Article

Shashin Shah
Shashin Shah 16 November 2020

5 Ways to Leverage Your PIM Platform in The Best Possible Way

Shashin Shah, the CEO of Pimcore Global Services, discusses the five capabilities that will help organizations to have a perfect product information management (PIM) platform.

When marketers at a midsize apparel brand incorporated necessary product information (size and material) within its ecommerce portal but failed to integrate informational hooks such as rich product visuals and product reviews, their initial excitement of expanding to new geographies fizzed out.

Similar to this, many brands do prepare for challenges like localization and currency conversion yet struggle to kickstart their expansion. They also try to implement a basic information management solution to handle the explosion of product information. However, their shortsightedness made them plunge headlong without having a strategy for product information management (PIM) in place.

And they are not the only ones. This is the story of many enterprises that lack a strategy to manage product information. A well-thought PIM strategy, coupled with an adaptable PIM platform, is critical to help enterprises streamline product information management as they grow in size and scope.

From an Enabler to a Force Multiplier

Traditionally, a PIM system helped organizations create product catalogs, enabling sales and marketing teams to seamlessly distribute information and eliminate manual efforts. An advanced PIM can also ease product enrichment, boost team productivity, improve conversion rates, and more. In fact, today’s PIM platforms can streamline data and automate up to 70%-80% of manual tasks.

This is particularly important in an environment where ever-evolving customer demands and market trends are forcing brands to hyper personalize their interactions with customers.

Brands are integrating chatbots to keep up 24/7 support, employing augmented reality (AR) to provide a rich visual experience of products, and much more. Besides driving personalization, this kind of customer-centrism improves sales and conversion. A PIM solution can support the integration of emerging technologies such as AR and chatbots on an ecommerce website, helping brands to meet their customer satisfaction goals.

For instance, besides using compelling product descriptions crafted by the product marketing team, the sales team can suggest edits, subject to approval. Leveraging a product information management platform to support high-end tasks like these becomes imperative when enterprises grow in scope.

5 Performance Enhancers for an Advanced PIM Platform

A product information management platform can change the game the way you traditionally manage your product data and digital assets. Make your PIM platform a super-powerful one that helps you meet your organizational goals with these capabilities:

1. Employ Flexible Product Modeling:

Employing flexible data modeling ensures the success of the PIM platform. While defining the relationship of product data to other kinds of data, it’s important to remember that not just text and its attributes, but unstructured data such as media assets also form a part of product information.

A PIM system helps you organize information the way you want to design the database of your organization, along with using industry-specific classification systems such as eCl@ss, ETIM, or GS1 to classify your product data. For instance, a web-based data modeling engine helps create a new product data model within minutes.

Plus, a flexible data model, data editing, and translation interface for multi-lingual data management ensure faster expansion to new markets.

2. Adopt Effective Enterprise Data Management: 

Be it managing business processes or deriving business intelligence, an efficient enterprise data management system is a prerequisite. Use an agile data model to enable the data editing feature to organize, classify, and aggregate rich product information. 

Customize the layout so that it can adapt to all data entry masks enabling field-level granularity. This, in turn, appropriates data to the needed editorial workflow. It also enables user right management to customize layout based on the role of each user and particular use cases.

3. Leverage Interoperability: 

An API-driven approach aids in aggregating data from internal data sources and third-party applications such as CRMs, ERP software, hard drives, suppliers, external partners, and syndicators for enterprise data integration. Brands must adopt this approach to attain hyper-connectivity. This further facilitates brands to define, model, map, and execute automatic and manual import and export of third-party data.

4. Inspect Product Data Quality:  

A PIM platform offers robust functionalities for defining, validating, and improving data quality. It is recommended to make the most of the in-built reporting engine, with filtering and exporting functionalities, to access the database and generate reports on data quality, etc.

Brands must also employ the rich auditing and versioning feature of a PIM to record a new version; save the audit trail to compare different versions and gain insights needed to improve data quality.

5. Integrate Workflow Management: 

A PIM platform includes an advanced workflow engine to define business processes and editorial workflows. Brands can leverage platform features such as states, actions, transitions, and notifications to create even the most complex workflow scenarios effortlessly. This helps them keep an audit trail of each workflow to create and manage information, boost accuracy and productivity while minimizing risks.

Retailers using a PIM platform already have a head start in managing product information. They might be facing a couple of challenges, such as establishing a single source of truth for all product data and generating accurate reports. However, mastering these five capabilities will help organizations mitigate these challenges.

Source: The above post originally published on Multichannel Merchant.

Please login or register to add a comment.

Contribute Now!

Loving our articles? Do you have an insightful post that you want to shout about? Well, you've come to the right place! We are always looking for fresh Doughnuts to be a part of our community.

Popular Articles

See all
How to Collaborate With UGC Creators?

How to Collaborate With UGC Creators?

Learn how to boost your brand through UGC creator collaborations: define goals, identify and engage with creators, offer incentives, and measure success for long-term partnerships.

Shivam Rawat
Shivam Rawat 28 February 2024
Read more
Adapting B2B Digital Marketing for the Modern Buyer Journey

Adapting B2B Digital Marketing for the Modern Buyer Journey

Digital marketing also allows for precise tracking and measurement of marketing efforts, enabling data-driven decision-making and optimization. In an increasingly competitive B2B landscape, a well-executed digital...

Ghia Marnewick
Ghia Marnewick 21 February 2024
Read more
How To Be the Best Marketer in 2024: Traits According to Your Star Sign

How To Be the Best Marketer in 2024: Traits According to Your Star Sign

Have you ever wondered how your astrological sign might influence your marketing approach?

Jen Macdonald
Jen Macdonald 16 February 2024
Read more
7 Reasons Why Social Media Marketing is Important For Your Business

7 Reasons Why Social Media Marketing is Important For Your Business

In the past two decades social media has become a crucial tool for marketers, enabling businesses to connect with potential customers. If your business has yet to embrace social media and you want to know why it is...

Sharron Nelson
Sharron Nelson 29 February 2024
Read more
How to Review a Website — A Guide for Beginners

How to Review a Website — A Guide for Beginners

Whether you're a startup or an established business, the company website is an essential element of your digital marketing strategy. The most effective sites are continually nurtured and developed in line with...

Digital Doughnut Contributor
Digital Doughnut Contributor 7 January 2020
Read more