Today’s buyers overwhelmingly use the Internet to gather data to make buying decisions. It’s true that they need PIM to make and keep their data clean. This guide explains how!
Whether they’re after something cheap and simple or complex and expensive, around 88% of today’s customers research online before deciding to buy (source).
In today’s world, sales success means you need clean data and a way to keep it clean. Your product data must be accurate so your customers have the necessary information.
The Harvard Business Review states, “Only 3% of companies’ data meets basic quality standards” (source).
Connecting how clean your data is with your sales and growth goals makes this stat alarming, to say the least. If you use PIM correctly, you can easily keep your data clean. However, PIM data quality issues often lead to challenges for businesses, resulting in reduced sales, customer suffering, and reduced productivity within the organization. Making data accurate and consistent helps win customers’ trust and simplifies things for all three teams.
What Are Basic Quality Standards?
Quality data is easy to understand, accurate, and complete. This applies to everything from feature bullets, pricing, dimensions, and descriptions to digital assets like images, videos, and CAD drawings.
Basic quality standards mean ensuring all the fields on your product pages populate with accurate and complete data. This must be true for every product you sell, across all sales channels, whether they your D2C site, eCommerce marketplaces, or retail websites.
(See the blog post below for more data about solving the challenges of selling across multiple BigCommerce sites.)
Multi-Store BigCommerce Challenges Solved with PIM
It sounds simple, but the amount of product data a company needs to manage to be successful has exploded over the last few years. Moreover, basic quality standards have become incredibly difficult to meet with traditional data management methods.
There are several causes, and PIM implementation solves nearly all of them. However, before going into how PIM helps you solve this problem, let’s first look at what leads to low-quality data.
What Causes Data to Not Meet Basic Quality Standards?
There are many different reasons why data issues occur. We will examine the most common causes.
Storing Data in Many Different Files
This is the most common cause of low-quality data. However, it doesn’t mean you can solve the problem by simply storing your files and folders on a server or cloud storage service.
Because if you put the files on a server, even if it is accessible to the entire company, your data will quickly become out-of-date.
Why? Because users will download the files and store them on their computers for easy access.
Searching through many files and massive spreadsheets to find the most up-to-date price or image isn’t fun.
Files with the Same Information
Users will download the data to their desktops to eliminate this headache and increase their working speed.
The problem with downloading files to your desktop is obvious. When a master file is updated, how can you ensure all your users get the update?
You could re-download the file every time you make an update. However, if you change data even once a month, this is an unrealistic solution.
In reality, users won’t get your updates and will keep the files they first downloaded. In short, they’ll continue to operate with the files they’re familiar with.
Nowadays, companies have many different users who need this data, leading to an almost infinite number of versions of what is supposed to be the same data.
Deleting Old Versions of Data
Another common cause of inaccuracy is not deleting old data.
You will see this very frequently with digital assets. If the decision is made to update a spec sheet or image and create a new version, the old version rarely gets deleted.
Out-of-date versions, especially of images, are like cancer to your data. It will continue to grow until it’s too out of control to stop.
The only way to solve this is to bring in the employees’ departments and review every image for every product to determine the most up-to-date version.
If you endure the never-ending meetings to eliminate old data and images, once you leave, the problem will only restart when new images are introduced.
The only way to ensure you’re keeping the most up-to-date images and data is to change the foundation on which you manage them.
Different Versions of the Same Data
We’ve been discussing creating one version of the same data this time. Unfortunately, the online world requires certain pieces of data to come in different versions.
A great example of this is having different descriptions for a product. You often need to tell the story of your product differently to attract other customers.
Let’s say your product sells to multiple industries. A generic description may alienate potential customers by not being compelling enough to convert a shopper into a buyer.
It has become increasingly common to see industry-specific descriptions like these, but they are often poorly managed, and necessary changes are never made.
Why is Product Information Management System (PIM) Important?
Ensuring a Kick-Off Meeting
A strong database from a PIM system is crucial for businesses wanting to expand. Disorganized, inaccurate, or varied product data usually results in problems with the accuracy of the PIM data foundation that can impact your customers and your company’s operations. The software makes collecting, standardizing, and building data easier. Reliable principles make it easier for individuals to cooperate and achieve outcomes.
Helping Reps Get Access To Clean Data
The sales and support teams must always have reliable and current information. A PIM system allows reps to work with accurate data. This process results in quicker replies, more efficient service, and fewer chances for mistakes. When teams rely on accurate data, they gain their customers’ trust and increase the number of conversions.
Simplify With a Simple PIM
Some businesses are fine with simpler solutions. A basic Project Information Management system can significantly impact your product list. Furthermore, expenses are reduced, and managers can focus on making the business succeed. The size of the brand, the complexity of its data, and the amount of data can affect your PIM decision, but having a simple tool can already help.
