Optimized product content: the value for your business and your customers

The world of online retail is becoming more competitive as e-commerce keeps on growing. An appealing presentation of the ‘digital shelf’ is one of the key concerns for brand manufacturers and online stores. Only this way do you stand out among the hundreds of sellers offering similar products. Unfortunately, the journey to optimized product content is a time-consuming and resource intensive process, which can’t be realized overnight. In this article, I will go into more detail on A) what you should be paying attention to and B) how to get started. But first; why exactly is a good Product Experience Management (PXM) so important for your business and what is the value for your customers?

The essence of a quality PXM

There are several reasons why, as a company, you may benefit from choosing a reliable and progressive PXM solution. A PXM system is often the foundation of e-commerce operations for companies dealing with the sale of products online. Without such a system, several problems often occur. The three most common problems are:

• Lack of efficiency due to manual processes;
• Error prone processes due to multiple platforms and inefficient communication;
• Inconsistent / not optimized data across channels due to lack of control.

If these problems sound familiar to you, then read on. Below I describe the benefits that arise when you tackle the problems above by using a PXM system for your product content optimization process.

Protect your brand reputation – Without a structured PXM, it’s most likely your product information within your company is not up-to-date. This can easily lead to dissatisfaction among your customers, if they don’t receive the information they expect. Outdated or incorrect information is one of the major reasons for disgruntled customers, often resulting in poor reviews. I don’t have to explain to you why this is bad news for your reputation.

Increase retention and conversion – Nowadays, we are inundated with advertisements and people trying to sell us stuff, making us look for reliable information in this flood. Consistent and correct product information across all channels gives reliability to your brand, making your customers want to come back. This directly correlates to higher retention, and thus higher conversion.

Better findability – if you are an Online Marketeer, Digital Marketeer or anything similar, you are probably known with the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In my experience you either hate or love this process, so a good PXM will help your company out either way. Strong and optimized marketing texts, clear and correct product titles and product images of high quality, all of this will increase the visibility of your products on all search engines.

Save time (and money) – “Time is money”. This might sound like an open door, however, its core definitely is true. When your product information is incomplete or outdated, it will take you lots of time and effort to make changes later on. It becomes even worse when you have to make changes manually per product and per retailer. A good PXM to start off with, and especially the option for bulk edits, can save you many hours of work.

Single source of truth – Last but not least: a good PXM ensures that all your data is the same for your whole organization and aggregated to a single location. No more miscommunication, no more confusion. There's nothing more irritating than not knowing where to find what data. A lot of (big) companies face this problem, since different departments work with different systems and models. A single source of truth will prevent this problem.

By now you probably understand why a structured PXM and the corresponding optimized product content is so important. But you might still have a problem with grasping the idea of what ‘optimized product content’ really looks like. Let me explain.

Optimizing your product content – do’s and don’ts

Do add enough high quality product images (or even product videos) to your master data. Visitors who are looking to buy your products will see your images before they even read the first line of text. The lack of images and videos makes it more difficult to convince potential customers to buy your products.

Do incorporate the brand name of the product in the title, together with the most important characteristics (color for clothes, smell for shampoo, the size in liters for an electric kettle, the flavor intensity for coffee, etc).

Do keep an eye on the analysis of your products. This will provide insight about your product performance, the progression overtime, and other essential information to get the most out of your sales and conversion.

Don’t make sloppy spelling errors in your marketing texts. This may sound obvious, but it happens more often than not. Simple mistakes like these can easily trigger potential customers, making you lose the sale.

Don’t be inconsistent with your product information. Sometimes a brand manufacturer simply wants to provide too much information, causing the visitor to see different information on different touchpoints during the customer journey. This can cause you to lose your credibility, thus, losing the sale again.

How can we help you?

By now you understand the value of a PXM system and how it can benefit you in your e-commerce operations, but maybe you still don't know where to start. No worries, World of Content is here to help you. We don’t only offer you a PXM solution, we offer you the complete package. This means an advanced platform where you can import, analyze, enrich and share all your product content with any retailer, automatically and worldwide, tailored to the individual. From a Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool to bulk imports/exports, and from integrated support to an excellent workflow. We can also assist you with our Data Management Service (DMS) to capture label and logistics information within GS1. To summarize: we guarantee you the possibility for complete content syndication with any marketplace or retailer in the world.

We really have everything you are looking for. Please request a obligation-free demo if you are interested, or get in touch with us personally.