Trust is earned: The CMO’s guide to fixing product data chaos

When it comes to brand loyalty, trust earned from consumers is the foundation. With customers expecting only the most accurate, detailed, and engaging product information at each touchpoint, it’s more critical than ever that your business’s product data is in order.

In this blog, we’ll look at why lacking the right infrastructure for managing and maintaining product data can cause product data chaos and some serious problems for your marketing team. You’ll also discover how all of these problems can be solved through the use of a Product Information Management system (PIM).

It’s not too late to clean up that data — and as your organization’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), you can be the driver for making it happen.

• How product data chaos harms your business
• How CMOs can fix product data chaos
• Use data-driven insights from your PIM solution to make smarter marketing decisions
• Time to strengthen customer trust? Time for inriver PIM

How product data chaos harms your business

Product data that’s managed inefficiently can cost a business dearly; from higher volumes of customer returns to slowed progress due to the use of multiple product catalogs and spreadsheets.

When we look at how mismanaged product data can be detrimental to your business’s marketing and brand, there are several aspects to consider.

For example, your marketing team may be wasting valuable hours each week correcting product listing errors, instead of spending that time planning and implementing new creative concepts and campaigns. It can also lead to miscommunication and confusion across different departments; from your marketing and sales teams to your customer success and support teams.

• Your marketing team may be wasting valuable hours each week correcting product listing errors, instead of spending that time planning and implementing new creative concepts and campaigns.
• It can also lead to miscommunication and confusion across different departments; from your marketing and sales teams to your customer success and support teams.
• Most importantly, when what marketing provides to these same internal teams doesn’t match the product, the end consequence is the erosion of customer trust. This also makes your marketing team look inefficient and highly disorganized.

Ultimately, the effects can be highly detrimental to the experience your customers have with your brand. One recent study found that 56% of US consumers have returned online purchases because the item didn’t match the product description.

How CMOs can fix product data chaos

In essence, the key to correcting product data chaos lies in the use of a dedicated Product Information Management (PIM) platform.

Here are the main steps that CMOs need to take today in order to begin the process of cleaning up data operations at their organization.

Introduce a robust, AI-driven PIM solution

Many existing data challenges can stem from the fact that product information is spread over multiple spreadsheets and systems, with data siloes often existing in some teams.

Putting a PIM platform in place provides your organization with a centralized hub for your product data — in fact, it acts as a ‘single source of truth’ for its users; allowing your teams to start sorting through what may be years, or even decades, of disorganized product data!

It means that:

• Your marketing team can start creating and maintaining product data more consistently.
• Both your customer care and sales teams can locate accurate product information more quickly.
• Your product managers can update and manage product information with more ease and accuracy, while also ensuring that end sales channels are simultaneously updated, in real-time.

Embedding a PIM platform brings a more streamlined approach to product data management; resulting in countless benefits for your brand, including:

• A decrease in data error volume.
• Quicker product time-to-market.
• Less confusion between teams and departments.
• Higher levels of brand consistency across multiple sales channels and marketplaces.
• Better shopping experiences for your customers.
• Time and resource savings made on manual data entry and updates.

Make data accuracy and optimization a daily habit for your teams

With a solid PIM solution in place and all previously fragmented data now centralized, the next step is to ensure that new, efficient routines and habits become second nature at your business.

Your teams need to focus their efforts on maintaining levels of data accuracy and quality — although they don’t need to do all the heavy lifting themselves. A good PIM platform that’s powered by AI can help with this by automating many (otherwise time-consuming) tasks such as identifying duplicate and inconsistent data attributes.

It can also manage a lot of the legwork that comes with:

• The ongoing process of enriching product data.
• Ensuring listings are optimized for their specific sales channels.
• Maintaining content consistency across different marketplaces.

For instance, a PIM system allows teams to use rich content to enhance product listings while also making sure that those assets are properly configured and optimized — and follows each sales channel’s specific criteria.

Additionally, a PIM platform can power better search engine rankings and increase product discoverability by providing your teams with a solid framework to use for well-structured product data.

Lastly, this type of system can empower your teams to deploy personalized product content with more efficiency and speed. And, with the ability to generate translations and region-specific product content, your PIM can enable your business to reach and engage new customers — without sacrificing any data quality.

Use data-driven insights from your PIM solution to make smarter marketing decisions

We’ve already covered the many benefits that a robust, AI-powered PIM platform can bring your organization; but beyond keeping your product data in great shape, there’s also a lot that can be gained from harnessing its Digital Shelf Analytics (DSA).

In a nutshell, your marketing team can leverage DSA and its automation capabilities to help them monitor, identify, and optimize the performance of product data.

Examples of data-driven DSA insights may help your organization identify, for example:

• Product descriptions that drive the most engagement.
• Product listings that appear to be linked to the highest levels of customer returns.
• Emerging trends in buyer behavior.

This invaluable internal information can help CMOs and their teams to make better, more informed marketing decisions, that, in turn, drive better customer experiences and higher sales.

Time to strengthen customer trust? Time for inriver PIM

Whether it’s a marketplace listing or an ad on social media… disorganized, inconsistent, and inaccurate product data can seriously chip away at customer trust, damage your brand, and sabotage the overall success of your business.

As CMO, you can play a powerful role in making things better for your business — and introducing a leading PIM solution like inriver is key.

Trusted by over 1,600 global brands, inriver PIM can help your organization eradicate product data chaos, and act as the means for empowering your teams to deliver more compelling, satisfying shopping experiences to your customers — with features like its in-built DSA (Evaluate) and its AI-driven data enrichment capabilities.

The end result? Product information that always tells the right story to your customers.