Understanding PIM Services Data Usage
This kind of service offers much more than simply storing product details. It comprises data governance, workflow management, and sending goods to marketplaces. They can observe how the data is employed and find areas for improvement. As a result, reappearing PIM data quality issues are prevented. Since clean data is always needed, PIM for brands always assists with this process.
Avoid Dried-Out PIM Strategies
Some organizations purchase PIM and then allow the strategy to stagnate. Consequently, the PIM is left unused, making it obsolete. Updating, training, and feedback help your PIM react well and stay effective in the market. It must keep up with the changes in your products and customers’ expectations.
In what ways does PIM help to improve things? As a result, your clients can access your product data quickly and easily. Thus, it enables marketing, sales, and e-commerce teams to perform their duties. It merges different departments and ensures everyone is connected to the same facts.
How does a PIM Clean Your Data and Keep It Clean?
A PIM functions like a database, a location for storing all of your product data.
Traditional PIMs are often tricky, so employees shy away from managing them. This PIM will likely only store product data, leaving digital assets high and dry. Because a traditional PIM only solves half of your challenge, modern businesses need an easy-to-use, cloud-based PIM that stores digital assets.
You can count the vendors and companies providing a platform like the one outlined above on one hand. Partnering with the right vendor gives you access to a foundation that cleans your data and, most importantly, keeps it clean.
(See the blog post below for more data about picking the right PIM for brands.)
PIM Do’s and Don’ts: 7 Steps to Picking the Right PIM
The First Step: Cleaning Your Data
Using PIM properly means doing things right from the beginning, before actually using it. The right vendor knows they must help your team implement your sleek new PIM before you can use it.
The best way to determine a vendor’s proficiency in PIM implementation is to visit G2.com’s “highest rated” PIM page.
Read customer reviews and see who has the highest customer satisfaction rating. If a vendor has issues with customer satisfaction, you can be sure that dissatisfaction started with poor implementations.
During the implementation phase, you should gather all product data files and digital assets and send them to your vendor for review.
You can leverage the implementation team’s expertise to learn their best practices and hear advice about which attributes to create and how to quickly and accurately eliminate insufficient data in your company.
This process takes time and requires collaboration, but it’s vital to your company’s future success in the digital world.
Structure Your PIM to Fit Your Needs
Every business is different. Teams are built differently. The products sold are different.
Configuring PIM to your specific needs will maximize the benefit for your organization.
The key components you’ll need to configure:
- Attributes
- Attribute Sets
- Taxonomy/Categorization
- User Roles
Let’s look at what these mean.
Attributes:
Attributes are the data bits that constitute the differences between otherwise similar products. Today, every company that sells products knows these attributes as the columns on their Excel spreadsheets.
We list attributes because they are the first step in configuring a PIM to your unique needs. You must create the attributes to market and sell your products successfully.
Attributes can be:
- Text: such as product descriptions and explanations of features
- Digital Assets: such as product photos and instruction guides
- Options: such as sizes, colors, and materials to choose from
A unique added value PIM gives your organization is the ability to make an attribute required or optional.
A great example is a specific image that may only be needed for your “hero” products. As such, this particular attribute could only be optional.
Also, say you decide each of your products needs to have at least three features. You can require listing three feature attributes to ensure product pages populate exactly as you want.
Later, you can run reports to identify which products are missing values for the attributes you’ve decided to make required. This allows you to identify product pages that need improvement easily.
Attribute Sets:
If you aren’t currently employing a PIM platform, this may be new to you, but an attribute set allows you to group like attributes together.
This way, when you create a new product, you can assign relevant attribute sets to each new product rather than adding each attribute individually.
Attribute sets are most commonly used for two purposes:
- To group attributes that are only relevant to a specific product category
This first use case is self-explanatory. If you sell chairs and tables, you’ll want an attribute set that includes every relevant attribute for each product line.
A massive added value is that not only are all relevant attributes assigned to each product, but also no irrelevant ones are.
- To group attributes that are relevant to a specific organizational department
This second use case will vary from organization to organization. A good example is separating marketing copy from digital assets.
Many organizations have one set of users managing text and another managing digital assets. With PIM, you can create an attribute set with all the text attributes and a second with all the digital assets.
This way, when users go to a product, they can easily find the attributes specifically relevant to them.
Taxonomy/Categorization:
Every company has a unique way of categorizing its products. However, today, this is managed manually.
During implementation, you must create a strong taxonomy that conforms specifically to your business and the products you sell. This will make it easier for your internal teams to manage your products and their attributes.
Additionally, when you share your data and images with reps, dealers, retailers, distributors, and others, your taxonomy will help them find what they seek.
User Roles:
The final step in configuring your business’s PIM is creating a hierarchy of user roles. A flexible PIM lets you choose which products and attributes each user can view and edit.
