PIM for Marketing: Why Is It Essential for Your Marketing Strategy?
Campaigning and promotion of products form an essential part of the strategy for the growth of the brand and business. Campaigns and promotions help in generating leads, increasing sales, enhancing brand identity, and creating an everlasting impression on the minds of potential customers. Considering PIM for marketing, companies can drive more efficiency in the business.
Launching these campaigns and promotions is a complex task and requires a team of experts along with an adequate tool that will help in creating and executing details for campaigns and promotions. The Product Information Management (PIM) system will help marketers with the smooth management of the essential product details essential for successful campaigns and promotions.
Top 5 Responsibilities of the Marketing Department
The several responsibilities of the marketing departments include:
1. Improving efficiency and ROI
There are several tools and software that help the organization in its various operations in the marketing department. These tools help in improving working efficiency by incorporating features like automation.
Implementing the product information management (PIM) marketing tool enables automating the process of uploading the products on the marketplace and selling platforms. It makes it easier for converting several product spreadsheets into a centralized data hub.
It synchronizes the data from the different product catalogs across the different channels. The tool enhances the data quality, identifies and rectifies the missing fields and errors, updates data with real-time values, etc.
2. Tracking and monitoring competition
The business needs to understand its position in the ever-increasingly competitive market. Effective competitor analysis is very helpful as it helps in studying their social media platforms, websites, email campaigns, paid advertisements, operational channels, etc. It helps in evaluating how the competitors list their products.
Understanding their categorization, and cross-selling opportunities will help in getting insights for effective marketing of the products. PIM for marketing helps in improving the product data and improved categorization for better showcasing of the product range.
3. Understanding customer needs
A robust marketing strategy has a huge impact on understanding customer expectations and needs. This can be achieved by seeking feedback from the customers. The internal channels like the sales and the customer support team will help to get the customer information that will help to enhance the marketing strategies.
External channels like market research, surveys, social media polls, etc. help as an effective way of understanding customer expectations. The PIM platform for marketing provides an intuitive solution for enriching product information with the details gained from customer feedback. It will enable us to provide clearer product profile details to potential customers.
4. Maintain brand consistency
The marketing department plays a crucial role in the development and maintenance of brand identity across the business. Consistency in the dissemination of images, assets, and content is essential for upholding brand values.
For larger companies having many products on the market, it is important to keep the product data updated with real-time details. It is also important to maintain consistent data across the different sales channels.
PIM for marketing allows for centralized storage of images, videos, logos, branded icons, and other assets essential as marketing materials. The centralization of assets helps in updating the detail across the different channels and touchpoints.
5. Provide information to other departments:
Implementing the PIM system allows for keeping all the teams within the organization well informed about the product information. With this data access, all the teams have better communication for enhanced performance.
It also helps in enhancing the transparency and efficiency involved in product marketing. PIM provides relevant privileges to the different teams to access the information for viewing and editing the details. It allows for tracking the changes and editing history.
Role of PIM for Marketing in Effective Product Promotion
The role played by the PIM system for successful and effective product promotion includes:
High-quality product data
It is important to stay agile while creating and running product promotions and campaigns. Automation for adding filters, reviewing or modifying the details, and removing duplicate data helps in saving time and effort.
PIM solution helps marketers keep product information updated and accurate. PIM enables centralized storage, organization, and management of data that can be efficiently shared across all the campaign stakeholders.
It also ensures that the sales resources, internal documents, and external marketing materials all reflect the same consistent details. For a successful launch of the campaign, the marketers should collaborate efficiently with the different teams.
Reaching out to the different teams for collecting the information and assets should not consume time. PIM allows for collecting all these details immediately thus saving time for focusing on creativity and innovation.
Optimized marketing processes
PIM streamlines the workflow thus ensuring all the campaign processes are in place and provides the necessary notifications and corrective action plans. PIM provides selective permission to the stakeholders to create, edit and update the information. Thus, all the teams have access to the right digital assets essential for building their campaigns and promotions.
Effective omnichannel marketing
Promoting the campaigns on multiple channels helps in achieving greater returns as this enables us to reach out to a larger crowd of potential customers. An effective and robust PIM system enables the marketers to deliver enriched product content across multiple channels thus allowing the right information to reach the end users.
Improved customer experiences
Implementing the PIM marketing tool enables continuous improvement and keeps the details updated timely. The PIM system helps marketers quickly adapt their marketing campaigns and product promotions based on their customers’ needs. PIM keeps the customers updated with accurate details thus reducing the return rates, gaining their confidence, and enhancing sales.
How Product Information Management Becomes Essential for Your Marketing Strategy?
The different reasons for PIM becoming essential for marketing strategies include:
Streamline digital and media assets
For the product-based industry, it is important to provide accurate product information to the end-users to gain customer confidence and build the brand identity. The product information like images, videos, audio clips, graphics, etc. help in building the visual interpretation of the product in the minds of the customers, thus prompting them to make their purchases.
