoy relevant, accurate, and trusted product information across all the channels and digital touchpoints.
Do you want to discuss how PIM helps you to make your B2B eCommerce strategy succeed?
Factors that B2B companies should be aware of before buying a PIM
1. Flexible Catalog Management
Catalogs are essential in marketing channels. However, in the digital era, there is a divergence in the values of catalogs. Today, everyone is in touch with digital touchpoints and customers search on the internet and choose the products they need. With PIM, companies can keep digital catalogs that are easily traceable. This is an economic quality-improvement strategy that needs to be considered.
2. SEO Features for B2B
B2B companies have a plethora of products and product lines. Hence, many companies now prefer to narrow down their products through the use of keywords on networking and social media. Today, SEO features are essential and unavoidable for any business to run successfully.
As PIM helps in content management systems as well as with data storage, it becomes the first place where B2B companies start to optimize their content. In addition, by focusing on keywords, data optimization is simplified and is easily distributed in multiple channels.
3. B2B Omnichannel Experience on PIM
With the help of omnichannel networks, B2B companies are more likely to become successful and can grow their revenue. With PIM, companies get customized and contextual brand messaging at every point of interaction. It ensures personalized experiences to B2B buyers and that helps to offer high-quality customer service.
Developing a B2B marketing strategy
1. Position in the market
The first step in building a B2B strategy is to understand the market and layout your position. Make time to understand the competitors, their products, strengths, and weaknesses. Know your value proposition and where it sits in the market. This competitive analysis will help you to identify an opportunity in the market where your business can stand out and become more successful.
2. Understand Target Market and Buyer
In the next step, you need to understand your target market. Know your target audience and make your strategy depending on the in-depth profile of your buyers in the market. This way, you will know how to sell your product more effectively in the market.
3. Set Realistic Goals
After gathering all the necessary information about the market and target audience, you need to set your goals. These goals should be realistic and made in conjunction with your sales team. By defining a timeline for accomplishing your goals, you can relatively measure success.
4. Make a Note and plan of Tactics
All the tactics your team will use in accomplishing the goals must be outlined. To achieve goals, all the tactics need to be carefully planned. You need to tweak and optimize the tactics at times to reach the goal.
For each tactic you use, it should have a specific outline and strategy. There should be a tactical plan for all the assets and campaigns. It is important to identify your resources. The budget for any tactical plan depends mostly on the existing investment. Scaling back or up the budget too quickly may not lead to success. Also, you need to identify and outline all the marketing channels.
Do you want to have a technology partner that helps you to build tailored PIM that supports your B2B eCommerce strategy?
The importance of PIM on B2B eCommerce
In the digital age, staying ahead of the curve will yield profits in the highly competitive and overcrowded online marketplace. Hence, it has become crucial to find an effective approach to collect and manage product data.
With a PIM system, you can easily manage the data associated with the products and promote higher profitability in the demanding B2B markets. PIM software can evaluate, collect, store, manage and distribute the product data. PIM has become important for B2B market strategy for the following reasons:
1. Increased productivity and efficiency
PIM collects the product data in a centralized system. This one-stop solution offers various benefits to your team. You can find all the consistent and rich product data in one place. So, there is no place for any confusion and waste of time in finding the data. You can utilize the time and energy saved with this solution in expanding your business.
By establishing a back-office system, you or your team can easily access or modify any product information without bothering the eCommerce store. This means a flexible way of doing business. With all the products in a centralized hub, you can focus on making the data more accurate.
2. Better product information quality
With improved product information and content quality, the products and your brand will get better attention through enrichment. Buyers get attracted to read accurate and good-quality product descriptions. Any product information backed with images or videos gets deserved attention. If the customers fail to find thorough information, then they go to your competitors.
However, a PIM application offers the right platform to improve and streamline your products. It helps you to create high-quality content regarding the product. Attractively crafted product data and descriptions bring the customers one step closer to a purchase. PIM systems offer the tools to add product videos or images in one centralized location.
3. Centralized Source of information
With the help of the PIM application, you can collect, manage and distribute the product data directly from a centralized single place. PIM makes the information handy and you can add or modify all the information from one place. Also, you can link the products and assets to the catalogs.
4. Improved customer experience
A PIM helps the customer to find accurate and relevant product information. It can be modified to become customer-centric. If a customer is searching for a product or information and the site is not up to date, then the customer can leave and go to the competitors.
If a customer is making specific searches related to finding a particular color, price or size then all the relevant products must show up. This enhanced experience helps to make more profits.
5. Enhanced ROI
With the help of the latest and well-designed PIM system, navigation throughout the site becomes user-friendly. This helps the customers to cut short their search process and they can find the products quickly. The user-friendly design will attract more users and improve site conversion rate & sales.
Do you want to execute your B2B eCommerce strategy seamlessly and ensure its success by implementing the right Product Information Management solution?
Bottom line
PIM helps to simplify the data collection and its distribution. It defines how product information is delivered to the market. PIM system gathers all the product specifications, data, and digital assets into one flexible system. With PIM you can increase the customers and profits and minimum product returns.
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