For example, a user who manages all of your product specs will likely need to be able to see all marketing attributes. However, you’d want to restrict that person’s ability to edit the product descriptions and features, including that marketing material.
Setting user roles ensures the owners of each product or attribute truly control inputting, modifying, and deleting data. There is no longer confusion about who changed what data. Instead, users automatically create the digital footprints necessary to track all changes.
Once you have decided on a structure to store your data, you can quickly load all the data, images, and other content.
Adoption by Your Team
The actual value of PIM only comes from using it to create a “Single Source of Truth” for all of your product content. For this to happen, your team has to adopt a new way to manage and share its data, and all of this needs to occur within your PIM.
So often, people are averse to change, but to grow, time changes. Remember, you need to change with the times. It wasn’t something they were excited to do, but it was the only option.
Over the years, users have become used to the inefficient process of managing massive Excel files and searching through image folders. Initially, some of the team may be averse to adopting a new method, but with the right PIM and some training, they will love this new way of managing data.
The key to adopting a new PIM is ensuring it’s easy to use. To reiterate, many older PIMs have the deserved reputation of being so difficult to manage that you need to have a PhD in computer science to use them properly.
Like implementation, the best way to ensure a PIM is easy to use is to visit G2.com’s “Ease of Use” ratings page.
The easier a PIM is to use, the faster your entire team can adopt it. This is true even for users who aren’t “tech savvy.”
Notifications and Workflow
Today, most organizations have a workflow process they follow, but it’s all manual.
Connecting your team with notifications is vital to ensuring your data starts clean and, most importantly, stays clean. If updates and changes are made, but no one knows, how will you ensure the changes are correct or leverage the new content?
A flexible and robust PIM allows you to create different workflows for different actions in your PIM.
At a high level, a workflow allows you to send automated notifications informing users of new tasks. Additionally, you can incorporate an approval step, so if a user makes a change, it won’t go live until it’s approved.
Workflows help in various ways and are ultimately crucial to team efficiency.
The most common types of workflows are:
- New Product Introduction
- Content Update Workflow
- Product Syndication Workflow
Let’s look at what these are.
New Product Introduction Workflow:
This is the most common workflow because today’s most competitive companies tend to introduce new products more frequently.
The new product introduction workflow ties your team together when introducing a new product. It ensures that all required attributes are quickly and accurately created.
It also ensures each user role knows exactly what data they need to create for each product, eliminating the possibility of missing or forgetting data required for product launches.
The new product introduction workflow ensures that all attributes are correctly created and populated with data, dramatically reducing the time it takes to launch a new product.
Content Update Workflow:
Content update workflow solves one of the biggest headaches companies face today: knowing how changes are made, who made them, and who approved them.
A content update workflow allows you to create a workflow process when a change is made to any or all of the attributes in your PIM. This is most commonly used to notify a manager who approves or denies a shift in product data.
Not only can the manager accept or reject a change, but they can also send notes back to the user who initiated it. This improves communication both within teams and across departments.
The approval step also ensures data stays clean. Today, when updates are made, they often don’t have a step for another user to review. Ultimately, this is a leading cause of data being out of date and “dirty.”
In addition to having an approval step built into all product updates, an excellent PIM allows you to see which user made what change and which user approved it.
If there is ever a disagreement on data, you can quickly identify who made and approved the changes and why they happened.
Content Syndication Workflow:
This workflow is specifically for companies fulfilling data requests from retailers and distributors.
Retailers and distributors send you large Excel files to populate. You must quickly complete and return them to get your products listed on these great channel partner sites. The slower you are, the less likely you are to capture sales.
A modern, robust PIM allows you to load the attributes you received from your retailers into your PIM. If you are using a truly modern PIM, you should be able to load all of the rules associated with the attributes quickly.
Content syndication workflow notifies all users responsible for any attribute that will be sent out to your new channel partner. These users know precisely what they need to do and collaborate on one platform, instead of working in separate Excel files.
Once users have completed the data they are responsible for, approval can be requested. This ensures you only send clean, robust data to your channel partners.
This step is missing, so product pages on leading retailer and distributor sites include incorrect and incomplete data.
Adding this small step to your process after PIM implementation will increase sales for all channel partners you use to fulfill requests with your PIM.
Clean Data Drives Sales and Increases Market Share
Ultimately, clean data benefits your business because a smooth-running company empowered by accurate, up-to-date data can utilize that data to grow sales and market share.
Presentation of clean data on product pages results in…
- More page views
- Lower shopping cart abandonment rates
- Higher conversion rates
- More good reviews
- Fewer negative reviews
- Higher likelihood of word-of-mouth sales
These are sales drivers, meaning clean data helps you increase revenue, grow your market share, and, ultimately, own the digital shelf.
Now that you know why PIM is your best bet for making and keeping your product data and digital assets clean and up to date, click here to see what Catsy can do for you.