These digital assets should be well managed and transformed into the right formats that can be easily accessed from the different channels used for eCommerce, product promotions, and marketing campaigns.
Centralized Storage
PIM enables centralized storage of product information and digital assets. These details can be easily and securely shared across the different channels by scaling and formatting based on the individual needs of these channels.
The automated process helps in publishing these assets to the right channels, in the right format at the right time without requiring manual editing of the inputs. This helps in fastening the process of providing all the essential details required for campaigning and product promotions.
Speed up seamless omnichannel publishing
The product-based company implements using different channels and touchpoints to reach out to its potential customers. Handling these channels and the content across each of these is a challenge.
Using the PIM system enables managing the data across different platforms like websites, television, microsites, prints, digital signage, etc. PIM helps in maintaining a single repository of true, accurate, and real-time details that can be easily shared with multiple channels for publishing.
PIM enables automated asset publishing in desired formats as required by the different channels based on their governance rules, requirements, and hierarchies across output channels, etc.
Manage explosive growth in product content
With the growth and expansion of the business, the number of products keeps increasing and these products are published on several channels to attract different potential users. PIM enables the organization to create a single centralized repository of all the product information that can be easily shared with the internal and external teams.
These centralized data are collected from multiple suppliers and sales channels and include content like pricing, SKUs, product descriptions, technical specifications, asset information, etc.
Improves Product Experience
PIM enables the collection, organization, distribution, management, storage, and secured sharing of the details with the internal teams like development, sales, marketing, IT, etc., and external partners like distributors, retailers, marketplaces, channel partners, etc.
The updated product information makes it easy for the organization to include the new market entrants using augmented or virtual reality-based content. It helps in providing an enhanced and interactive product experience.
Provide relevant data to downstream partners
The different distribution channels require product information in the defined format. A comprehensive PIM marketing system ensures providing accurate and complete product information presented to each of these channels based on its context.
This data is derived from siloed systems like ERP, MDM, etc., and needs to be directly syndicated to any of the sales channels. The PIM system allows easy integration with the different systems thus automatically including the data from these systems.
This helps in efficient streamlining of the product information that is distributed across the different channels with the downstream partners like retailers, distributors, etc. which are product supply chain parts.
Contextualize product information
The different markets require different details or versions of product information based on their geographical location. This includes the details like the pricing currency, language, metric values, delivery details, etc.
The PIM system has features that allow for automated translation of the details in several languages as per the geographical requirements. It also provides the metric value and the currency in their local details. PIM can efficiently manage these multiple versions of product information or assets based on geographical sites and automatically update them periodically.
Eliminates data duplication
PIM can be contextualized based on the market, channel, brand, region, customer segment, etc. It helps in providing the product information in different formats as specified by the different channels and ensures that there is no data duplication within the PIM system.
Channel behavioral data and digital analytics
PIM enables providing eh unified view of all the available product information. It provides a 360-degree view of the product across the different channels to understand what information is displayed for the product through which channel.
Implementation of the analytics tool helps in gaining insight to understand the customer behavioral parameters like the pricing, usage, quantity, other metrics sets, etc. that are set by the marketing team during the campaign execution.
Eliminate manual errors and improve operations
The errors increase when there is manual handling of data or human interventions. Implementing a PIM system enables automated collection, organization, and management of product information. This leads to a decrease in the chances of error incorporation.
PIM also enables identifying the errors and provides the solution for its rectification. This enables providing accurate and true details to the different sales channels for the campaigning and product promotions.
Enhance customer experiences
PIM is one of the best tools that help in the adequate handling of high-quality product information and digital assets. It allows for adequate cataloging of the product portfolio for seamless management of the product information, marketing collaterals, etc. for faster time-to-market.
It includes structure, hierarchy, validations, visioning, approvals, etc. that are essential for addressing the customer needs.
Driving the future of data in marketing
The main task of marketers is to reach out to the different departments within and outside the organization to collect product information and digital assets that are essential for adequate campaigning and product promotions.
PIM solution serves as a single source platform for providing true, accurate, and real-time product information. It is enabled with API-derived architecture that makes the data collection, creation, management, and seamless transfer of the product information within and outside the organization on time.
It promotes sharing product information across different channels through different touchpoints like print catalogs, marketplaces, brochures, stores, websites, etc.
Conclusion
PIM for marketing solution is a great tool that helps marketers in making their brand stand out in the competitive market. Product data plays a very crucial role in eCommerce, marketing campaigns, and product promotions.
PIM systems enable the different teams within and outside the organization to work together and streamline the processes involved in product lifecycle development. This helps in creating a consistent and seamless experience for the customers thus enhancing customer experience thus building brand trust leading to growth in business.
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