You’ve got a complex e-commerce revenue and growth strategy in place, so you know how important it is to have a strong, resonant brand message.
However, knowing how important your brand message is and leveraging it successfully are different.
“Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.”
Walt Disney (source)
The single most critical factor in driving revenue and consistently growing market share in e-commerce is increasing the repeat business of loyal customers. No matter the particulars of your brand message, you have to know your product pages are compelling.
Product pages have to be compelling enough for visitors to convert to customers.
But even more importantly, you must ensure your customers are returning and recommending your products to their friends and family. Answering “How?” is more important than explaining “What?” You need a PIM tool. A PIM system stores your product data and enhances your brand messaging. Therefore, you can make your brand message clear and powerful. So let’s cut to the chase:
Product Information Management (PIM) supports your brand message to drive customer loyalty
It’d be hard to find anyone in ecommerce who’d say achieving high customer loyalty isn’t a key goal of every brand message strategy. There may be less agreement about how to get there. But it’s easy to see how PIM supports that complex strategy you’ve spent so much time fine-tuning.
8 Core Benefits of PIM That Serve Brand Message
- Data Consistency Across Products
PIM ensures you are providing your customers with one source of truth. Product information exists in a central repository where users can only change or update it if authorized. Thus, for example, data silos that confuse visitors with out-of-date information can’t exist.
PIM ensures clean data entry with data validation at the point of entry. Any changes must be approved before they’re implemented, and changes are tracked to ensure data quality. For example, inputting data from pre-selected lists means typos and careless errors can’t be made.
SEO is all about being seen in searches, and keywords are what people search. PIM allows you to embed all the keywords you want to rank for. So you can put them in your product titles, descriptions, and image alt text.
This is a set of data discoverability, maintenance, and security practices. But among the many benefits, enrichment is the most important. Data governance allows you to employ rich content for all the products you sell. And you can do this across all your sales websites, retail outlets, and vendor platforms.
Workflow introduces two key improvements and a permission level that eliminates careless mistakes. First, simple tasks are automated, and all tasks are set to occur precisely when needed. Second, complex tasks are assigned to key stakeholders, and reminders are sent automatically to drive productivity.
Product information means little in the visual world of e-commerce without images and videos. These show customers what they’re buying. The DAM inside your PIM ties all product content together directly, delivering your one source of truth to customers.
Growing market share means selling more products on more platforms. Gathering product information and images from multiple departments is hard enough. PIM makes it easier to configure product information and photos to populate correctly. This is true on retailer sites, ecommerce marketplaces, and your D2C site.
- Shorter Time to Market
Most importantly, these efficiencies and process improvements mean you can slash your time to market. For example, you’ll lose less revenue gathering and organizing information. And you won’t need to create the hundreds or thousands of images you need to sell across multiple websites.
PIM Hones Your Brand Message to Increase Revenue and Grow Market Share
In this blog, we’ll dive deeply into the core benefits of a PIM solution to your e-commerce operation. We’ll show you how to leverage those core benefits to drive your brand message. Ultimately, this blog will explain how supporting your brand message with PIM increases revenue and market share.
(Read below for everything you need to know about the dos and don’ts of picking the right PIM system for your e-commerce business.)
10 Reasons Why You Need a PIM
Search “brand message best practices” online, and you could spend months sifting through all the recommendations you’ll get. Instead, start today with the product content optimization you need to ensure your brand message is robust and compelling.
- PIM Ensures Product Content Consistency
“The #1 piece of advice for an ecommerce business regarding branding is to have a cohesive look across your social media platforms and blog.”
Tracey Wallace, BigCommerce Editor-in-Chief (source)
The difference between commerce and e-commerce is the immediacy of touch. Customers have traded being able to pick up and closely examine your products for convenience. The linchpins holding this modern bargain together are your authenticity and their trust in it.
The best way to kill customer trust is by being inauthentic.
The best way to broadcast inauthenticity is by presenting your customers with a confusing brand message. When an authentic brand message is given, customers will invest trust in it by delivering consistency. Consistency is simultaneously the biggest challenge of brand messaging and precisely what PIM was designed to do. PIM is a single source of product truth for your entire ecommerce operation, meaning product information is always accurate and up-to-date.
- Customers Hate Disappointment, PIM Keeps You Honest
“Our small group of customers was quite loyal, and we soon found ourselves competing with the major airlines. The key is to set realistic expectations, then exceed them, preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.”
Richard Branson (source)
It’s straightforward: Overpromising and failing to deliver is probably the quickest way to fail in e-commerce. Getting customers to your site is hard enough, but it’s heartbreaking to know you successfully brought in customers only to lose them forever by making a promise you didn’t keep.
