Product content has always been a critical element in ensuring that you stand apart on the extremely overcrowded, highly online-based shelves.
70% of shoppers believe that a wide array of details on product pages is crucial to their buying experience. Retailers and brands need to provide appealing, relevant experiences for their customers to win their customers.
Customers expect a consistent brand experience throughout their non-linear, multi-channel shopping journeys.
However, consistency in the quality of data is a challenge to maintain when rich media are being leased out to hundreds of selling platforms and retailers. The silos of teams and manual entry aren’t helping either.
Since its inception that it was introduced, the PIM (products information management) and PCM(products content management) tools have solved the problem and allowed brands to sell better.
The next step in this cycle is called product experience management (PXM), which makes sure that the content is designed to provide a seamless omnichannel experience.
What exactly is Product Content Management (PCM)?
Product content management is the only source of truth about product attributes videos, including specifications, images, and any other brand-related content.
Content is sourced from various sources throughout an organization, and be it an ERP system, MDM, or Excel sheets – it’s likely that data is shared between your shipping, product teams, marketing, and sales.
A PCM platform can help consolidate this data so team members can access, modify, and modify it at any time and publish it to the appropriate sales channel.
If it is working well, PCM streamlines processes to gather data about your products and send data to the sales channels you use. It ensures the high accuracy of the information you provide about your products, increases the time to market, and improves the customer experience.
A true PCM “either using a standalone technology or layered on top of a company’s existing technology” collects and combines all data and information in one place.
Control product data
Centralizing all of your product details, descriptions, images, and other media assets that are rich is essential.
If you don’t have a central repository for information, your employees will be wasting time trying to track the information down, or people across your company could create various versions and even cause confusion for your customers.
Introduce your products
When there is a complete list of your product’s information and the content needed to market it online, You must make it visible wherever a potential buyer is searching.
Alongside working with retailers and distributors to create complete set-ups for their catalogs, you require a system to provide this information to review sites, search engines, and social media sites.
Handle product workflows
Do you have a trackable and reliable method of gathering, delivering, and evaluating the effectiveness of this product data across many teams?
The use of workflows that are able to track the processes and automate handing off to groups within your organization as well as external stakeholders, including resellers, creative agencies, and translation services, is essential to arrive at the most reliable, repeatable procedure for bringing products to sell on the online shelves.
What exactly is Product Information Management (PIM)?
PIM is a platform to keep product information that retailers and brands must sell to customers in the digital world.
What exactly is Product Experience Management (PXM)?
PXM goes one step ahead of PCM and puts complete attention on the customer’s product and experience with the brand. It’s the method “brands utilize to offer the appropriate content at the right time and where it’s required to increase sales, create loyalty and increase the market’s share.”
Competing brands require PXM.
As Forrester says in their report, the PXM platform is “the well-known workbench for merchandisers and product managers to improve content and make product experiences.”
This is because PXM does more than centralize and distribute content. By using actionable analytics, companies receive the data they require to improve the quality of their content for each sales channel and adjust to market trends.
PXM Vs. PCM vs. PIM
The PCM and the PIM functions are very similar, and both exist for internal workflow.
The significant distinction in PCM is the fact that PCM is more durable than PIM and allows the storage of images as well as other media-rich in nature. However, this technology is not sufficient to make it competitive with the digital shelves.
A PXM system provides additional value and automatization by incorporating feedback on all the channels your content is displayed on. The fundamental concept is that it is sufficient to produce content and circulate it.
To succeed, you need to modify the content for each channel that you sell it on. Are you able to learn from the experience of your customers and develop that variant of the content?
For instance, Do you take action in response to changes made on Walmart.com and the new requirements for shoppers and adjust your content, modify it, and gain knowledge through a closed loop of content creation and learn, optimize, and change?
In the words of Salsify founder Rob Gonzalez, “The goal of product experience management isn’t just to develop a single internal version of an application that all of your systems can depend on. It’s about creating thousands of customized versions of your product for the end-users.
If a person buys from Walmart, it will likely be different from the one who shops at Amazon. These experiences must differ. Product experience management is a departure from the norm of trust and reliability. Instead of being a purely internal process management tool, it’s an externally focused marketing program.
How to Design a Win-Win Product Content Strategy
Your content strategy for your product is the most essential method of selling. Without a solid base, every advertising, marketing, and sales initiative will fail.
Customers rely on the information they see in search results and on the page of the product to determine whether to purchase. Making sure it’s accurate, up-to-date, and convincing is crucial for your success.
The consumer is the one who decides
Create a message tailored to their needs and create products that answer their questions throughout the buying journey. For instance, do you have an image that answers commonly asked questions about the ingredients or materials? Do you lay this information in bullet points on the product’s description?
Do you include the sizing chart or an image that shows the size of your item? Does your product have clear size information on the page so that customers can see whether they’re buying one product or many items? Are there any videos that can help customers when they buy?
If you’re dealing with a complicated installation or use case or installation process, a video of a brief length can be a fantastic method to increase confidence in your customers and ensure that they will use the product they purchased.
If you don’t, you should consider investing in product technology for content that can be laid over your current structure
This is usually the most efficient and sustainable way to make modifications to your whole product catalogue. For instance, will the product you’re considering fit well with your e-commerce platform or brand’s web CMS?
Does it integrate well with your current MDM as well as ERP? Select a system that is capable of integrating with different strategies that your group is already depending on.
