PIM: 4 reasons to invest

In our previous blog post, What is PIM and why should you care?, we introduced readers to product information management (PIM) systems, and talked about the competitive advantage to offer to eCommerce brands that must compete in a highly competitive market.

In this follow-up blog post, we’ll delve into the tangible benefits PIM offers to organizations.

Reason #1:  Product Information Governance

Your customers need a wide variety of information in order to make purchasing decisions that are right for them — and your teams have stepped up to create amazing content to support the purchasing journey. 

Much of that information is created in an ad hoc manner and stored in a variety of places, such as a department shared drive or an individual employee’s computer. Because it’s spread out all over the organization, it’s difficult to know what’s available, how frequently it’s updated, and where it actually appears.

PIM allows you to establish and enforce a robust product information governance process. It collects product information from wherever it resides, so you get a complete view of what exists. Once you know what’s available you can assess its quality and focus resources appropriately. . And a PIM system allows you to create and implement governance processes around your product information.

Reason #2: Optimized Customer Journeys

Every brand presents product information to users at every step of their customer journeys, but they don’t always present the absolute “best” information at the right time. That’s a problem that PIM systems address head on by helping you understand how to deploy product information to lead consumers through their discovery, consideration and decision-making phases.

PIM systems provide a range of tools to optimize your customer journeys, rom understanding how to better incorporate keywords across your website and social media profiles and attracting traffic to your product pages, to ensuring that product detail pages contain the data visitors need to convert. 

Additionally, customers expect brands to provide a set of tools that help them find what they need quickly and easily. To meet that expectation, brands must be quite intentional in the way they organize and categorize product information (e.g. filters, categories, families, and so on).

Data that has been enhanced via a PIM system will also have a direct impact on site search, which is a critical step in the customer journey.

Reason #3: Save IT Resources

One of the great advantages of the world of eCommerce is that it allows brands to partner with many partners to sell products. No doubt you have an eCommerce site where consumers can browse products and make purchases. But in all likelihood, consumers discover your brand in other places, such as global marketplaces and social media.

For many brands, supporting these additional channels means asking the IT department to expand the functionality of the ERP system. This is costly, time consuming and wholly unscalable. PIM eliminates this need altogether, giving you the freedom to make decisions to form new partnerships based on market opportunity, not how quickly your IT team can change your ERP system.

Reason #4: Step Up to Product Experience Management (PMX)

Part and parcel to a positive customer journey is the product experience management or PMX. PMX is becoming a unique discipline because of the significant impact it has on a customer’s ability to understand the value of a product, and their decision to purchase and become loyal. 

PMX focuses on the impact of product-related information on the overall customer experience. It encompasses all the processes, tools and activities needed to ensure that product information is consistent and consistently robust across all touch points, whether they belong to your company, or are owned and managed by a third-party, such as a channel partner or global marketplace (which accounts account for 67% of global eCommerce revenue).

PIM is essential for PMX for two reasons. First, it has the governance and workflows in place to ensure that any information that’s displayed is correct and appropriate for where it will be seen. Second, PIM systems typically offer tools to enable syndication of content across all of the channels where your products are sold, whether they’re owned by you or by another entity.

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