The last thing you want to do is to associate your brand message with disappointment.
Remember, your top priority should be cultivating the customer loyalty that drives repeat business. Remember also the power of word of mouth and the fact that this unique power of the informed and delighted customer is more important now than ever. Promising a product can and will deliver benefits it can’t and won’t does more to undermine customer loyalty than any other mistake in the e-commerce playbook.
2 Kinds of Overpromising
Overpromising and failing to deliver takes two forms: conscious and unconscious. Consciously overpromising and not delivering likely has more to do with failing to deliver than initially making promises you can’t keep. You consciously overpromised because you thought you could provide, right?
PIM can help you keep your promises to your customers. Its centralization and optimization functionality make tracking exactly which products you are selling and their specifications easier. Instead of making promises you can’t keep, PIM allows you to transfer concrete facts to your customers simply.
Conversely, if you unconsciously overpromised and didn’t deliver, is it possible that the source of the problem was inaccurate or out-of-date product content? PIM solves this problem by providing one source of truth that is easy to keep accurate and up-to-date. PIM functionality also includes tracking, so you know how changes are being made and who is making them. Also, changes made by users without permission are automatically forwarded for approval.
Ultimately, you can’t present visitors with an authentic brand message that will drive loyalty and repeat business if you are making promises you don’t keep. PIM helps you keep your promises.
- Serve Specific Market Segments with PIM
“So many opportunities are on the horizon, from mobile exclusives to geo-located offers to better filtering and searching. We’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible with personalization.”
Michelle Peluso, CEO of Gilt Groupe (source)
One frustrating contradiction in e-commerce sales concerns increasing market share while niching the brand message. You want to sell to ever more customers, but to do so, you need to speak to ever-shrinking slices of the market.
The solution is running a multi-store that allows you to calibrate your brand message to specific buyer personas you choose to target by site. Those sites can be e-commerce marketplaces, retailer sites, or even D2C sites.
With a multi-store, your products are presented differently on various sites, while the key information stays the same.
PIM facilitates this by simplifying the organization of product information with digital assets, such as images and videos, that must populate specific product pages aimed at niche customers. With PIM, once information and assets have been connected with syndication to a particular sales channel, pushing content out to your product pages becomes the work of minutes, rather than days or weeks.
When it comes down to it, targeted individuals will know your brand message is authentic if it makes and keeps promises tailored to their unique needs. PIM helps you deliver the authentic brand message that converts these customers by allowing you to provide the same product information and digital assets while speaking the language of the market segment you’re targeting.
Whether you’re running ten sites or a thousand, PIM also makes expanding ever simpler.
- Use PIM to Refine Brand Message with A/B Testing
“We see our customers as guests at a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our daily job to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”
Jeff Bezos (source)
How do you know if you’re making authentic promises? How do you know if you’re speaking the language of those specific niche markets your tailored content is intended to convert? You must research what is working and what isn’t, and tweak your brand message to increase revenue and expand market share into more niches.
PIM simplifies fine-tuning your brand message.
With PIM, finding specific bits of information or the one digital asset you need to change takes little or no time. You make the one or two changes you want and push them out across all your sites quickly and easily. If those changes don’t work and must be undone, PIM tracks changes, so you can change things or make further adjustments.
At the bottom of it all, forget about keeping them, if you don’t even know you’re making the authentic promises that flow from refining your brand message. PIM helps you sculpt and hone your brand message.
- PIM Creates Contrast Between You and Your Competitors
“You should learn from your competitor, but never copy. Copy and you die.”
Jack Ma (source)
With millions of e-commerce websites online today, you can only sell your products by differentiating yourself.
One of the most effective ways of differentiating your brand message is by including the information your competitors don’t. But how do you know if the hours and days you need to spend researching what your competitors are doing will provide you with the insight you need to increase your pages’ revenue?
Also, don’t forget how quickly product information can become out-of-date. These days, e-commerce customers overwhelmingly conduct online research before buying. If they see two of your product pages displaying contradictory information, they will be less likely to want to buy.
PIM includes content grading functionality.
Content grading allows you to easily measure the quality of your product pages against top-selling pages in your sales space. With PIM, you can immediately find out which pages are optimized to maximize sales and which require your attention to rework them. Fully optimized pages clearly show your customers the difference between your company’s product pages and your competition’s.
You should ask yourself, “How am I different from my competitors?” Your answer should focus on the brand message, to be sure, but it should also involve simply being better. PIM makes it easier for you to demonstrate the superiority of your brand message.
