Increasingly, more e-commerce brands are jumping on the PXM (product experience management) wagon. It certainly makes sense. After all, the product page is the single most important factor for a customer doing research or shopping for products online.
Traditionally, the online product page was designed to hold all of the basic information about a product. For example, the specs, descriptions, images, and prices. Today, it’s not enough. To maximize the benefits of the e-commerce landscape, it’s necessary for brands to publish more robust and creative content.
The brands that craft more and more compelling product pages are the brands that will win.
Publishing Product Content to Win
Let’s assume a brand has taken the first step in winning online by creating more compelling product content.
They will quickly run into syndicating this content to all of their sales channels. This is enough to drive anyone crazy. You created this content and it isn’t getting published as you envisioned!
The solution to this challenge is PXM, or product experience management.
What is Product Experience Management (PxM)?
PxM stands for Product Experience Management. What exactly is PXM? And how does it help you craft and publish product pages? Essentially, PXM is a platform that stores all of your product content in one location and pushes the content out to your sales channels.
As a software, PXM allows you to manage, optimize, and publish product data & images effectively on all of your sales channels. The sales channels PXM updates are most often your distributors and retailers. However, companies are also using PXM to share data with their sales reps or feed their website.
At the highest level, PXM is the bridge that allows you to transport product content from inside your organization to your ecosystem.
Not only must you construct great content, but also engineer the bridge that sends that content out. In other words, it’s a huge advantage to use PXM software as the source of quality content. From it, you can push content out to multiple sales channels. Hence, you maintain consistency while providing a stellar experience to your customers. Brands that realize this reality are the ones that are winning in the e-commerce space.
The Main Components of PXM
There are three main components to PXM:
- Centralizing the content
- Optimizing the content for each channel
- Syndicating the content to each channel
Centralize All Your Product Data & Assets
Centralization is the foundation of PXM. It allows you to store all of your product content in one single platform.
Centralization is the PIM portion of PXM.
For the manufacturers who are living in spreadsheets, the idea of centralizing product content in one platform is a fundamental change. Brands today have product content scattered in many excel files, folders, and whatever else they can find.
SImply, centralization can provide immense value for them.
Rather than bouncing around in different files and folders to look at a single product’s information. Your team will now have one page to view all data & content related to a product.
Having one place to access all content related to a product is incredibly valuable. First, it saves your teams massive amounts of time when they need to find or edit product content. Secondly, it ensures accuracy because there is only one location where your product information resides.
Optimize Your Product Content & Data
Optimizing your content for a channel is vital to winning the digital shelf. Each retailer and distributor has different requirements for the content you send them.
Optimizing content for each channel manually is a very time-consuming process. PXM gives your team the tools they need to efficiently tailor the product content for each retailer. This means helping optimize descriptions, resizing images, selecting retailer-specific product lists, populating retailer-specific item numbers, and more.
In addition to more quickly optimizing your content for each retailer. A great PXM will give you insight into how you can improve your product page. Incorporating analytics to tell your team what keywords to use or what changes to make to your product pages will pay for itself. Analytics is what your team needs to make sure they stay at the top of the search results. It helps boost not only product page views but the conversion rate for all visitors.
PXM simplifies the optimization process for your team. With the time that saved your team can put a bigger emphasis on creating high-quality content to even further improve the quality of your product pages.
Syndicate Your Products Across All Selling Channels
Syndicate is all about actually getting your products posted on each retailer site.
A great PXM will have the ability to export product data and images that conform to every retailer or distributor’s formats. It is crucial in today that your PXM is used for as many retailers & distributors as possible rather than only helping with a few of your sales channels.
It is so important to keep all channels up to date from your PXM because if you don’t you’ve only created another data silo for your team to manage.
Some retailers may be able to receive your product data via API while others will have custom excel templates that can be populated directly from your PXM. Regardless of how your data is sent, your PXM should be able to meet any requirements. This automated populating of the templates will drastically cut down the amount of time it takes to send data to each retailer.
How is PXM different from PIM?
PIM is the umbrella under which PXM exists. Everything that a PIM has a PXM has. However, PIM Software is only used to create one source of truth for product data and images. Simply put, PXM is the focus on syndicating your product data across multiple selling channels. It is an inherent part of any good PIM strategy.
Unfortunately, many PIM solutions focus on the product data, but not how to use the product data. Such solutions don’t have robust tools that PXM has to effectively share the content with all of your sales channels. The ability to share is where the value is in PXM. The value in centralizing data is greatly diminished if it is still very challenging to share it.
Who cares if internally your data is accurate and robust? It only matters if you can get it out to your customers.
PXM gives you the tools you need to not only manage data like PIM and DAM but also get that great content out to the people who really matter.
How PXM Provides Value
PXM gives your organization the platform they need to grow successfully. By establishing an efficient process, you can manage and share content that engages visitors on your product pages.
Without a PXM you will never be able to build a process to consistently onboard and publish products. Having that ability is absolutely crucial to your success in today’s digital world.
In 2019 and beyond, managing product data with scattered excel files and image folders won’t work anymore. If you are still doing so, you risk falling behind your competitors.
On the other hand, if you implement a PXM and leverage it to build a streamlined process to manage and share product data and images, you will be able to separate yourself from the pack.
About Catsy
Catsy has been providing unique value to the product information industry since 2003, allowing businesses a way to achieve high-quality product content. Our product information management (PIM) software centralizes all product data, so you can manage and share data with internal teams, retailers, and multiple platforms. Revolutionize your business with Catsy’s accuracy, automation, and optimization. To learn more, visit us at https://catsy.com.
