What Impact Can a Product Information Management System Have?

Product marketers today are striving continuously to strike a balance between maintaining relevancy when entering new markets while stepping-up resiliency to increase profit potential. To address the ever-increasing customer demands across multiple touchpoints, they need a central hub to manage product information like attributes, and specifications. That is because they need real-time visibility into product data and rule out discrepancies by demolishing multiple data silos, so that Customer Experience (CX) does not suffer.

This is where a Product Information Management (PIM) solution comes in. It collects and combines product information from multiple sources and enables marketers to optimize product data synchronization and publishing. PIM helps in: controlling information at each stage of a product's lifecycle; improvement in data quality and accuracy; and simplification of product catalogue management.

This allows product marketing managers to facilitate omnichannel marketing, reduce time to market, drive brand awareness, and increase conversion rates.

By investing in a robust PIM solution, organizations can deliver a highly targeted and personalized customer experience with minimum effort. Here are five benefits of a PIM solution.

1. Promoting a Customer-Centric Culture

It’s no secret that customer experience (CX) today is the key differentiator that drives business. Brands with a CX-centric mindset drive more revenue than their competitors. As marketers set out to craft a story around product information to engage customers along their purchase journeys it must be known to everyone across the value chain that no matter how amazing your products are, poor product data management can wreak havoc on your CX. Value of product data must be clearly and comprehensibly propagated to employees internally, keeping PIM at the centre. PIM can be a vehicle for promoting customer-centric values, influence employee behaviour and actions so that they are unceasingly dedicated to improving customer experience across the enterprise.

2. Carving Out a Sound Customer Success Strategy

Investing in a PIM solution is the first step towards a customer-centric business culture and to foster customer loyalty. As a product marketer, your customer success strategy must focus on increasing customer satisfaction by helping them realize the outcome of the desire. PIM helps you leverage rich product data to not only deliver tailored customer experiences but also nurture customer relationships. With PIM in place, you can focus on improving the lives of your customers by providing them with the right resources and tools whenever they need them. By maintaining accurate and relevant product information, PIM ensures that your customers get the maximum value. Investing in a PIM solution can help you rest assured that your customers are more likely to return and subsequently end up as brand loyalists.

3. Enabling Better Data Assessment With a 360 Degree View

As a product marketing manager, you cater to the multifaceted buying journeys of today’s omnichannel customers.

For that, you need a 360-degree product view to design marketing campaigns, by connecting all relevant data scattered across numerous internal business systems as well as external trading-partners and supply chain networks. A PIM solution allows marketers to fulfil exact business requirements through a holistic picture of data that offers a business context on a variety of levels apart from the whole enterprise view, like a finance view, marketing view, B2B view (pertaining to value chain between enterprise and its partners) and B2C view (that shows better customer engagement and experience on commerce as well as service channels). Therefore, a PIM can help you easily customize and adapt content for every channel via a preview in the context best suited to your customers.

4. Driving Go-To-Market Innovation

To stay ahead in the game, most brands invest in innovative go-to-market (GTM) strategies for driving business growth. The rise of global eCommerce and the emergence of influential digital players catering to the omnichannel customer segment is continually disrupting the whole sector.

With analytics-driven agile marketing and CX trends gaining popularity, product marketers need to overhaul their go-to-market strategy with innovative, data-driven campaigns aimed at brand advocacy and revenue growth.

A PIM plays a fundamental role in driving the differentiation and positioning of an offering to shape a distinct product identity and to fuel continuous go-to-market innovation. With PIM implemented, product marketers can easily unlock substantial business value primarily through novel GTM techniques based on refined pricing, innovative positioning, and simplified sales cycles.

5. Delivering Consistent Product Experiences at an Enterprise Level

Apart from storing, indexing, distributing, and publishing product data, investing in a PIM solution ensures the delivery of consistent, reliable, and top-quality product experiences at an enterprise level. In most organizations, deciding to implement a PIM solution is a result of merging IT and business. Product marketers intending to deliver contextual and persuasive customer experiences depend largely upon close collaboration across various departments and functions.

Through this collaboration, PIM helps marketers draw up product roadmaps, including rich analytical insights, seamless integration, and enhanced user experience.

So, a PIM solution today does not meet the demands of the marketing team or product managers alone. It is well integrated into the digital experience framework and this builds a bridge between product data analytics and creative campaigns for innovative CX.

With the burgeoning global eCommerce industry, product marketers today must have all-time access to smart insights that help them connect with their customers wherever they are and whenever they want. A PIM solution empowers them with such data and helps them craft their brand story – a story that begins with product information but ends with not only happy customers but also with loyal brand champions.