- Drive Conversions with PIM Reporting Functionality
“If an Internet company could obsess about only one metric, it should be conversion. No other metric so holistically captures as many critical aspects of a website – user design, usability, performance, convenience, ad effectiveness, net promoter score, customer satisfaction – all in a single measurement. Yet despite the remarkable power of this metric, it is alarming how few companies today truly understand conversion and how to optimize it. As such, it is time to pound the table again – conversion is by far the most powerful Internet metric.”
Bill Gurley, VC General Partner at Benchmark (source)
Your differentiated e-commerce strategy should target a wide variety of different kinds of customers. Selling to each requires vastly different approaches, which apply mainly to presentation. Product information and digital assets will likely be almost identical across sales spaces.
Decisions about different kinds of shoppers can range from impulsive and emotional to measured and contemplative. Regardless, you need to ensure that all the information these different buyers need to make strong, informed decisions is populated in the right places across your sales platforms.
PIM realistic eliminates the need to update product pages and ensures that information is populated manually correctly
Instead, product content is syndicated across your sales channels according to how you’ve optimized it to sell to specific kinds of customers. Further, PIM reporting functionality covers product page completeness, so you know exactly which pages are optimized for success and which aren’t. A color-coded completeness scoring system makes finding the pages you need to pay attention to the work of seconds, instead of hours or days.
Long story short, conversions are driven by informed and empowered customers to buy. PIM allows you to harness the power of centrally organized and optimized product content and pass it to your customers.
- PIM Brings Your Teams Together
“Communication is at the heart of e-commerce and community.”
Meg Whitman, President and CEO of Hewlett-Packard (source)
Data siloing is one of the biggest hurdles to smooth operations and productivity in e-commerce. Some team members rely on data or images stored on their computers. Others fail to communicate, and approved changes and updates are never made.
Add to this the fact that creating and honing a brand message and translating it into product pages that convert requires numerous individuals across multiple departments working together. For example, specifications come from product managers, marketers write your descriptions, and digital assets come from your design department.
Your teams must collaborate to ensure your brand message flows from your product pages.
PIM’s workflow functionality drives productivity by automating simple tasks and automatically assigning more complicated tasks to the correct team member. Further, workflow organizes tasks, notifying the next stakeholder when a required task is finished, driving processes forward in an orderly fashion. In short, workflow requires the communication your product pages need to convert customers.
A brand message must be authentically powerful to resonate with your buyer personas. The content that goes into crafting such a message can only be created when your teams work together, sharpening and polishing each other’s work. PIM’s workflow functionality requires this kind of productive collaboration.
- PIM Incorporates Your Brand Message’s Keywords to Drive SEO
According to PYMNTS.com, 88% of e-commerce customers conduct online research before buying (source). With millions of e-commerce operations online today, the way to get customers to find you is with a strong SEO strategy employing keywords. Blogs and marketing content can help, but PIM offers an even better way to appear in online search results.
Drive visitors to your product pages by embedding robust keywords directly into your product pages.
With PIM, you can incorporate the keywords you want to target into every possible nook and cranny of your product pages. You want to work keywords into your titles. Still, PIM makes it possible to work them into the metadata you search digital assets with and the alt text attached to your images and videos.
This incorporation process begins with PIM implementation, requiring input from the full range of your team members. Such a strategy means optimizing your product pages to perform immediately because you’ve already embedded keywords for search engines to find and display.
Diversity of opinion also ensures completeness, seeing that no possibility is overlooked. Such an SEO strategy is necessarily more robust, resulting in more conversions. This maximizes revenue and virtually ensures market share growth.
Finally, nothing is set in stone with PIM if you don’t want it to be. So, keeping pace with the tides of change is as simple as searching for a product, adjusting it, and pushing it out. PIM makes what was once the work of days or weeks take only minutes.
- Deliver the Right Amount of Brand Message Content with PIM
You should give your customers as close to the right amount of information as possible, like walking a tightrope; falling off either side is equally devastating. If you provide your customers too little information, they can’t make informed buying decisions. If you give them too much, you may overwhelm them so much that they leave your site and never return.
Your brand message is only hindered by unnecessary or redundant information.
You may need to include seven or more pictures to ensure a complex product’s features are fully displayed. On the other hand, there’s no reason to include multiple images of a simple product that don’t offer your customers any more insight.
PIM ensures optimization of your digital assets for the e-commerce marketplaces, retail sites, and every other sales channel you sell across. This means no matter their platform, your product pages feature the right amount of information, images, and videos. Further, you can optimize content to change dynamically for mobile devices like phones and tablet computers.
Ultimately, you can’t keep those authentic promises your customers are paying for if you can’t deliver the right amount of compelling content. PIM makes that possible, while accounting for customers wanting product content to look perfect on their device of choice.
