Three Ways a PIM Helps You Go to Market Faster
If your products are on store shelves or in online webshops ahead of your competitors, you have a leg up on the competition. And deploying the right Product Information Management (PIM) tool can increase your speed to market—from weeks or months to just a few hours or days. Your products can be found and purchased faster with PIM.
You likely are aware that more than three-quarters of shoppers conduct online research before making a big purchase and one-third search on common search engines to start product searches. In the B2B space, 71% of B2B buyers start their research with a generic search.
Why are these statistics so important?
Today, we are emphasizing these data because if your product has not yet been launched, it certainly cannot yet be found!
Bringing Products to Market Rapidly is a Competitive Advantage.
If your products are on store shelves or in online webshops ahead of your competitors, you have a leg up on the competition. And deploying the right Product Information Management (PIM) tool can increase your speed to market—from weeks or months to just a few hours or days. Your products can be found and purchased faster with PIM.
Let me explain.
PIM Provides a Central Source of Product Information
When you are juggling large product assortments and multiple channels across disparate geographies, you may be gleaning information from a plethora of sources—supplier portals, ERP systems, documents, spreadsheets, and image files that are spread across disparate teams. This means it can often take hours, days, or even weeks to compile all the product information you will need for a launch. Even then, you may still end up with product information that is inaccurate, incomplete, or inconsistent.
With PIM, you instead will have a central repository of product information, one that pulls data from your backend systems and your suppliers, one that enables a transparent, orderly enrichment process, and one that is a single source of truth. A PIM solution saves a lot of time, so that you can focus on marketing activities, promotional campaigns, and delivering a better customer experience.
PIM Enables More Efficient Marketing Processes
When you deploy a PIM solution, you are also deploying a powerful workflow automation tool to help you manage your product launches. This tool ensures that product information is updated, complete, and approved. Alerts and dashboards tell you when imagery or descriptions are missing and what product information needs attention.
When you empower teams to work in parallel, people don’t have to wait for colleagues to do their part before taking action. The result? Greater speed to market for products, more effective marketing, and ultimately more sales for less effort.
PIM Enhances Your Product Storytelling Ability
With a PIM solution, you remove the time sucks that include searching for product data and seeking ongoing approvals for content. Now your team can focus on telling the right story for each product—for each market or channel and for each customer touchpoint. Not only will you get your product to market faster, but also your product messaging will be more compelling and your product information will be more complete. In fact, nearly 60% of shoppers indicated that having comprehensive product information is very important when shopping. An equal number are looking for product details that provide a “rich sense of the product.”
Why not have a PIM to help you give them that?
In Summary
When you have the right system support in place, your marketing resources can do more in less time. They can focus on being more strategic and creative rather than taking care of low-end administrative tasks. Deploying a PIM system means that you can get your products on shelves and out to the market sooner. You can sell sooner and longer, and generate more sales and profits.