Make a persuasive case to secure the necessary money
Good product content increases discovery, search ranking, traffic, and page conversion, generating more significant revenue. Quicker speed to market equals increased exposure and more income.
To begin, pick the smallest selection of product SKUs or a specific category of products to test and collect results to demonstrate your company. A majority of brands experience a 10% to 15 % improvement in the conversion rate of their pages after adding more content to their pages.
What effect would this improvement have on the sales of your business? Examine the changes in sales ranks following one week of additional content. Discuss these findings with your team.
Build content that is specifically for someone shopping
The customers want to see themselves in your product’s information and feel a sense of belonging to the brand. This is the reason you should choose images that are genuine and suited to your intended group of customers.
Reviewing indicates that brands are aware of the needs of consumers, as per 30% of consumers. Consumers expect a minimum of 100 reviews. Personalization, for example, could be helpful. For example, keeping track of the purchase history of a customer is a sign that brands are aware of the needs of consumers as per 15% of consumers.
Keep improving
The art of producing content for your products is constantly evolving. There isn’t any time to set and forget for brands that want to make a sale. The most advanced companies are utilizing technology to update their content every day.
How Technology Can Help Your Content Strategy for Product
If it’s the PIM, PCM, or PXM solution that your company invests in, the objective is to increase the efficiency and a simple access point to an otherwise manual process. In order to make maximum value from your investment, be sure to keep these four crucial outcomes in mind.
Maintain consistency across all brand or corporate channels
The digital footprint of your brand is the way that consumers identify you and decide on which products to purchase. Consider investing in software that will assist you in centralizing the content you publish and make it easily accessible to your sales force, distributors, and retailers to prevent misunderstandings and inconsistencies in your market.
Revise existing product content quickly
Automating your system and tracking allows your staff to gain insight into the date when content was last updated, the location where it’s stored, and the procedure to update the system.
Based on the degree of complexity and scope of your catalog, think about a plan that will automate the requirements of retailers and give you feedback on the performance of categories and products on your digital shelves.
Manage scale with a central system
As your company grows and expands, so does the quantity of products you sell and the number of channels you sell your products on.
It is essential to invest in a system that is able to handle the volume of products that you offer across multiple channels and provide enough in-depth information about the attributes of your product and digital assets that will meet your business requirements.
Save time and energy
One first benefit that many businesses get after investing in appropriate technology is time and savings. Consider a company’s timeline for implementation and determine what manual processes you’ll replace – are your data being transformed automatically?
Does automatic endpoint validation cut down on the amount of approvals required? Be aware of how much time you’ve saved so you can communicate the benefits to your business.
What brands are using PXM today?
ShurTech, the creator of Duck Tape(r), was seeking ways to enhance their strategy for digital shelves in 2018 and decided to take some steps to do so:
Find a single source for truth
As eCommerce continues to gain dominance, brands must get rid of the various spreadsheets and systems that hold the information about their products. The digital shelf demands the ability to provide quick information about their products.
For ShurTech the company, a common source of truth about the product was required across the entire organization. The divisions didn’t speak the same language to their customers, which was a significant obstruction to sales growth and maintaining a consistent global brand.
Processes can be streamlined across teams
Technology solutions are only able to make an impact on the world if their adoption is the goal and the teams make use of the technology to achieve outcomes.
Find out which teams are required to design experiences for products that resonate with customers.
For some brands, their Product Management team may be appropriate to provide ecommerce teams with the most current information about the product. In the case of other companies, It may be a team that is devoted to creating digital content.
Make an honest evaluation of the elements that are working, what could be improved, and what’s the responsibility.
Implementing processes that are compatible with your current technology will enable brands to be more effective and focused on the only source of truth, allowing them to create distinct experiences for customers at specific retailers.
Optimize the top SKUs for priority channels
The ultimate goal of the digital shelf is winning the market and keeping ahead of your competitors.
In order to achieve this, it requires continuous improvement and identifying the content requirements that make your company stand out.
ShurTech’s eCommerce team recognized an opportunity to enhance its top-ranked 70 products on Amazon by discovering products that required more powerful user experiences to be considered for the buy box.
They could explain precisely what the Product Management team needed to update particular Amazon pages quickly. Shurtech noticed an increase of 15% in rank on these products in just four months.
Maximize the Content Strategy for Your Product
Consumers expect more content than ever before everywhere they shop. Use PXM to provide a real omni-channel shopping experience to customers with comprehensive descriptions of products, pictures, and audio throughout the point of purchase.
In the annually conducted Consumer Research Report survey in 2016, the average of three images per item was a common expectation, but videos on the product’s page were not even expected.
Three years later, consumers need at least 6 pictures and two videos, with those aged between 18-24 and 35-44 requiring 8 images and 4-5 videos.
Enhancing rich content, Content that is A+, and enhanced opportunities for content – no matter how it’s termed – allows consumers to be immersed in your brand’s story.
Furthermore, the information and media can answer customers’ queries, making transactions more seamless.
A more complete, cohesive, and consistent story, no matter where consumers come across your product using PXM, can help brands make the most of the $517 billion in U.S. online sales.
The habits of online shopping customers will change rapidly. 90% of shoppers abandon websites or simply give up if they are unable to find the information they require. Create experiences for consumers that they are seeking to ensure they don’t lose their interest and their loyalty.
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