- Sell More with More Than Just Static Images
Product pages are incomplete today unless they combine product information with the compelling visual elements necessary to convert customers. Simply put, having a complete selection of images displaying your product from every angle to show every feature is good, but far from great. Your pages need videos, CAD drawings, and especially 360-degree images.
Imagine you’re selling a complex piece of machinery, full of features that provide the benefits your customers want to buy. 360-degree images allow customers to easily rotate your products from a top-down or bottom-up view to examine individual features.
Did you know that rotating images of this kind, such as 96 individual photos, are?
Managing and updating such a digital asset with folders becomes increasingly complex as the images become more detailed. However, detailed images are what your customers need to make strong, informed buying decisions.
PIM with DAM capability solves this problem by treating 360-degree images as a single element, rather than a folder or list of pictures. This means updating or modifying a 360-degree image is significantly simpler, and pushing it across all your sales channels is as easy.
Ultimately, PIM simplifies populating your product pages with precisely the empowering product content you need to turn visitors into customers.
(Read everything you need to know about why your PIM system needs to include DAM functionality in the blog featured below.)
Raise Your Brand Clarity with a Purpose-designed PIM
Clarity is not an option for brands that venture into multichannel e-commerce; it is the basis of trust. When your potential customers go through your product pages, what they see and read is what they form their idea of your brand. PIM system does more than store product data. It proactively edgifies your messaging, fits into your growth, and eliminates confusion from any customer experience.
Why does “good enough” not work anymore?
Using a product page with common elements or obsolete details damages your brand. It introduces doubt and kills conversions. With Amazon, Walmart, and the likes setting the bar high, your content has to be not only there but also factual, comprehensive, and consistent. This is where PIMensurese each channel gets customized, with current content in your brand’s voice.
Many start looking at tools when brands see they’re bumping against operational limits (often termed the PIM finding stage). From this stage, manual systems are the barriers. A strong PIM system effectively eliminates those limitations by automating boring updates, synchronizing changes in real time, and preserving the brand voice in different formats.
Marketplace Growth Starts with Messaging
You might be curious about how PIM increases sales on marketplaces – the solution lies in bolstering visibility and credibility. Platforms favor high-quality listings. A good setup PIM enables one to deliver to their standards consistently. Telling bullet points, search engine optimized titles, and accurate specifications. These improvements over time result in higher rankings and better conversion rates, especially in a competitive space.
Fashion Retailers Need Specialized Flexibility
If you are in fashion, your catalog is not merely extensive but constantly changing. Collections move, stock fluctuates, and presentation is all. A good understanding of how to optimize your PIM for fashion can be the make-or-break of a season. A customized PIM solution grants precise variant control: sizes, materials, and colors, and it makes it easy for you to be prompt in initiating campaigns, thus making no mistakes and delays.
What’s more, it enhances storytelling. Fashion is not really about specs—it’s about creating a mood. An excellent PIM will help ensure your brand voice bleeds through while listing hundreds of SKUs with individual flair.
Real Price of Neglecting the Data Quality
One of the issues that is not so visible but damaging to brands is the PIM data quality issues. Be it a missing dimension, an old feature, or the wrong image, small mistakes frustrate the customer and make them return the product. Worse, they erode brand credibility. The errors are caught before going live with a quality-driven product information management tool, and the enrichment of the products becomes regular and not reactive.
Make Your Messaging Realistic—and Scalable
Your content strategy has to be sustainable. Many teams burn out when attempting to keep up with updates manually. A realistic PIM approach is not simply an issue of technology; it is a choice of system to follow your real workflows. It combines departments, cuts redundant tasks, and allows your team to think of the message, not the mess.
Your Brand Message with PIM
When you consider PIM’s key strengths for your e-commerce operation, creating a stronger, more resonant brand message becomes much easier.
- PIM standardizes your product information across all sales platforms, producing a coherent brand message.
- With clean data, PIM ensures that, right from implementation, you get consistent brand messages.
- PIM supports your SEO strategy with embedded keywords, making your products easier for customers to find via search.
- Workflow functionality in your PIM promotes teamwork and drives productivity. So your brand message stays sharp and your product pages convert.
- PIM with DAM functionality makes optimizing product pages with digital assets simple. Regardless of how your brand message is honed for any given sales channel, it’s easier with PIM.
- Populating your multi-store product pages with PIM syndication functionality means what once took weeks or months now takes far less time. This leaves you free to hone your brand message.
- Finally, PIM implementation means a shorter time to market. So the resources you once devoted to rolling out new products can be reinvested elsewhere.
All in all, with PIM, you can be sure your product pages convert. You’ll know your brand message shines. Your revenue is far more likely to increase. And growing market share will be far simpler.
Now that you know how PIM fine-tunes your brand message to increase conversions and revenue, click here to see what Catsy can do for you today.
